12/08 Assignments (News Blog/Individual Blog)

This week we once again talked about the system development life cycle. I understand that they are steps and features that we have to be aware of for minimizing the chance of failure for a business model design. On yahoo I found an article: http://au.biz.yahoo.com/071206/43/1irhn.html

Basically this is about high system availability systems and their future evolvement. “The convergence of IT and communications infrastructure is placing complex high availability, system clustering, and manageability requirements on system development. These requirements create tremendous problems with respect to scalability, development cost, time-to-market, and resources allocated to core competencies.” In the world today, everything is being computerized and technology is the key to success. The more technology, the easier work is for us.

On Wednesday we worked on the negotiation assignment. It was a lot easier to come up with a solution when we were coming up with a decision in our own group. When we got to class, the negotiation became confusing although in the end, we did pretty well and got the outcome we wanted (with +90).

How did your group make the decisions?
At first we looked at it individually and came up with all the possible combinations. I think we came up with 12 combinations, for example a few:
1) A1, B1, C1
2) A1, B1, C2
3) A1, B1, C3
4) A1, B2, C1
5) A1, B2, C2
6) Etc.
After we came up with all the numbers, we put them together and checked which combination gave us the best outcome in total.

What problems did you encounter in the process?
A lot of the combinations in which gave somebody high numbers would give somebody a 0 in the group since all our numbers were different. So that is why we came up with the decision to pick the highest outcome combined. Even so, one of our members (Keith) had to sacrifice a little. He only had 20 points while the rest of us had 90, 60, 85, and 45. However since it was for the benefit of the team, the negotiation was easier to be reached.

Did your group make decisions in a different way than the whole class did?
Well I’m not sure how other groups negotiated however I think that they probably did something similar to what we did.

What kind of information system do you need to design to support such a process of negotiation?
I think it’s easiest to just plug the numbers in a spreadsheet and show the results of each possibility in order to come up with a solution to the negotiation. Many programs we have like excel can sort the numbers. And to further the software configuration, we can have a program in which the computer can come up with all the possibilities (Statistics) and rate it on a percentage of risk.