Say Bye Bye to My Fear of Technology

When i saw the title of last blog post which we have to write, i immediately started to think about what i have done during this course, where i was at the beginning and where i am right now.

 First of all, i have  to confess that i am not such a curious person about technological changes around me. At least, i wasn’t ! Checking  emails,  taking a look at social networks , reading newspapers and something like that were pretty much all i used to do on the Internet. Of course it sometimes have worked to do my assignments as well .

The New Way of Obtaining Information

“The World is Changing,The Future is Flat “ says Thomas L. Friedman in his book “The World is Flat”. It includes the globalized world which brings your mind the current changes in especially information technology around our world.

 The reason to start by showing this book is its great  content which is related what we have been doing during this course.

 Everything is changing day by day and it is getting harder to follow them. 

 Lets take the “knowledge” first.

Save Your Money,Save Your Time

Are you too lazy to follow all technological changes around you,( like me )? If your answer is “yes” ,don’t shame about that and be ready for some changes in your life.

Let me give you some specific examples to make it more clear ;

I used to think that all cell phones were the same, because the main point of using them was common. Different shape,size, color or any other feature weren’t worth to spend more money than others with almost the same qualities.

Now?

It has become incredibly important to have the best features in your cell phone. Or should I say just “smartphones”?

Tracking Your Steps

  You have probably seen someone who posts like “ I am at …” or “ Anne just checked in at …” from your friends by using  location-based apps via social networks.

  Have you ever considered how it works or how people connect their location information to the network?

  There are some popular mobile applications to use the GPS like that. For example; Foursquare, WeePlaces, Loopt ,Brightkite … They help you to inform immediate surroundings and cultural events by increasing the web-based communication with your friends.

Would you like to „telecommute“?

Have you ever heard about the AT&T which is the world`s premier voice and data company? If your answer is `no`, just take a look at my post and let your perspective change about teleworkers  a little bit .

AT&T is the world`s largest telecommunications services provider with 90 million customer, more than $51 billion annual revenue and 147.000 employees. Maybe the number of employees didn’t surprised you that much but most interesting part of it is the 23.000 of employees are TELEWORKERS.

Why is that so important ?

The way you can be known well by millions

Everything changes around our world fastly and it is getting harder to follow those changes.

Like what?

 I have heard lots of stories about famous people ,especially artists,who tried hard to became that famous and make people aware what they do well.

 They worked hard,tried to use every chance which could be an opportunity to show their talent to the world.Long story short,they didn’t use to have a simple way to make people support their works.

 What about now?

What About the Disadvantages?

By taking this course, we all realized the important of information technology on our social and business life and we have regularly explained the impacts and roles of  IT for people in our blog posts and most of us (includes me )  focused the advantages of it .

In my previous blog posts, I mentioned the privacy of social networks as an disadvantages of IT but didn’t explained all negative effects clearly, because as you can guess it is really a large subject to write about and now i would like to emphasize it more with some book reports, articles and scientific facts to make everybody aware what we trade to get all these benefits from information technology.

Logistics

     I have been interested in logistics for a few weeks.First, when i started to search topics and  interesting stuffs about information technology, i realized that i didnt know even how impartant IT is for every part of business life, because i was interested in just networking, blogging and some other things like most of the other poeple are. In my case,logistics was also basic and simple part of business which provides flow of goods and services between customer and producer, but now i can see the most complicated part of logistics and how IT helps it to provide better quality of works and much more quantity in shorter time. I would like to share what i have figured out about basic means and works of logistics and  relation between IT and logistics.

  Recently, competition between firms has been grown and become more important in business life. As a result of that, there has been a few changes of systems for firms.

   Logistics has taken a big part of these changes, because manufacturers have to focus production to provide better quality, make more profit and fulfil consumer needs more. Therefore, some other firms have to take care of transportation, inventory, warehousing, material handing and packing. Those firms are of course logistics firms because its based on flow of goods and services between producer and customer.

  What is the importance of information technology for logistics?

   That is the main point we should focus on because common feature of successful firms is using the information technology (IT) efficiently.

   First of all ,there are a few type of logistics which are used for military, production, business and so on.

   Lets take the business logistics to focus on and show the important role of IT for it.

   Logistics firms have to care about growing market, international integration, variable customer demands and competition. They need to use IT to manage success even though these issues.

     IT for logistics should enable to users;

1.  Optimize transportation logistics plans across multi- period daily schedules
2.  Determine the best routes through scheduling optimization and analysis
3.  Utilize web-hosted planning and organization to improve shipment planning, execution and settlement

  ( from ; http://www.business.com/guides/transportation-logistics-information-technology-5461/)

   On the other hand, they need  to use IT  to control their internal and external works, reduce the costs and mistakes, increase efficiency and effectiveness. If we divide these factors as internal and external, there would be two basic stuff to summarize the needs of IT ;

1)      Expectations of customer

2)      Expectations of internal agencies

  After emphasizing the importance of IT for logistics, we should represent the Logistics Information Systems (LIS) which is absolutely based on what we said about the relation logistics and IT before.

  Logistics information systems have been very important part of logistics activities for 25 years.

   LIS, take a part of decision making at all levels in the organization, provide database and mostly internal control.

    As you can see in the charts and slide shows , it is not possible to think logistics and information technology separately to achieve the goals of the firms and compete with others. Therefore, it is so important to pay enough attention to information techonolgy and accept that it influences almost every part of businees (marketing, HR, logistics, management and so on) .

  See also ;http://www.slideshare.net/Bobtb/how-humanitarian-logistics-information-systems-can-improve

and http://www.metacafe.com/watch/4755817/a_logistics_companys_high_road_to_success/

Privacy on Social Networks

  A social networks is a kind of tool to connect with people ,share your personal knowledges, images , videos, interests with your friends or sometimes to make a new friend by using these common stuff(hobbies, interests..).

  There is a huge growth of using social networks and no way to prevent this situation. A lot of debates go around about advantages and disadvantages of using social networks. I think it is pretty easy to indicate which benefits people can get by using them for friendships, brands, marketing, logistics and something like that.

  What about disadvantages?

  Do we really use that kind of tool for our benefits without any risk?

  Let`s think about Facebook which has more than 600 million active users.

  At the beginning, i thought that it would be harmless to use it with your close friends. First we add our personal knowledges  from date of birth to address. Than start to share our photos,videos and personal interest. It gets more connection with new friends who you barely know and we are available  to be found  by a friend of a friend of our friend. It goes on like that.

  What is next?

   After a while i realized that i have shared my stuuf with people i cant really trust though i have about 200 friends on my Facebook. What about  the people who have about 600/700/800 .. friends.? Maybe it sounds weird and  unrealistic but unfortunately true because i know it from my most of friends who do have those number. Are they really close friends with each other to share everything?Of course not. Therefore ,even if your profile  is visible  to just your friends, it is not enough for safety.

    Being searchable on Google with your social network`s profile,other personal knowledges with photos doesn’t seem safety too.

   On the other hand ,your every move is watched on the Internet and the perfect proof  for that is “ Online  Advertising”.

    With those risks and without privacy what should we do?

  In my case, beings obsessed  about that is not enough to prevent those risks.I guess we should start first  checking privacy part  before getting an  account becuse  people usually accept everything to go on faster without looking privacy policy of social network`s and some similar part like this one. After that, it is your own choice and way to keep using them because it s  a huge online platform with lot of connections of people .It is almost impossible to prevent all dangers from them.

   We should think the advantages and disadvantages together to catch the balance between them, pay more attention and of course think before your every move online to not regret later because it s so obvious that even if you delete what you did or shared, they are not really deleted on the Internet.

 See also;

http://www.slideshare.net/misteroo/privacy-and-social-networks

Social Media Revolution

According to some people, social media is just a tool for entertainment, communication with friends and sometimes just waste of time but it includes more than it seems.

`Social Media Revolution 2010` makes clear the idea of what actually social media provides to people, even business life. I said business life because as you can see `consultants and marketing  professionals are the most active users  of social media`  in the video ,it gives a big opportunity  for them to increase  effectiveness, success and of course profits of their business. Nowadays,  it is almost impossible to imagine any way to be known well by consumers ,give consumers an opportunity  be part of  production and increase their qualities without IT.

The real numbers of being active, getting account and benefits from social media indicates the importance of it for everybody.

That is important because of the inescapable growth of using social media every year and you can see some predictions about future of it in a few years.

I am not talking about just Facebook, Twitter and similar social networks.it also includes `Wikipedia` and the other online places which you can get any information whenever you need or blogs  to create your own pages which consist of  your ideas interests, images and comments. It is a kind of way you can be part of it or a tool you can get what you need with better opportunities.

Of course there are a lot of disadvantages of having that kind of social medias in our life like losing privacy and something like that but it is so obvious  that  you can get a lot of benefits from it .

Therefore, it depends how you add it to your life and how you  prefer to use.