...Competitor analysis: Website & Thought leadership Report by Rashmi Singh (PGDM No: 10098) Work carried out at Tata Consultancy Services, Bangalore, Karnataka Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement of Summer Internship Programme Under the Supervision of Mr. Ashish Shetty, Marketing Lead, Insurance ISU, TCS, Bangalore SDM Institute for Management Development Mysore, Karnataka, India (June 2011) SDM IMD INSTITUTE CERTIFICATE This is to certify that Ms. Rashmi Singh, undergoing PGDM program 2010-12 at this institute has successfully completed the Summer Internship Programme on the project titled ―Competitor Analysis: Website and Thought Leadership‖ at TCS, Bangalore, from April 01, 2011 to May 31, 2011 as a partial requirement for completion of his PGDM curriculum. Prof. Govinda Sharma Internal Faculty Guide SDM IMD, Mysore. Date: 24/06/2011 Place: Mysore Summer Internship Project Page 2 SDM IMD Acknowledgement I take this opportunity to extend my sincere gratitude to our guides at Tata Consultancy Services, Mr. Ashish Shetty and Ms. Varsha Nair who spent a lot of time mentoring and guiding us. The insurance ISU was a completely new arena for us. We stumbled a few times, yet they have been very patient and supportive with us, always encouraging us to give our best. I also thank the Academic relationship manager, TCS, Mr. Chandra Koduru, for helping us with the joining formalities and induction program. I would also like to thank Prof. N. R. Govinda Sharma...
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...ABSTRACT Geert Hofstede's legendary national culture research is critiqued. Crucial assumptions which underlie his claim to have uncovered the secrets of entire national cultures are described and challenged. The plausibility of systematically causal national cultures is questioned. Introduction Do nations have cultures? Within each of the ‘management disciplines’ there is a significant literature which assumes that each nation has a distinctive, influential, and describable ‘culture’ As Hickson and Pugh declare: '[i]t ‘shapes everything’ (1995: 90). Other than a priori belief, what is the basis of claims that influential national cultures exist? What is the quality of the evidence appealed to? Frequently, within the management disciplines, the causal-national-culture accepting literature justifies its reliance on the notion of national culture by citing approvingly the work of Geert Hofstede who claims to have successfully 'uncover[ed] the secrets of entire national cultures' (1980b: 44). Whilst Anderson has vividly described nations as ‘imagined communities’ (1991) and Wallerstein states that he is ‘skeptical that we can operationalise the concept of culture ... in any way that enables us to use it for statements that are more than trivial’ (1990: 34), Hofstede claims to have identified the four (later five) 'main dimensions' of national culture along which countries can be hierarchically ordered (1980a, 1984, 1991). By 1998 he could confidently claim that the scale...
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...Abstract Business strategy is the strategy which the company uses to compete with their rivals in the same industry. Business strategy is also considered as the spine of the business because it dominates other operations in the company and helps create competitive advantages over their competitors. Due to these very important roles of the business strategy, we decided conduct this research paper with the aim to test whether choosing different types of business strategies will lead to difference in the performance of the companies or not. This research paper is based on the data from quarterly financial reports of the three companies in the computer industry in US from 1999 to 2011. With the findings of the research, the paper draws a conclusion that the impacts of different strategies are not the same, so that the managers should choose the most appropriate and profit-maximizing strategy for their company. Moreover, this result of the test will give incentives to the firms to put forward further test to find out the most effective strategy, which then can be recommended to Vietnam’s businesses. I. Scenario Computer industry is a very young industry in the world and it was not until the late 1990s that it really developed rapidly. In spite of this fact, the computer industry has gained a lot of significant achievements, opening a new era for the human-beings. It is also considered as an industry that has the fastest growth rate with a lot of new innovative products being produced...
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...Term Paper Proposal To: Dr. Vijay Karan From: Ming-Tzu Chou Date: 13 February 2012 Subject: Management control system Proposed Research Topic: How a new strategy saved and created a bright future for IBM in 90s. Statement of problem: In the early 1990s, IBM suffered in dramatically declining in the revenue of the mainframe sales, and the stock price also dropped. During the period, the personal computer was the most popular products in Information Technology market, and the mainframe was already outdated. Last but not least, IBM could not reduce its cost according to its size and bureaucracy. As a result, many people believed that IBM could only fell or be divided to smaller companies. Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., who was the new CEO, saved IBM and implemented different strategies in the company. Objective & Method: The purpose of the study is to evaluate how a new strategy affected IBM. Except the abstract, the term project will be separated to four parts: problem statement, strategy formulation and strategy planning of solutions, the summary of results, and recommendations. The term project should reach the following goals through in the four sections. 1. Problem statement will describe IBM’s previous business situation and introduce how problems had generated before Gerstner arrived. 2. The solutions from Gerstner will be deeply analyzed according to the theories from strategy formulation and strategy planning in the textbook. 3. The summary of results will be presented...
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...power might shift if one country gets the ability to invade any other country’s computer systems while putting up the ultimate computer defenses. That’s a major reason nations are pouring money into this research. The U.K., China, Russia, Australia, Netherlands and other countries are in the game. In the U.S., the CIA, National Security Agency and Pentagon are all funding research, while Los Alamos National Laboratory operates one of the most significant quantum computer labs. Negotiations to keep nuclear weapons from Iran are certainly critical, but if you play out the promise of quantum computing, an American machine could bust into Iranian systems and shut down all that country’s nuclear activity in an instant. It’s like a game of rock-paper-scissors: Nukes might be the world’s version of a rock, but quantum computers would be paper, winning every time. And yet, quantum computing research isn’t self-contained and secretive in the manner of the Los Alamos atomic bomb work during World War II. Some of it is academic work at universities such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with findings shared in scientific papers. Technology companies are working on this, too, since these things have the potential to be business nukes. IBM, Google and Microsoft all fund research. Imagine if Google gets one before Microsoft. That pesky Bing could wind up vaporized. Google has a Quantum Artificial Intelligence unit working with the University of California, Santa Barbara, with...
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...used floating point binary arithmetic and had a 22-bit word length. • 1942 The Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) is completed. The ABC was designed and built by Professor John Vincent Atanasoff and graduate student Cliff Berry between 1939 and 1942. • 1944 Harvard Mark-1 is completed. Created by Howard Aiken, and designed and built by IBM, the Harvard Mark-1 was a room-sized relay-based calculator. This machine had a fifty-foot long camshaft that synchronized the machine’s thousands of component parts. • 1946 The first glimpse of the ENIAC, a machine built by John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert that improved by 1,000 times on the speed of its contemporaries. • 1949 Maurice Wilkes assembled the EDSAC, the first practical stored-program computer, at Cambridge University. For programming the EDSAC, Wilkes established a library of short programs called subroutines stored on punched paper tapes. • 1950 The first commercially produced computer was built called the ERA 1101 by the Engineering Research Associates of Minneapolis. • 1953 IBM shipped its first electronic computer, the 701. During three years of production, IBM sold 19 machines to research laboratories, aircraft companies, and...
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...Why did Bharti outsource its network operations? Bharti was facing a challenge – the customer base was growing explosively (100% per year) but it was not able to keep up with the pace of the market growth. Bharti had challenges with management time, capital costs, and human resources. 1. Faster time to market: There was huge delay between the time when Bharti needed additional capacity and when that additional capacity could be up/running. Bharti was spending from six months to a year in the process of planning, tendering, purchasing, and installing. This took a lot of time from Bharti’s management team too and did not allow them to focus other important priorities in the company. 2. Scalability: Bharti was facing scalability issues both in its IT function and network function. 3. Human resources scarcity: Given the rapid growth in the industry, Bharti was finding it more and more difficult to hire and retain people. It was facing intense competition from other telecom providers as well are other multi-national companies to hire engineers. 4. Lean and predictable cost model: With the rapid changes in technology and also in the requirements for network capacity, Bharti was having a very unpredictable cost model. Instead of huge capital assets on the balance sheet and capital expenditures, Bharti wanted operating expenses which went hand-in-hand with the pace of its growth. 5. Capital Expenditures: With industry consolidation, the focus was switching from having...
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...Lenovo’s Acquisition of IBM’s PC Division A Final Paper Submitted to Professor Mihir Desai By John Ackerly Måns Larsson Cambridge, MA December 2005 The Emergence of a Chinese Global PC Giant: Lenovo’s Acquisition of IBM’s PC Division By John Ackerly & Måns Larsson 1/28 Introduction On May 1, 2005, the Lenovo Group acquired IBM’s personal computing division (IBM PC) for $1.25 billion, achieving the goal of its ambitious founder, Liu Chuanzhi, to create a global PC manufacturing powerhouse. By transforming itself from an upstart company focused on its domestic market, Lenovo joined an exclusive club of Chinese companies, such as Huawei and TCL, which compete head-to-head with leading multinational corporations. Without the involvement of western private equity firms – Texas Pacific Group (TPG), Newbridge Capital,1 and General Atlantic Partners (GA) – this transaction may never have been consummated. Each firm brought crucial expertise and credibility that helped mitigate the significant financial, operational and cultural risks inherent in a large scale, cross-border transaction. Many believe that these efforts opened a new chapter in the growth of China’s economy and its integration with the West. As Bill Grabe, GA’s representative on Lenovo’s board, stated: “Lenovo’s acquisition of IBM mark the start of something bigger. In the future, we will see more Chinese global giants emerging through cross-border M&A.”2 This paper examines the underlying motivations and assumptions...
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...advertising and information distribution, to name a few. As with most technological advances, there is also a dark side: criminal hackers. Governments, companies, and private citizens around the world are anxious to be a part of this revolution, but they are afraid that some hacker will break into their Web server and replace their logo with pornography, read their e-mail, steal their credit card number from an on-line shopping site, or implant software that will secretly transmit their organization’s secrets to the open Internet. With these concerns and others, the ethical hacker can help. This paper describes ethical hackers: their skills, their attitudes, and how they go about helping their customers find and plug up security holes. The ethical hacking process is explained, along with many of the problems that the Global Security Analysis Lab has seen during its early years of ethical hacking for IBM clients. T he term “hacker” has a dual usage in the computer industry today. Originally, the term was defined as: HACKER noun 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of computer systems and how to stretch their capabilities—as opposed to most users of computers, who prefer to learn only the minimum amount necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 1 This complimentary description was often extended to the verb form “hacking,” which was used to deIBM SYSTEMS JOURNAL, VOL 40, NO 3, 2001 scribe the rapid crafting...
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...Title: The Fall of IBM Date: September 20, 2013 I. Executive Summary The purpose of this case study analysis is to analyze the situation of IBM in the 1990s, to come up with possible mutually exclusive alternatives for IBM’s management and ultimately, to recommend a possible strategy to regain back IBM’s throne in the industry. The problem of the case study is all about the survival of IBM in a much more competitive market ever encountered by the company. And also, overcoming new challenges brought about IBM’s new management and the dynamic technological environment. The methods of analysis used for this case study are the Porter’s Five Forces Model and the ANSOFF matrix analysis. Brief explanations were provided in each of the methods used for analysis. After analyzing the case study, the following three mutually exclusive alternative course of action were developed: 1. Decentralize Management; 2. Invest heavily on research and development and; 3. Partner with suppliers From the alternatives, I recommend that IBM should partner with its suppliers. Collaboration with suppliers will increase business flexibility and executive level business decision support. This will surely bring the most benefit for the company among the other alternatives course of action. The suppliers play a great role in the industry and having strong connections with them can help the company survive and even excel in the industry. Outline and Implementation: ...
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...advertising and information distribution, to name a few. As with most technological advances, there is also a dark side: criminal hackers. Governments, companies, and private citizens around the world are anxious to be a part of this revolution, but they are afraid that some hacker will break into their Web server and replace their logo with pornography, read their e-mail, steal their credit card number from an on-line shopping site, or implant software that will secretly transmit their organization’s secrets to the open Internet. With these concerns and others, the ethical hacker can help. This paper describes ethical hackers: their skills, their attitudes, and how they go about helping their customers find and plug up security holes. The ethical hacking process is explained, along with many of the problems that the Global Security Analysis Lab has seen during its early years of ethical hacking for IBM clients. scribe the rapid crafting of a new program or the making of changes to existing, usually complicated software. As computers became increasingly available at universities, user communities began to extend beyond researchers in engineering or computer science to other individuals who viewed the computer as a curiously flexible tool. Whether they programmed the computers to play games, draw pictures, or to help them with the more mundane aspects of their daily work, once computers were available for use, there was never a lack of individuals wanting to use them. Because of this increasing...
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...IBM Global Business Services Executive Report Customer Relationship Management IBM Institute for Business Value From social media to Social CRM What customers want The first in a two-part series IBM Institute for Business Value IBM Global Business Services, through the IBM Institute for Business Value, develops fact-based strategic insights for senior executives around critical public and private sector issues. This executive report is based on an in-depth study by the Institute’s research team. It is part of an ongoing commitment by IBM Global Business Services to provide analysis and viewpoints that help companies realize business value. You may contact the authors or send an e-mail to iibv@us.ibm.com for more information. Additional studies from the IBM Institute for Business Value can be found at ibm.com/iibv Introduction By Carolyn Heller Baird and Gautam Parasnis CEOs, according to the IBM 2010 CEO Study.1 Today’s businesses are fervently building social media programs to do just this. But are customers as enthusiastic? Actually, most do not engage with companies via social media simply to feel connected. It turns out, customers are far more pragmatic. To successfully exploit the potential of social media, companies need to design experiences that deliver tangible value in return for customers’ time, attention, endorsement and data. With the worldwide explosion of social media usage, businesses are feeling extreme pressure to be where their customers...
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...Hand-in date: 01.09.2009 Supervisor: Dr. Espen Andersen This thesis is a part of the MSc programme at BI Norwegian School of Management. The school takes no responsibility for the methods used, results found and conclusions drawn. Acknowledgments I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Espen Andersen, for his support and guidance throughout the project. I am also grateful to all participants in this research for their contribution and time. Finally, I thank my family for their understanding, encouragement and patience. Thesis 01.09.2009 Content Content ..................................................................................................................... i Abstract .................................................................................................................. iv Introduction ............................................................................................................ 1 Research Methodology ........................................................................................... 2 Research Question .........................................................................................................2 Method Used ..................................................................................................................2 Collecting Data ..............................................................................................................3 BI vendors .................................
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...artificially intelligent machine. A lot of scientists believe that the key to figuring out artificial intelligence is to copy the basic function of the human brain. While it is certainly evident that a computer can acquire knowledge from a program or programmer, it is the new developments in AI that will enable it to apply the knowledge. The new advancements in AI will hopefully enable these machines to not only possess the knowledge, but also understand how to utilize it in a number of situations. Artificial Intelligence researchers analyze human intelligent behavior in an attempt to have computers use the same deductive reasoning skills that humans use. While many of the developments in AI are relatively new the research of AI has been around for many years. One of the first notions of Artificial Intelligence came from Alan Turing (1912-1954) a British mathematician, and logician. Turing is widely considered to be the father...
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...Management Information Systems: A Research Paper By Greg Butler Student ####### American Military University MC302 D002 Summer 07 October 23, 2007 Management Information Systems: A Research Paper Executive Summary. In April 2004, after a year of planning, preparation, and training, the City of La Quinta “went live” with an enterprise-wide, integrated information system for the first time in its 22-year history. For the roughly one hundred member staff, it was a revolutionary leap. Previously, each functional department had selected, purchased, and implemented its own best solution to facilitate day-to-day operations. The implementation of SunGard’s HTE NaviLine software required infrastructure improvements and behind-the-scenes setup. The result was several databases for common use among departments and several automation improvements to previous transaction processing systems. Functional departments, individually and collectively, are able to spend more time concentrating on serving customers and less time searching City Hall for a needed piece of information. Implementation in two final departments will lead to even better service, particularly for those in the development community. The system is challenging, but powerful by virtue of its use of a multi-platform IBM® System i™ server. It is moderately user-friendly by virtue of NaviLine’s Web browser interface. Several improvements are necessary to make the system truly great, but in its current state the system...
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