A video review of the webinar/video presentation of Meet Edgar's "Ten Social Media Tips for 2019 Success", for the MSc course in Information Systems (University of Salford).
Video produced through slides made with LibreOffice Impress and audio with GNOME SoundRecorder, and composed with OpenShot.
Information Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning
If a broad definition of information systems is taken as "usage and adaptation of the IT and the formal and informal processes by all of its users" (Paul, 2007), then Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) must be recognised as a major IT application which seeks to combine a very wide range of business processes in an organisation in a technologically-mediated manner. Integration is of primary importance, for example, so that the disparate and siloed software applications that manage customers, sales, procurement, production, distribution, accounting, human resources, governance etc are provided common associations through a database system and from which decision-makers can engage in effective and informed business intelligence and enterprise management.
As can be imagined with such scope, effective ERP systems are highly sought after, with a range of well-known major providers (e.g., Oracle, SAP, Infor, Microsoft, Syspro, Pegasus etc), and a number of free and open-source solutions as well (e.g., LedgerSMB, metasfresh, Dolibarr etc). The main advantages of ERP systems should be self-evident; forecasting, tracking, a systems consolidation, a comprehensive workflow of activities, and business quality, efficiency, and collaboration. What is perhaps less well-known is the disadvantages; the twins of expensive customisation or business process restructuring for the software, the possibility of vendor lock-in and transition costs, and, of course, cost.
Introduction
More than thirty years ago, Professor Peter Checkland of the University of Lancaster, raised the question whether information systems (IS) and systems thinking could be united (Checkland, 1988). Almost twenty years later, Ray J. Paul, senior lecturer at the London School of Economics and Political Science also raised the disciplinary status of the subject, as editor the European Journal of Information Systems (Paul, 2007). These two papers are both illustrative of several others (e.g., Banville and Laundry, (1988)., George et. al., (2005)., Firth et. al., (2011)., Annabi and McGann, (2015)) from information systems as it attempts to find its own disciplinary boundaries among the crowd of academia, research, and vocational activities (c.f., Abraham et. al., (2006)., Benamati et. al., (2010).
The two papers are selecting not only to provide an at-a-glance illustration of the time-period of foundational issues within Information Systems as a discipline, but also the temporal context of each paper, and the differences in their views which, at least in part, is reflective of those different times. Drawing from these illustrative comments and from other source material mentioned, some critical issues facing the field of information systems is identified. Rather than attempting to enforce a niche for information systems, a philosophical reconstruction is carried out using formal pragmatics, as developed by the philosopher Karl-Otto Apel (1980) and the social theorist Jurgen Habermas (1984).
What Are Information Systems? (video)
Reflective One Minute Paper
The primary objective here is to define information systems. To do so, one must differentiate between raw, unorganised data, to processed, organised, and structured information that is meaningful. Information is necessary to for behaviour, decisions, and outcomes and can be valued by various metrics (timeliness, appropriateness, accuracy, etc). Information has a life-cycle: Creation (internal or external capture), Existence (Store/Retrieve, Use), Termination (Archive or Destroy).
As is often the case real IT operators in large organisations find themselves having to deal with "enterprise" software which has been imposed upon them. The decision to implement such software is usually determined by perceived business requirements (which is reasonable enough), but with little consideration of the operations and flexibility for new, or even assumed, needs.
"Immersion" is an innovative digital product that combines multiple established existing technologies and processes to provide a new product that fills gaps in the higher education and gaming market.
An attempted build of Python-2.7.13 with GCC-8.2.0 led to an unexpected error where the build failed to generation of POSIX vars. This is kind of important and unsurprisingly, others on in the Python community have noticed it as well both this year, and in a directly related matter from late 2016, with a recommended patchfile provided on the Python-Dev mailing list.
Identifying probable dispersal routes and for marine populations is a data and processing intensive task of which traditional high performance computing systems are suitable, even for single-threaded applications. Whilst processing dependencies between the datasets exist, a large level of independence between sets allows for use of job arrays to significantly improve processing time. Identification of bottle-necks within the code base suitable for GPU optimisation however had led to additional performance improvements which can be coupled with the existing benefits from job arrays.
You would think with a website like laptop.com.au you would be sitting on a gold mine of opportunity. It would take real effort not to turn such a domain advantage into a real advantage, to become the country's specialist and expert provider of laptops. But alas, some effort is required in this regard and it involves what, in my considered opinion, is not doing the right thing. I leave you, gentle reader, to form your own opinion on the matter from the facts provided.
Over the past 33 years the International Super Computing conference in Germany has become one of the world's major computing events with the bi-annual announcement of the Top500 systems, which continues to be dominated in entirety by Linux systems. In June this year over 3,500 people attended ISC with a programme of tutorials, workshops and miniconferences, poster sessions, student competitions, a vast vendor hall, and numerous other events.
