How can information system be used to achieve strategic advantage at the industry level? By working with other firms, industry participants can use information technology to develop industry-wide standards for exchanging information or business transactions electronically, which force all market participants to subscribe to similar standards.

Such efforts increase efficiency, making product substitution less likely and perhaps raising entry costs-thus discouraging new entrants. Also, industry members can build industry wide, IT-supported consortium, symposium, and communications networks to coordinate activities concerning government agencies, foreign competition and competing industries.

Looking at the industry value chain encourages you to think about how to use information systems to link up more efficiently with your suppliers, strategic partners, and customers. Strategic advantage derives from your ability to relate your value chain to the value chains of other partners in the process. For instance, if you are Amazon.com, you want to build systems that:

• Make it  easy for suppliers to display goods and open stores on the Amazon site
• Make it easy for customers to pay for goods
• Develop systems that coordinate the shipment of goods to customers
• Develop shipment tracking systems for customers

In fact, this is exactly what Amazon has done to become one of the Web’s most satisfying online retail shopping sites. The Interactive Session on Technology discusses how Amazon.com developed and executes this business strategy. It also shows that Amazon.com had to revise its strategy several times in order to remain competitive. Internet technology has made it possible to create highly syncronized industry value chains called value webs.

A value web is a collection of independent firms that use information technology to coordinate their value chains to produce a product or a service for a market collectively. It is more customer driven and operates in a less linear fashion than the traditional value chain.  These value webs are flexible and adaptive to changes in supply and demand. Relationships can be bundled or unbundled in response to changing market conditions. Firms will accelerate time to market and to customers by optimizing their value web relationships to make quick decisions on who can deliver the required products or services at the right price and location.

Large, bureaucratic organizations, which primarily developed before the computer age, are often inefficient, slow to change, and less competitive than newly created organizations. Some of these large organizations have down-size, reducing the number of employees and the number of levels in their organizational hierarchies. Behavioral researches have theorized that information technology facilitates flattening of hierarchies by broadening the distribution of information to empower lower-level employees and increase management efficiency.

IT pushes decision-making rights lower in the organization because lower-level employees receive the information they need to make decisions without supervision. (This empowerment is also possible because higher educational levels among workforce, which give employees the capabilities to make intelligent decisions.) Because managers now receive so much more accurate information on time, they become much faster at making decisions, so fewer managers are required.

Management costs decline as a percentage of revenues, and the hierarchies becomes much more efficient. These changes mean that the management span of control has also been broadened, enabling high level managers to manage and control more workers spread over greater distances. Many companies have eliminated thousands of middle managers as a result of these changes.

The poor use of English on the National Registration Department (NRD) website has been rectified following public complaints. The department’s public relations officer Janisah Mohd Noor said the mistakes were an oversight.

“We are checking on this and assume that someone has taken the initiative to upload the content without going through the necessary procedures first,” she said.

Earlier this month, a reader forwarded a copy of the atrocious content in English on the website to the media, expressing concern that it would taint the country’s image. Below are the original contents of the said pages. Note, these pages have since been amended by NRD.

http://www.jpn.gov.my/BI/4_5_kadpengenalan.php (edited)

1. I’m 17 year old, when should I change my identity card replacement?
A person whose had got first-time identity card namely during old 12 year, are required change again his identity card when have reached the age 18 year. If this change made within life time 18 - 25 year, no any penalty imposed.

2. I already 25 year old and still not have my own identity card. What shoul I do?
To them not yet own identity card although already aged more 16 year are advised to come to any nearby NRD to apply identity card past record. Applicant and promoter must showed up together to be interviewed, bringing with together following documents.

3. I a foreign citizens and have gotten permit of entry from Jabatan Immigration Malaysia. Whether I qualified to apply identity card? What is conditions for I apply identity card. Read rest of story…

AidanTech’s sister company, ArdentEdu, has just succesfully registered the ArdentEduKit brand (”ardent edukit“) and tagline (”fun science in a box”).

Thomas Jefferson, the 3rd American president, was also the first US patent commissioner. He spoke of patents as “locomotives that run industry“.

Mark Twain once wrote “a country without a patent office and good patent laws is just a crab and couldn’t travel anyway but sideways or backwards“.

With a patent, an inventor can control the design, manufacture, licensing, distribution and copying of his inventions. Patents can prevent your competitors from practising your invention.

Simply put: The purpose of patents is to keep others from duplicating your invention.

Benefits of a patent
• Marketing. Customers are always looking for the “next new thing”. Patents represent “newness” as “novelty” is the key to successful patent applications. Patents also represent “R&D”, which everyone likes. Patents are also third-party endorsements as they need to be vetted by the unbiased officials in patent offices worldwide. Read rest of story…

It’s on an O’Reilly blog, so it must be true: Facebook has lost some users’ email settings. The company had to send them an apology, and a request to reset things. Let me explain in geek jargon: That’s effin. Not because Facebook’s engineers failed at Backups 101, but because by now the Marketing department has figured out they can reset all our email preferences to “Spam Me Like Crazy” by pretending to lose them again in January. Laugh while it’s still funny.