For example, you are at location X. You suddenly need servicing for your car or gas. Also you are hungry. With Location Based Services enabled on your mobile device, you can be guided to the closest place at the time of your need to the junction that can service your needs in the best possible way. It may be a Gas Station with a food joint.

This is not all. Location Based Services have a very high potential for cross-selling and upselling new services and lower cost of customer acquisition. Intimation of location specific services may be offered to potential customers, and conversion of leads to sales may be extremely high, in certain services. For example, close to a highway, if a joint is present that provides refreshments, and the travelers are intimated of the same during a journey about the same, this may rake in huge benefits.

With the increasing popularity of cloud computing in the era of information technology enabled services (more often internet enabled services), Location Based services are one of the more promising services technology majors are focusing on, due to it extremely high potential revenue generating future. Started first by the 3 majors in 2000, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia,Location Based Services and the research on the service science on the domain has never looked back. The first major full-scale commercial Location Based Service was launched by DoCoMo in Japan , based on triangulation for pre-GPS handsets in 2001. Services like Friendfinder, Yellow pages, houseposition, emergency call location etc. were the first few services that harnessed enormous acceptance from its targeted consumer base across geographies.

Today technology majors like IBM have their own extensive solution for work-force management, that uses platforms for location based management systems. The recent acquisition of GoWalla by Facebook is another such indication that even Social Media majors are considering potential revenue from advertisements from such services. The potential profitability of such services are encouraging the trend, and as more and more focus is increased on the Cloud Computing, these services are bound to be a major revenue earner for technology giants, and can be a crucial ace for the players in the IT services and IT enabled services industry.

Although the methodology was conceived in the early 1990s, it started gaining in popularity after 2001 when the methodology started getting adopted in research laboratories of major technology companies. Generally speaking Agile software development is more suitable for products and less for services. Even amongst products, Agile software development methodologies are more suitable for smaller to medium sized products. Ideally development teams for such products have a size ranging from 5 members to 20 or 30 members, although, instances were noted when the methodology was successfully used with a team of 100 members.

Some of the more popular Agile methodologies are as follows:

•     Agile Modeling
•     Agile Unified Process (AUP)
•     Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM)
•     Essential Unified Process (EssUP)
•     Extreme Programming (XP)
•     Feature Driven Development (FDD)
•     Open Unified Process (OpenUP)
•     Scrum
•     Velocity tracking

A major difference of Agile methodologies from the Systems evelopment Life Cycle (SDLC), or software development life cycle models is that the requirements from the client is collected iteratively and in an evolutionary manner. In contrast, in the SDLC methodologies, each stage, including the requirement analysis stage, needs to be completed and finalized, before moving on to the next stage.

Also, another major difference of Agile methodologies from the Systems evelopment Life Cycle (SDLC) is that the degree of documentation done is typically a lot lesser. Because of smaller team size, extensive informal communication makes high quality software development feasible. But it would be difficult to ensure high quality in larger projects, due to this methodological limitation, which is mostly made by choice to ensure faster delivery of software projects.

The Agile methodologies focusses on different aspects of the software development life-cycle. Some focus on the practices (extreme programming, pragmatic programming, agile modeling), while some focus on managing the software projects (Scrum). There are also methodologies which have a focus on all the stages of the SDLC (DSDM, RUP), although most are tailor cut for the requirements specification phase (e.g. FDD).

Hope this short and simple note is sufficient for an introduction to Agile software development methodologies. Do let me know if you need any more information.

The Agile methodologies focusses on different aspects of the software development life-cycle. Some focus on the practices (extreme programming, pragmatic programming, agile modeling), while some focus on managing the software projects (Scrum). There are also methodologies which have a focus on all the stages of the SDLC (DSDM, RUP), although most are tailor cut for the requirements specification phase (e.g. FDD).

Knowledge management is the way organizations today are attempting to make the otherwise intangible knowledge tangible and distributable, throughout the organization, in search of the illusive competitive advantage. Today, in this evolving world where insights on data or business intelligence plays an extremely crucial role for the sustainable development of an organization, knowledge management has become a key area of focus.

Beckett et al. (2000) has provided an interesting framework by which many organizations are actually managing their data within with a growing focus to manage the data outside the organization also. Through research, the authors highlight how effective knowledge management can provide a wider scope of continuous improvement to obtain benefits for the parent organization, by providing higher quality information, better quality information, removing information asymmetry, and subsequently increasing the levels of organisational expertise which can be applied to it to create substantial improvements for the organization.

The sole focus of organizations today is to convert internalized tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, so that it can be commoditized and less dependency is there on an individual for being the source of knowledge. With a high attrition rate in organizations across industry, it becomes extremely pertinent that knowledge once created within the organization stays inside the organization and does not become unusable once the creator of the same changes base, within or outside the organization. That is the sole objective of the initial knowledge management systems.

For improving the knowledge management practices within the organization, companies today are increasingly adopting rewards systems, collaborative systems, post-project reviews, knowledge mapping, establishing communities of practice with cross-project learning platforms, creating expert directories, competence management systems, best practice transfer, mentor-mentee relationships, knowledge fairs, formal knowledge repositories, measuring and reporting intellectual capital, knowledge brokers, social media and social network mining systems.

While it is important for organizations to understand the importance of knowledge management systems, even one aspect that many organizations often overlook is using the knowledge outside the boundaries of the organization, but within the value chain. Realizing this, the recent focus has been the development of customer knowledge management systems, where customer tacit knowledge is use to co-create value for the customer in the best possible way, and finally value for the company. Another group of stakeholders who are being introduced into the knowledge management realms are the supplier networks, where knowledge management is often used to create otherwise non-contactable value for the stakeholders. The way forward for knowledge management systems into the future is to capture the tacit knowledge outside the organization but within the value chain (and within multiple stakeholders) to create value for both.

Today, it is pertinent that all the senior executives of organizations realize the potential benefits of effective introduction and management of knowledge management systems, that can benefit the organization. Today, while organizations are facing increasing levels of competition due to the effects of greater competition, knowledge management provides an important way for organization to utilize the most valuable resource available to them, to gain competitive advantage.

The article “A Framework for Research in Computer Based MIS” by Blake Ives, Scott Hamilton, Gordon Davis talks about 5 major research models by “Mason & Mitroff”, “Chervany, Dickson & Kozar”, “Lucas”, “Mock” & “Gorry & Scott Morton”. It also forecasts a model to generate future potential hypotheses for research. In the Mason & Mitroff Model, the focus is on defining the IS as A person of a certain Psychological type who faces a problem within some organizational context for which he needs evidence to arrive at a solution, where the evidence is made available through some mode of presentation. In the research by Chervany, Dickson & Kozar, the focus is on the isolation of dependent and independent variables which determine effectiveness of an IS.  Lucas formed a descriptive model of situational, personal & attitudinal variables & their impact on usage of the system & performance of the IS user, where behavioral issues have been studied in depth. Mock studied how behavioral constraints on system developers and users, impact the usage of the system and their individual performances. Gory and Scott Morton focused on how an IS provides information for management decision making. The authors of the paper designs a model with 3 IS environments, 3 IS processes & 1 IS subsystem, existing within an Organizational & External environment. On the basis of interaction between the variables of these types, the author divides IS research into broadly 5 types, 1 to 5, which again are subdivided into multiple subtypes. The framework focuses on providing a basis to formulate a hypothesis which is relevant to MIS research.

The article “The Identity Crisis within the IS Discipline: Defining & communicating the disciplines core properties” by Isaac Bensbasat & Robert Zmud, focuses on what is IS research all about and how to make it a distinct area of research. He focuses on how to build IS research by investigating closely related areas than distant issues. He states the 3 requirements for IS research, that of claimed central character, claimed distinctiveness and claimed temporal continuity required for IS research to evolve as a discipline. He stresses on the need for an identity in the MIS field by obtaining cognitive & socio-political legitimacy. The authors are concerned that the Interdisciplinary nature of IS cause application of varied theories from multidisciplinary backgrounds which is important for building theory but may dilute the focus of research. They express their concerns of errors of exclusion of core constructs & errors of inclusion of non-core construct in studies of IS and IT artifacts. The core properties focusing on the managerial, methodological, technological, operational, behavioral issues and the impacts of IT should be studied in IS research, in the context of the nomological net. IS research should also investigate relationships involving 1/more core constructs only, and heavy reliance on theories of reference disciplines to achieve legitimacy should be minimized.

The article “MIS RESEARCH: Reference disciplines & a Cumulative tradition” by Peter Keen also focuses on suggesting a way in which MIS research may evolve into a classical discipline having its own identity. He states that the concept of having microeconomics & computer science as the reference field limits the scope of MIS research. The researchers should focus on defining the dependent variable in their study and build on the work done by predecessors. The research should now focus on building theory from multiple reference disciplines to help IS keep evolving as a discipline and not build frameworks only. The research should not be dependent on technology evolution but focus on management, information and systems issues. Since MIS as a discipline has strong implications for practice, the focus on theoretical research should not be diluted. The focus of the researchers should be to publish in quality IS journals. Research should focus on the management of the use of technology to benefit business processes and resolve technical, managerial & organizational issues.

All 3 papers focus on mentioning the scope of IS research and what researchers should focus on in the future. They stress on the need for building theory to make MIS evolve as a discipline, and not be too dependent on reference disciplines for the purpose. Also they stress ways to evaluate if a research is actually investigating issues closely related to IS or not. Also they stress on how hypotheses formulation should be done for research in IS and what should the constructs aim to achieve.

Most average Fortune 500 company spends more than $100 million on telecommunications services each year. This arises predominantly from communication that may happen internally (Often 40%-60%) and with external stake holders (20% – 40%) Yet, on average, 7 to 12 % of telecom expenses are in surplus of what they could have been brought down to. This means that there is a high possibility of lowering costs by upto even $10 million each year! Think about all the revenue generating opportunities that could be funded with that money and the possible impact such a cost saving may have on the bottom-line of the firm.

Communications tools, such as wireless and wired connections, are crucial in managing the organizational day to day functionalities, communicate with the employees, liaison solid relationships with the customers, suppliers and business partners. Yet, firms are  often forced to delay new communications projects that could give them a competitive advantage using ICTs, such as Voice over IP, because it’s difficult to accurately forecast labor and infrastructure costs.  implementing a proactive Telecom Expense Management program can help defray those costs.  With the telecom managed service from IT Service providers like IBM, Oracle, Infosys, the firms now-days can look beyond just cost savings and implement business process improvements through innovative adoption of communication technologies.
The best part about these services are that they are outsourced completely to the service providers and billing is done entirely based on how much the firms plan to use the benefits of such a service. It means, firms will pay a small percentage based on the dollar benefit they get out of such an engagement. They are completely priced based on usage. (Read   Pricing of Information Technology)

Firms will be able to utilize the business intelligence sometimes bundled with such services to optimize network price/ performance, plan network strategies, forecast spend and justify telecom expense decisions to your management team.