1.

The Internet in decision making at the strategic, tactical and operational levels

Strategic: At this level, company management will be looking to high level strategic decisions concerning the whole organisation, such as the size and location of manufacturing sites, partnerships with suppliers, products to be manufactured and sales markets. Tactical: For this level the information needed is for medium term decisions (few months-year), for example cash ows, allocation of resources within departmental budgets, and midterm forecasting and scheduling. Operational: Decisions at this level are made each day and are about control of the inventory and production levels, pricing decisions, cash controls, treatment of personnel etc. These are highly detailed information almost exclusive in each organisation.

Example: IBM

Over the past three decades, operations research groups within the IBM Research Division have conducted numerous analytic studies and developed many applications across the global IBM enterprise. During the last decade, IBM Research has extended its model of research to include work with IBM's customers. Bringing IBM scientists and customers together to tackle real-world business problems has advanced the application of information technology as well as the underlying science and mathematics.

In recent years the Internet has made a huge impact on value chain design:

Customer behavior. Largely due to the Internet, consumers are becoming more informed and demanding. Collaboration. The Internet has changed the way that companies connect with customers, partners, dealers and employees. Service velocity. Internet communication mechanisms speed orders through the supply chain at incredibly high rates.

In recent years the Internet has made a huge impact on value chain design:

Product velocity. The expectation of rapid change coupled with real technological advance drives a rapid turnover of products Flexibility. E-marketplaces offer businesses signicantly increased options in the selection of suppliers and customers. Globalisation. For global companies the Internet represents an opportunity to optimise across geographies, plants, shipping costs, labor, tariffs, processes and customers.

2. Engineering and revenue decisions

An engineering decision reects the outlook of the engineer themselves their perspective of a perfect system which they believe meets the criteria set to them. A revenue decision instead reects upon the usability aspect and so is from the perspective of the user.

To understand this better:

If an engineer has been set the proposal of creating a secure website, they may implement security features such as captcha. This is an engineering decision as he has met the proposal set to him he has implemented security. While this system is now secure, they may be pitfalls in its use if the captcha feature is confusing, hard to understand, repetitive and so on, there is the added chance that customers may become frustrated and leave the page. This can ultimately mean that despite the feature meeting its purpose, from the users perspective it is more obstructive than useful. This loss of customers results in revenue decisions where money is lost.

In the end its all about nding the balance.

3. Areas of internet science and decision making

Information management and retrieval

Wikis Knowledgebases Internal/external databases

Machine learning

Models Simulations

Large scale computing

Data processing Trend analysis Scalable systems

Cognitive psychology

Behaviour Site design Online shopping Tactical decisions Marketing Engagement Advertising

Microeconomics

Dynamic pricing Reacts to changes in the market Airline tickets Google Adwords Experiments