Information Systems In Business

polling equipment, then the store would have to cease trading if the tills are not equipped with some kind of buffering system to store transaction information until the breakdown has been rectified. It is possible for sites to have several different versions of their web site, enabling the user to choose upon logging on the level of multimedia ‘wow’ (and consequently download time) they desire, and tools such as Adobe’s Acrobat and programming languages such as Sun Microsystems’ Java offer portability and platform independence, enabling the web developer to create a website that will look and behave exactly the same, no matter what kind of system the user is accessing them from.

This year, the company revamped their computer systems to create more reliability from their network and Internet servers, and placed high end PCs in every branch to run the retail system, connected to their main network by dial-up connection. Any company with a web presence will also need to be protected by a ‘firewall’ – a software shield against any untoward attempts at accessing the system, and usually monitoring internal web usage to ensure it adheres to the company’s Internet and Email policies, which are usually strictly enforced. This enabled head office to receive invoices and delivery notes electronically from the suppliers, using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). Transactions with suppliers were now considered more secure, as there was less room for human error when making or receiving orders, and the computer system was adept at spotting irregularities – preventing both fraud and theft.

Despite the regular rise and fall of purely web based ‘dot com’ companies, it seems to me that a well established company moving towards being largely web based in operation and construction would create strong feet for its self in a future that is inevitably going to be more virtual than it is actual. Until recently, the company was a leader in its class, but with rising competition from the ever growing number of ‘Super Pub’ chains through the nineties, the company started to show falling profit margins. This has, however, enabled rogues to move in a different direction – that of using similar net names to a big company and passing themselves off as that company in order to steal business from unwary web surfers.

The effects of computers on a business can be shown easily by examining the case study of Yates Group Plc in Appendix A; the result of this change was redundancy for around 30% of the head office staff, as well as major departmental restructuring. A system can break down anywhere from the ground up, and if the rest of the system is not designed to cope with this, then the company could come crashing down. The courts, both in the UK and US have set precedents that now make it harder for the unscrupulous to make a fast buck at other’s expense, but it is the brand name that can be at stake, so companies should be vigilant of such activity.