Question

. In a minimum of 250 words answer the following questions.

How has/can information technology improve business processes?

What are some information technology challenges in business?

2. In a minimum of 250 words answer the following questions.

Compare and contrast centralized and decentralized architecture.

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Answer 1

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Answer

1.

We can improve business using information technology in the following ways :

a. The first is the support of the primary business process and the chain of activities that creates value. Doing stock administration, data management or data entry with pen and paper accompanies a lot of errors in the process whereas using a computer for that task prevents the same.

b. The second improvement is by generating data on the primary process. Once you have the data in a system, you can run an analysis over the data. You might find trends that you could not be revealed easily. For example, withing the order confirmation process we could see how many orders were processed first time , giving a “straight through processing” (STP) rate. Here IT allows to improve the primary process.

c. The third driver is one that’s currently gaining traction. It’s using systems not only to analyse past events, but also to predict future events. With sufficient data and trend information we might find that certain events can be predicted. A good example is using meta-data analysis on medical records. If 90% of the occurrences of a disease have specific symptom markers, we might be able to sort out potential patients based on other symptoms.

Though information technology helps business in many ways, but faces challenges with the same intensity. Addressing operational data errors, rapid growth, and technology change in terms of demands performance; then the increase in profitability and improving operational efficiency as a demands allocation and efficient utilization of resources; and the mission critical decision making and the demands scalability of maximizing data collection of large data sets and data mining are some of the challenges faced by IT in business.

2.

A centralized network architecture is a network architecture built around a single server that handles all the major processing. Less powerful workstations connect to the server and submit their requests to the central server rather than performing them directly. This can include applications, data storage, and utilities.

A decentralized network architecture is one that distributes workloads among several machines, instead of relying on a single central server. This trend has evolved from the rapid advancements of desktop and laptop computers, which now offer performance well beyond the needs of most business applications; meaning the extra compute power can be put to use for distributed processing.

The primary difference between centralized and decentralized communication networks has to do with the question of who has control over the network itself. In a centralized system, a singular authority or administrator retains total control over all aspects of the network. This authority is typically exerted through a central server that manages all data and permissions. A centralized network also locates all major processing power in this primary server.

Decentralized networks are organized in a much more distributed fashion. Each node within the network functions as a separate authority with independent decision-making power regarding how it interacts with other systems. These networks also distribute processing power and workload functions among connected servers.

Example of centralized network architecture:
Wikipedia. Consider a massive server to which we send our requests and the server responds with the article that we requested. Suppose we enter the search term ‘junk food’ in the Wikipedia search bar. This search term is sent as a request to the Wikipedia servers (mostly located in Virginia, U.S.A) which then responds back with the articles based on relevance. In this situation, we are the client node, wikipedia servers are central server.

Example of decentralized network architecture

Bitcoin is the most popular use case of decentralized systems. No single

entity/organisation owns the bitcoin network. The network is a sum of all the nodes who talk to each other for maintaining the amount of bitcoin every account holder has.