Module 4

Ryan Williams

Module 4

I chose to interview my dad for this assignment. He is the Director of Information Systems at Davis Hospital in Layton, Utah. He has worked there for 19 years and has always liked his job. He deals with most of the electronics in the hospital and has been in contact with almost everybody in the hospital ranging from the people in housekeeping to surgeons.

            What does he do? Well, He manages the computers, networking, servers, and technology infrastructure in the hospital. He also manages a staff of technicians and network engineers as well as two nurses who help train and do project management for new applications. He is not just in charge of part of the hospitals technology, he is in charge of the whole hospital. Being a director is not a competitive job where you want to be better than directors in other places. My dad talks to directors at other hospitals and they share their best practices.

            Up-to-date technology is very important in a hospital. Surgeons would always want the best software there is available to be able to do the best they can. This is part of being the IS director, to make sure all the software is not only working, but is also up-to-date. To stay current you need to be reading online about new software, but you also can’t be the expert in all areas which is why you have staff to specialize in different areas.

            IS directors also need to have people skills. You will not always be working just on computer, you will be working with someone on that computer either helping them with a problem on it or working on developing a program. If you were not good with people then it would be much harder to help someone understand why a program might not be running correctly just by showing them.

            To be a manger you need to have at least a bachelor’s degree, but to be a director, it is preferable to have a master’s Degree. My dad actually has a Master’s Degree in business administration. You also need to have a good view of problems in the place of work not just in the present, but problems that could happen in the future.

            Most IS directors have a 9-5 work schedule with some occasional late night days and some work on weekends. Most directors do not have to travel very much but are usually local with some business trips every so often. On average, and IS director makes $110,031 a year.

Module 3

Ryan Williams

            Outsourcing is taking one specific thing a company does and moving that one process to somewhere else where it can be done cheaper and have that product sent back to the company. Off shoring is similar to outsourcing. Instead of taking one process and sending it to another country to be done, off shoring moves the whole factory from the same country that the company is to a different country where the factory can operate with lower costs and higher quality products.

            Supply chain is controlling the production of a product from the raw materials required to make the product to the actual finished product in order to reduce the total cost of making a product. Walmart has the biggest and best supply chain in the world. Since they are the biggest supply chain in the world, if a product were to be reduced in price, Walmart would be able to reduce the product without much effect since they probably sell the most of that product anyway. Another way they can use their supply chain to an advantage is if a product were to go out of style in say New York but not in Arizona, Walmart can reroute all the out-of-style products that were going to go to New York and send them to Arizona instead. This will help save Walmart some money because if the products were to get to New York before the message was received, they would then have to ship the products all the way from New York to Arizona.

            Google has affected businesses in a variety of different ways. One way is research. One no longer is required to go to some out-of-the-way place to get some information, now you can just Google it. Say you had been stuck on a problem for a while and still couldn’t find the solution, just Google it. If companies want to find out about the products of other companies, like reviews or product specifications, they can just search Google for it and find an answer almost immediately. Before, companies would have had to buy a product and examine it themselves and have their own people review it, they can still do it today but it has become easier to just find it using Google.

            This reading has really been an eye opener, especially when it comes to Google. Google is a great company, but it also has its downsides. The more you use Google, the less private information becomes. In the book, it talked about privacy. Anything that you post online will eventually be searchable, whether it be something small, like your favorite color, to something more private, like where you live or how old you are. Where you live might not seem like a big idea, mostly because many people around you know where you live. The reason it can be personal is because anyone could know where you live, would you really like anyone in the world knowing where you live anytime?

Module 2

Ryan Williams

            Workflow software is software that is created to automate as many tasks as possible to lighten the load for a human being or just simply make them easier. As technology progresses, workflow software progresses too, making work easier for humans as more tasks can become automated. A fictional example of this could be a software that use some key words and makes a game out of it. Say you wanted a game a certain element to it, what you would do is type all the key words or elements you wanted into a program and then that program would write all the programming for that game. After that, the program would transfer all this code to a specified folder for the creator to use. This would take out all the programmers need to write a game and just one person could make the programming for a game.

            Open-source software a program that has all of the source code made available to anyone to modify how they want. Any changes that you make to the code you can share with others, but you must give credit back to the original creator. This is important for a few reasons. For one, a company can hire as many people as they want, but they will never get every idea that anyone has. When the program is open-source, anyone can edit it making the ideas for the program endless. Also, there could be a problem with the software and no one who works at the company knows how to fix it unless it is open-source, then any random person could solve the problem and send it back to the original developers.

            Outsourcing is sending work to people outside your company to work on one thing. Usually the people that get sent the work only work on that specific thing, so it is cheaper to hire them instead of paying more for someone else to work on it who might also work on other things. Outsourcing can help a company because they have less things to do and can focus on one task better. Having someone work on something cheaper will help save the company money and get them a better process.

            This reading interested me more than the last reading for mostly one reason: open-source software. I have five brothers and two of them are pretty geeky when it comes to computers and programming and whatnot. We also all have android phones and android is an open-source software. On android, people have taken the original source code and modified it and created many different versions of it called ROMs. So out of the five phones we have, we all have different ROMs but they all came out of the original android source code just people have modified it the way the like.