Task 1 A Digital Hospital Increases Performance and Saves Lives

Q. 1

Why is IHH considered to be a digital enterprise?

According to Waukesha and Polos (2003), digital enterprise can be defined as step taken by an organization to adopt IT in a fundamental way in order to improve productivity & efficiency of the business process. The Indiana Heart Hospital features the latest cardiac technology and patient information systems from GE Medical Systems and is expected to improve patient care and reduce medical errors by up to 80 percent, while saving time and healthcare costs. Their aim is to provide excellent quality patient care while eliminating the clerical redundancies that take health care professionals away from their patients. Hospital officials also firmly believe that the all-digital environment will be safer for patients.

Q. 2

A major environmental pressure in health care is the Health Insurance Portability and

Accountability Act (HIPPA) of 1996 regulatory requirements. In what ways can a digital hospital help with compliance? The core role of HIPPA is to provide a standard in order to safeguard the privacy of personal health information. A digital hospital will be a positive step for compliance due to the streamlining of all information and could easily be restricted to certain authority levels only with the confidentiality of the patient record and HIPAA compliance, disaster recovery systems and medication integration.

Q.3.

Relate this case to the concept of digital society.

Larson (2003), digital Society is a vastly used term due to the dependence of technology in this extremely fast advancing society. We, use IT to improve the way we do business in order to give us that ever changing competitive edge. In relation to the digital hospital, the majority of society will see nothing but a huge advantage in the quicker, accurate, secure & more convenient overall system the hospital would posses once they become digital.

Q.4

Can you identify any ethical issues related to such a high level of automation?

A few major ethical issues would be the fact of cutting down on the physical number of staff at the hospital together with the possibility of an information breach which could be easily tampered with if high access protocols were known to the perpetrator, but the advantages are too great not to embrace this new age where levels of accuracy and time has never seen such effective levels of treatment that will directly result in the saving of peoples lives.

TASK 2

Internet Exercise Number 4 Investigate the status of utility computing by visiting utilitycomputing.com/forum, aspnews.com (discussion forum), google.com, ibm.com, oracle.com and cio.com. Prepare a report that will highlight the progress today and the current inhibitors. According to the oracle.com, Utility Computing is a business model for computing in which resources (CPU power, storage space, etc.) are made available to the user. The goal of the utility computing is to maximize the computing resources and minimize user costs. Users are able to dial up or dial down usage in real time, to meet the varying demands of business. Utility computing starts by asking what the user wants. By contrast, the ASP and outsourcing models started with the existing IT infrastructure and asked how they might do it better. Utility computing is ITbased functionality on demand. The other two are IT resources, infrastructure. Utility computing is a service that is so compelling that it makes little sense for users to do it themselves. The other two are options that leave the users ambivalent about the trade offs. If questioned any business manager how they would like to get their IT-based functionality and the answer will be something like reliably and cost-effectively. The analogy to established utilities is appropriate because the services we take for granted today such as reliable and cheap delivery of electricity, water, and telephone were once only available to companies that could do it for themselves. On the other hand an apt analogy for ASPs and outsourcing is leasing. The primary obstacle to true utility computing is the structure of modern online applications. These are complex systems comprised of the application software itself, middleware software like web servers and

databases, operating systems and drivers, numerous servers, storage to boot the servers, storage to hold the application data, and finally the networks that connect it all. Simply deploying and operating these systems requires significant expertise. The traditional approach has been to build templates to map the dependencies and automate updates when changes are made. Unfortunately, this is a brittle solution requiring significant maintenance of its own. Attempting to move applications to utility providers in this complex state isn't utility computing; it's contract services.

Task 3

Q. Find an article, web site, video or other information resource that concerns an area of knowledge / topic in chapter 3. For example: databases; data warehousing; data marts; business intelligence; data privacy; document management; etc For the resource that you find: 1. Give its Web link 2. Briefly summarize its content (~100 words) 3. Discuss its importance (~200 words)

Source : The need of systematic storage capacity management URL : http://docs.oraclewhitepapers.com

The importance of a comprehensive capacity planning system

Its believed that the spending on storage continues to grow at the rate of 10%-15% surprisingly even when the storage prices decreases and this has affected the IT budgets in a negative manner. Exponential application growths and compliance requirements have greatly influenced the requirement of adding more disk space. Yet, it was found that only 70% of the expensive disk space is properly utilized therefore wasting 30% of the investments. To add that that most companies have 15-24 months of

excess capacities that does not make any business sense. Poorly planned capacity management will lead to following consequences.

1. Emergency out-of-capacity conditions leading into unavailability of systems, affecting business continuity. 2. Overspending and underutilization of disk space. 3. Not gaining cost advantages of reducing prices of storage units by way of purchasing them too far in advance. 4. Not gaining technological advantages: This is mainly due to the fact that the technology used in storage units purchased today may not be 100% used with the excess capacities and the technology therefore may get obsolete at the time of fully utilization. 5. Extra cost on maintaining unused disks such as power, cooling and data center real estate costs.

These facts emphasize on the importance of a comprehensive approach to capacity planning for an enterprise. The conventional tools used in this context fails to deliver accurate statistics mainly due to inflexibility, disregarding array usage, no automated capacity plans and need of exhausted agent deployments. The approach of User-based Regimen for Enterprise (SURE), overcomes the limitations of a conventional approach by providing the following benefits. 1. Automated development of optimized and dynamic capacity plans. 2. Clearly detailing storage environment, growth rates and forecasted values. 3. Pinpointing over-provisioned areas to reclaim wasted space. 4. Providing potential early warning issues on over-utilization.

Task 4 6. Discuss the components of a mobile communication network.

Computerized Inventory Systems A computerized Inventory System paves for an effective and efficient system between the service sector and manufacturing sector. For a business enterprise, which has its own production line and a sales point, it is very important to have such a mechanism.

For instance, if we consider a garment production company, the showrooms supply chains and the distribution networks usually mean their ability to offer the right product at the right outlet. Inventory management software could provide alert on products that are selling rapidly and the manufacturing department could also be notified though the software on the low stock items. As the inventory system is computerized, the data stored at the system can also be used to monitor and study the trend of the items that is slow moving and also items which has the highest demand. By studying the trend of the customers need, it could be decided on the quantity of the particular items to be manufactured. Also different outlets or the showrooms might have different trends; the system could assist on planning the business strategies for the different outlets. Point-Of-Sale (POS) software Point-of-sale (POS) software is another example where it works collaboratively in the service sector and the manufacturing sector. For example; at a restaurant where this technology is using, the customers order would be taken by the waiters by using PDAs which will contain the menu-items which instantly generates and display ordered items to the Chefs computer at located at kitchen. Instead of using PDAs, some restaurants are still taking orders on a note pad and enter to the nearest POS system. But gradually the restaurants are giving up these methods of order processing and moving towards PDAs which could speed up whole process accurately. The data provided by the POS software could also be used in the inventory purposes and increases the productivity of the staffs.