Research Topics: Free Markets

WEBSITE EVALUATION FOR FILTON COLLEGE

WEBSITE EVALUATION FOR FILTON COLLEGE Introduction The transmission of the internet has revolutionized the business arena.  The use of the Internet is changing high-tech marketing overnight while different industries have been trying to use it as part of their marketing strategy. It does not only reconfigured the way different firms do business and the way the consumers buy goods and services but it also become instrumental in transforming the value chain from manufacturers to retailers to consumers, creating a new retail distribution channel (Donthu & Garcia, 1999).  Website development is a powerful tool used by different business organizations around the world. It is defined as the process of achieving business objectives utilizing electronic communications technology. In addition, the Internet has brought about many changes to the world, particularly on how contemporary businesses are being operated. Due to this technological progress, product development became faster and better and business processes are more systematized. Indeed, the introduction of the internet to several industries has paved the way for greater progress in the future. The complexities of achieving business success through increased efficiency, effectiveness and competitiveness, combined with innovative applications of the online marketing or the Internet, has heightened the awareness of both the internet and business managers towards more strategically oriented approaches for choosing business strategies (Luftman, Lewis & Oldach, 1993).  In any business organization, the core responsibility of the management is to ensure the consistency of its stakeholders’ relationships, to establish that the planned output can be achieved with the planned inputs of labour, capital, and materials. For each of these relationships, there is a corresponding financial flow.  With the advent of internet, more and more organization is trying to use this as part of their business strategy and educational institutions are never an exemption.  Primarily, the main goal of this paper is to provide a report on the evaluation of two existing websites which include online enrolment. Further, the discussion will also include a brief description of different web technologies available and attempts to assess which of these tools will be appropriate to be used by the Filton College. Evaluation of 2 Existing Websites The World Wide Web (WWW) site or more commonly known as the website is regarded as the collection or compilation of web pages, i.e. HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and/or Extensible HyperText Markup Language (XHTML) documents which are accessible via HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) on the Internet, all publicly available in existence encompass World Wide Web. Many individuals, business organisation and other groups are trying to create or establish their own website for any purpose they have.  The website that must be designed should adhere to the interest of the internet user and it must meet the needs of the user from all aspects (Horn, 2003).             Web designing and developing is difficult since there are many factors that must be considered in order to make the website more efficient.  In this report the two websites that will be assessed includes of Nottingham Trent University’s website (www.ntu.ac.uk) and the website of City University London (www.city.ac.uk). These websites will be assessed in terms of design rules, the software used.  In addition, these will be assessed in terms of users, purposes, and structure of sites, graphical design, environment and browsers. Evaluation of Nottingham Trent University (www.ntu.ac.uk)             When creating a website it is important that a web developer or designer should be able to adhere to the web designing rules, so as to ensure that the website created will be accessible.  There are five basic rules that must be met in web designing: the website created must be easy to read, easy to navigate and easy to find.  In addition, the layout and design of the web must be consistent throughout the site and the website should be quick to download. The first website to be evaluated is the Nottingham Trent University’s website which is www.ntu.ac.uk.  It can be said that the website of the NTU adheres to the first rule because all the written information within the website is easy to be read and understand.  Herein, the developed website for NTU has been able to choose the best text and background which makes the users to easily read and comprehend what was the website wanted to imply. In terms of navigation, it seems that the NTU website has been able to meet the requirements of having an easy to navigate site.  Herein, all the hyperlinks established by the NTU site is clear enough to be understood by the users or visitors. In addition, the graphic images like tabs or buttons can be easily read because the developer of such website has labelled it clearly. The NTU website has been able to carefully and meticulously choose colours, backgrounds and textures for easy navigation. In addition, the website of NTU has also been able to follow the rules of providing link colours to have a distinction between those unvisited links and those mostly visited links.  For example, the online enrolment link of this website has used blue text to be easily seen by the students who would avail the service of the institution. The next design rule is the easiness of the website to be found. It is important that when developing a website, one of the goals of the web designers is to make create a website that would be easy to access and find over the internet.  There are thousands of organizations that are now creating their own website; hence, it is important that the site created must be unique and distinctive. In line with the NTU website, it can be said that the site has been able to meet the third rule of having a website that is easy to find. Herein, the company make it sure that their site will be available both online and offline. To be able to make the website available to all and to be able to promote the website to all the users and possible customers, the company had used different search engines including Google, Yahoo and others. In addition, the website of NTU has also been able to use easy to access contact information. In terms of consistency, the NTU website has been consistent throughout the website.  In order to make the NTU website a user friendly, the web designers has used software other than the standard HyperTExt Mark-Up Language.  The website is being operated under NTU. The main purpose of this website is to provide information regarding the services offered by NTU, including online enrolment system that the institution had established. The possible users of the website are visitors and students who would want to avail the services offered by the University.  Herein, the users may easily access all the information regarding NTU and the best things that NTU can offer for their educational needs. Through the website, even students from different parts of the world may enrol at the company through its online enrolment system. Herein, the students are given the opportunity to book their reservations online.  The website also provides information on how the enrolees can pay for tuition fees or accommodation fees. All the data that the students or enrolees are given are being protected and secured through encryption. Evaluation of City University London (www.city.ac.uk) As mentioned, there are five basic rules that must be considered when designing or developing a website.  This part of the paper will be the evaluation the City University London’s website. In observation, the website of CUL has not been able to adhere to the first rule because the information and the label of the links are not readable. Herein, the developed website for CUL uses colours which is very light that all the texts cannot be read easily. It also uses small texts that the user cannot easily understand such link. In terms of navigation, it seems that the CUL website has been able to meet the requirements of having an easy to navigate page or site.  Herein, all the hyperlinks established by the NTU site is clear enough to be understood by the users or visitors, although it’s not that readable as compared to the first website because of the text colours.  In addition, the graphic images like tabs or buttons can are also unreadable; it seems that the web designer does not give emphasis to the second rule of web designing. The NTU website does not been able to carefully select colours, backgrounds and textures for easy navigation. The CUL website does not also follow the rules of providing link colours to have a distinction between those unvisited links and those mostly visited links.  They only used one colour which is blue. The next design rule that must be considered is the easiness of the website to be found. It is one of the important rules to follow in order to promote the website among different users.  In line with the website of City University London, it can be noted that the site has been able to meet the third rule of having a website that is easy to find. Herein, the company make it sure that their site will be available in the internet to make users be aware of the website’s existence. In order for CUL to make their designed website available to internet users the university had used different search engines including Google, Yahoo, AOL and others. In addition, the CUL website has also been able to use easy to access contact information. And with regards to consistency, the web layout and design of CUL has been consistent throughout the website.  The website of City University London had used 128- bit encryption for its server security. The website is being operated with the help of the Centre for Human Computer Interaction design. The main purpose of this website is to provide information regarding the services offered by the City University London, including the online enrolment site to be used by the students who wants to avail such services. Like the website of NTU, the possible users of the website are visitors and students who would want to avail the services offered by the University.  Herein, the users may easily access all the information regarding CUL for the students’ or users’ educational needs. Through the website, even students from different parts of the world may enrol at the company through its online enrolment system. In this manner, the students are given the opportunity to book their reservations online.  In the website of the university, they include an enrolment form for students which include payment details and other personal information needed.  Different Web Technologies HyperText Markup Language             In creating a website, it is equally important to consider the web technologies to be used.  The following are the web technologies that can be used when designing or developing a website. Fundamental to the Web is HTML, or hypertext Markup language. Devised by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN at the beginning of the 1990s, HTML was intended to be open formatting language that would display pages in any browser capable of recognising that language. As the Web became more successful, so the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was established to oversee future developments of the standard: each new version is designed to downgrade as elegantly as possible; that is, when used well, older browsers ignore elements that they cannot interpret (Powell, 2001; Whittaker 2002). Fundamental to HTML is the element; that is, a tag indicated by angular brackets that may include a number of attributes, or modifiers affecting how an element is formatted. Typically at present, most but not all elements have an opening and closing tag (something that has been addressed by XHTML): for example, a web page usually begins and ends with the tags, the closing tag indicated by the use of a forward slash. The first version of HTML was intended only to display text with some basic formatting elements such as headers and paragraphs, as well as the ability to link to other documents. The demand quickly arose for images, and HTML 2.0 outlined the basic standards for formatting text, linking and adding images to pages. The next important standard, HTML 3.0 (modified shortly afterwards as 3.2), added the ability to format pages using tables, as well as the first steps towards the use of cascading style sheets (see below), developments that were taken further by HTML 4.0, which also included layers, absolute positioning and some dynamic effects (Whittaker, 2002). HTML is relatively simple to learn although web pages soon become very complex, particularly when designing with modern web editors such as Dreamweaver or GoLive. Pages are typically divided into two parts: a header (indicated by the element) that includes meta-information about the page—its title, tags describing content and so on—and the body (defined by the element). XHTML, XML and other advances to HTML Although HTML has served the Web well, providing a simple and resilient language to format pages and connect documents, it has been pushed in a number of ways that its original inventor Berners-Lee could not have foreseen. The successor to ENQUIRE was intended for text only, or primarily text-based documents, but it is being used increasingly to handle multimedia sites and powerful databases. At the same time, the personal computer, which Berners-Lee reasonably saw as the main, indeed, the only, client of the Web in the early 1990s, has been joined by a multitude of devices, including personal digital assistants (PDAs), web-ready television sets and even mobile phones, all of which access the Web in different ways. XHTML Early in 2000, the W3C, the body responsible for Web standards, recommended XHTML (or extended HTML) to be used on websites. The main difference made by XHTML is that rules now matter: whereas previously browsers would ignore poor Markup (for example, missing tags), this will not be the case with browsers that comply with strict XHTML standards. Because there are so many websites, many of them with mistakes that require a forgiving browser, it is likely that for the foreseeable future versions of Netscape or Internet Explorer will remain backwards compatible. None the less, implementing rules is important to the future of HTML: mobile phone or web-TV browsers, for example, display web pages very differently from those designed for PCs, and establishing how a page will display in various browsers will become increasingly important. As such, XHTML pages must have what is known as a ‘doctype indicator’, an instruction at the beginning of the page which tells the browser what version of HTML it will use, and all relevant elements indicating the Markup type. For the moment, HTML is the main formatting language on the Web, but this may not be the case in the future. Style sheets As web designers have sought more eye-popping sites, so HTML has been pushed to extremes as a tool for layout and design. Another problem for site designers is that it is unusual for a single individual to combine the talents required to create content for pages and present them on a page in an appealing fashion. One solution to this problem has emerged in the form of cascading style sheets (CSS), Markup rules for text and positioning that offer more control over layout. Because such style sheets may be nested one inside another, they are referred to as ‘cascading’, and CSS creates a presentation style for a particular HTML element. CSS defines how different elements appear on the web page. These elements include headers, text and links. First is the ASCII, this technology stands for American Standard Code Information Exchange.  Herein, the principal character set encoding of present-day computers. It uses a code for representing English characters, in which each letter has a counter numerical value from 0 to 127.  The next web technology is the Active Server Pages (ASP). This is a dynamically ad animatedly created web page that usually use JavaScript or VB Script code.  In this, if a browser requests an ASP site, the web server produces a page with HTML c ode and sends its back to its respective browser.             Next is the Cold Fusion (CFM), a format that allows a web developer to link and connect databases and spreadsheets to the webpage which is considered to be much easier through HTML coding. On the other hand the Cold Fusion Markup Language (CFML) is a tag-based server scripting language for building web applications.  Cold Fusion Markup Language utilised a syntax which is closely look like XML and HTML. XML Another important web technology that can be considers id the Common Gateway Interface (CGI).  Common Gateway Interface is known as any program, which is designed to accept and restore or return data which conforms to the specification set under CGI. This program can be written in any other programming languages such as C, Java, Visual Basics and Perl. The CGI programs are known as the most common way for Web servers to connect dynamically with users.  Web technology also includes the Dynamic HyperText Markup Language (DHTML).  This refers to the new extension of HTML that allows the web page to respond to use input without sending any requests to the web server. Recommendation The World Wide Web, also known as the Internet, is the most renowned hypertext system and because of this there are two standard hypertext technologies that can be considered aside from those mentioned above.  Two of its standards are the HyperText Transfer Protocol or HTTP and the HyperText Markup Language or HTML.  HTTP gives the specifications on how the browser and the server send information to each other.  HTML, on the other hand is a way of encoding the information so that it may be displayed on different devices.  The hypertext capabilities of the web include support for constructing and modularizing information on a nonlinear format, the convenience of making references, and the capability to keep a number of information threads alive all at once (Heller, 1990). In creating a website, these two standards must be considered the most. Today, the two-tier client/server architecture such as the HTTP and HTML is still the widest implemented computer architecture.  An application is considered two-tier when database services are detached from an application so that they can run independently on another computer (Fastie, 1999).  Client/server software architectures were developed in the 1980s based on the file server architecture design (Sadoski, 1997).  They are able to improve the usability, scalability, and flexibility in computer sharing infrastructure (Schussel, 1996).  Moreover, the architecture needed only small operator intervention. For many years, the set-up of this model seemed ideal – a Windows/GUI-based PC manages the application and presentation activities at the client level, whereas the server accesses the database.  Such scenario seemed to be suitable for Internet application.  Several advantages are offered by the fact that data are being managed and stored in a central location.  First, every item of data stored in the central location can be accessed and worked on by all users.  Second, security and business rules may be defined only once by the server, and, thus, be enforced in all users.  Next, relational database servers optimize network traffic through returning only the needed data of the application.  Then, costs of hardware are minimized.  Finally, maintenance tasks including backing up and/or restoring data are cut down since they can now focus only on the central server. Conclusion             In creating the website, web designers have to consider many things web technologies and designs. If the web designs adhere to the set standards of website development, then the website can be considered as accessible and readable. Next to consider is the credibility of your website as a vital component. Thus, you need to state your phone, fax or 800 numbers, head office address, offices’ location as the essentials. The addresses and contact numbers must stay accurate. With regards to the site, the designer would need to affirm the warranties, guarantees, methods of the delivery of the services, terms and conditions and the privacy policy. However, the amount of information given regarding the company will also depends on the objectives that the organization wants to achieve.  It is easy to presuppose much knowledge on the viewer’s part, yet it is wiser to presuppose that people or users have drawn their interest in all the aspects of the services, from the basic information onward. The companies which are sincere with the marketing through the website extend to the vast span of expecting and responding the questions, motivating interest and raise the level of the viewer’s comfort.             Developing the website can be arranged into six steps: defining the goal which requires a clear goal so as to decide on the appropriate style, appearance and features; overall appearance which should reflect on the corporate culture of such business, which entails the selection of colours, use of logos, corporate images and the format design; navigability of the website, this includes the header, footer and side-menu bars which is attained by the use of every part of every webpage to link to equivalent pages and which aims to provide the visitors timesaving browsing through the website; visuals which become the focus of the process in developing the site along with the overall appearance, approved sampler and the graphics;  content which shapes the foundation of the website and which can be helpfully organized into a site map that arranges the content into groups in which lays the path the visitors take as they browse the website; and finally is the site management which refers to the regular attention spent for the review of the design, use of graphics, maintenance of the site for the visitors to frequently return to. Once the website is functional, it will always aspire to keep its relevance most especially the time-sensitive information. Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com

WEBSITE EVALUATION FOR FILTON COLLEGE

WEBSITE EVALUATION FOR FILTON COLLEGE Introduction The transmission of the internet has revolutionized the business arena. The use of...

Sony was essentially established as a venture business

The Sony Corporation                   Sony was essentially established as a venture business created in cooperation with a number of technology experts, spearheaded by Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka. The year 1979 brought great changes to Sony. At age 57, Ibuka shifted over to the largely ceremonial position of chairman emeritus and left Morita to run things his way, which he did with such a personal style that the company began to resemble a founder enterprise. Most recent figures indicate that the Morita family is a major shareholder in Sony with their company, called Reikei K.K., holding 4.1 percent interest and total family holdings representing about 10 percent of Sony’s stock.                         As for the makeup of Sony’s top-management team, the real power still lay with Morita, who held the post of director/chairman. Morita’s hand-picked choice as president was the former baritone singer Norio Ohga, and Morita’s younger brother, Masaaki, is vice president. There are other family connections as well. Sony’s president prior to Ohga was Kazuo Iwama, who was Morita’s brother- in-law, and the president of Reikei K.K. is Kazuaki Morita, another of Morita’s younger brothers. With this sort of lineup—and also taking into account the influence of Morita’s extremely well-connected wife, Yoshiko—I had intended to write that Sony, as a founder enterprise, was headed for potential future problems. But in November 1993 nature intervened, bringing huge changes at Sony. Akio Morita suffered a serious stroke, forcing him to resign as chairman a year later. In Morita’s place Ohga became chairman, and other new appointments included Tsunao Hashimoto as vice chairman and Nobuyuki Idei (a regular director up this time) as president and CEO. Many had pegged Masaaki Morita to replace Ohga as president, but instead Masaaki took this opportunity to retire. Currently, the only Morita connection on the Sony board is Kazuaki Morita, who holds the position of auditor. This flourish of boardroom changes, and the reasoning behind the changes, caused a rash of speculation—but unfortunately the true answers remain unknown. From the outside, however, the changes look like healthy ones. Sony avoided having a long-term disabled (or dictatorial) chairman running things his own way, and the appointment of a new president was not put off interminably as it was with Y.K.K., as we’ve seen. Sony’s reputation remained solid and unscathed by what, from today’s perspective, seems to have been only a temporary setback.                         Sony started with twenty people in 1946, and has grown to 8,000 people in twenty years. In keeping up with such a rapid growth, we could not depend on the usual yearly hiring of freshmen. Sony gathered a wide variety of personnel by such methods as personal acquaintance, public announcement, etc. As a result, school history and seniority are never considered by Sony’s management. Only the ability and qualifications of a person are considered basic factors for personnel assignments. However, as the company started to grow, Sony’s management began to face pressure from the traditional Japanese social influences. To maintain its freedom to act, management thereupon decided to delete a man’s school history from his personnel record. It was a bold step to take in Japan. But it resulted in greatly boosting morale, among SONY employees. This decision created a sensation and was highly appreciated by the people who are trying to introduce modern management in Japan.                         On the other hand, Sony management became aware that it was a mistake to disappoint the men and their families by completely abolishing the seniority promotion system. For the seniority concept is a firmly established business and social practice in Japan. Still, to keep active and adjustable to keen international competition, and to the fast-developing electronics technology, Sony must have flexibility in personnel management. A compromise has therefore been developed. Sony gives such titles as assistant manager, manager, and general manager to people on the traditional seniority basis. But the functions and the range of responsibility of a section or department are set according to the capacity of the person who assumes the management of that section or department. To carry this idea out, Sony, being flexible, changes its organization as frequently as necessary.                         Japanese manufacturing corporations have to be globally oriented because they either have to export their products or establish foreign factories, although the domestic market is relatively large. Sony’s policy is that all new products have to be sold worldwide and this policy is followed from the inception of these products. Overseas sales account for more than 70 per cent of Sony’s total consolidated sales. Overall, Sony is more global in outlook than most, but the average firm in the sample was still globally oriented – the export ratio and overseas production ratio of the sample of manufacturing companies were 20 per cent and 16 per cent respectively in 1993.                         Today, Sony uses EVA as a measure of performance and it has found that EVA is related to share price. It estimates EVA for three years – thus it tries to avoid too much emphasis on measures of short-term profit. Matsushita Electric has started to use ROE as one of its corporate goals. However respect for people is a continuing value and employees remain a prime priority. For example Matsushita tried to raise the retirement age to 65 years (strictly speaking, one should refer to this as the ‘extended retirement age’ because employees should retire when they reach 60. Usually they enter into a new employment contract with less generous provisions because the long service obligation no longer applies). These new trends do not signal a convergence with the US system but rather the emergence of a hybrid model, sometimes referred to in Japan as the ‘new gemeinschaft ’ model.                         In the past the Japanese organizational structure tended to be highly centralized but recently a degree of decentralization has occurred. One can see this in the tendency of many companies to establish ‘internal companies’. Hitachi has established ten such companies, each headed by a president. Sony has set up four companies of this type. Hitachi previously had a strong head office that housed marketing and other key functions. The many factory profit canters reported to the head office, but because they were shortsighted and afraid of failure, risky strategic decisions tended to be postponed and this hampered innovation. Sony had a hybrid organizational structure with many product divisions, but these lacked marketing and research functions because many of the key functions were centralized in the head office. Sony then established ten internal ‘companies’, but marketing and research were still conducted at head office. More recently Sony established four internal companies with full-responsibility for these functions. The head office still retains staff teams to study strategic issues.                         The reasons for this change to the organizational structure are as follows. First, rapid strategic decisions have become necessary in the age of mega-competition: competitive advantage depends on seizing new opportunities as they appear. For instance Sony was quick to enter the entertainment and Internet businesses. Second, the construction of core competencies requires the concentration of resources into growth areas. Small product divisions with responsibility for short-term profits are not equipped to take decisive strategic action.                         Sony had 38 directors in 1997 but this number has now been reduced to 10, of whom three are non-executive. At the time of the changes Sony sent letters to the removed directors’ families to reassure them that the change did not constitute a demotion. In the transition the title of 31 directors was changed to ‘corporate executive officer’, which corresponds to ‘vice president’ in American corporations. Corporate executive officers have been further categorized as senior, superior or junior.                         Sony, now provide stock options to higher level managers to encourage them to improve shareholder value. Since the Corporation Act was changed to allow companies to hold treasury stock, managers have been able buy treasury stock or new issues of stock at the option price. The stock option and the bonus paid to managers accounts for more than half of their remuneration, thus to a large extent their salaries reflect the company’s profits. It does not appear that these changes were intended to transform corporate philosophy, however. Top managers are not being required to ‘cut the neck of employees to enrich [their own] pockets’ (Groenewegen, 1997), and companies still seem to be trying to maintain their employment levels as much as possible.                         For presidents who exemplify the innovative and analytical type, innovation is the most important value. Typically, they encourage the collection of large amounts of information about future opportunities, keep a close watch on the business environment, are sensitive to new opportunities and generate alternative ideas based on information, ideas and data collected from both outside and inside the organisation. Decision-making depends on forecasts of the risks involved. The leadership style is typically participative – by listening to the opinions of subordinates the president strives to create a free atmosphere and is generous about failure – the emphasis is on innovation, not success.                         Many companies have very specific corporate creeds, updating them when they become obsolescent. Sony emphasizes creativity in innovation. The creed is a condensation of what it means to share common goals (in quality, in creativity, in youthful appeal and so on). The creed also makes clear the meaning of jobs in the enterprise: as oriented overwhelmingly towards quality, creativity or innovation, or towards the youth market. The creed, as the implicit backdrop to all strategic thinking, also encourages consistency in strategic decision-making.                         Changes in the mode of selection of non-executive directors are hastening ethical disclosure and compliance. Sony has reduced the size of its board from 38 members to 10, three of whom are non-executive directors. This measure is spreading to many other companies; thus the disclosure of company activities will be advanced. Further-more the new code in the Company Act stipulates that at least one member of the statutory auditors must come from outside the company, and this auditor could act as a monitor of corporate ethics. At Shiseido an independent centre for corporate ethics has been established.                         When a Sony project team developed the Walkman, five million of which are sold each year throughout the world, the marketing department opposed the decision to proceed. However the president of Sony overruled them he was clearly closer in tune with customers than were those who were supposed to be. Market analysis                                              The Walkman was made possible by good market analysis, in addition to technological developments. There was a trend for stereo players to become smaller as a result of technological innovations in miniaturization, the sale of these sets was increasing and the tape as a medium of music was becoming more popular than records. The technology of miniaturization combined with the concept of portability led to the Walkman, which took three years to develop after the idea was first put forward. During the course of development the response from sales channels was very cold. It was thought that an expensive small player without a recording capacity would be unable to compete with the small tape recorders that were flooding the market, so the development team was not confident of success. But when the president of Sony inspected the prototype Walkman he declared that the sound was splendid and encouraged the development team to go ahead, thus giving a great stimulus to the team and the project as a whole. So not only was information on market trends important for success but also support from the top played a great part in encouraging continued development.                         Successful companies were able to launch growth products even during the economic downturn in the 1990s. Sony had been producing the hardware for Nintendo’s game machine but Nintendo decided to change its alliance partner from Sony to Philips, where upon Sony resolved to enter into the game machine business in its own right. This was not a sudden leap into the dark because its alliance with Nintendo had enabled it to expand its technical knowledge. It had made a number of innovations to the game machine, including changing the recording medium from tape to CD (Sony had already been successful in the music recording business and so it was familiar with CD technology). It had also changed the contract system so that the risk formerly assumed by the software suppliers had been taken over by Sony. Furthermore it had acquired skills that enabled it to enter the personal computer market, such as miniaturization skills, which resulted in its notebook computers setting the industry standard for thinness. Sony introduced its PlayStation in 1994, and in 1999 its global sales of about billion contributed about billion to Sony’s profits. The successful new product was based on Sony’s core competence in miniaturization.                         Sony has learnt the hard way about the importance of new products following a standard if they are to be successful. Its more sophisticated Beta video technology lost out to the VHS format because the latter was freely available as a standard for other manufacturers to copy while Sony sought to control its proprietary knowledge through exclusive license. The license strategy deterred content providers and restricted the range of contents available as rival ‘me-too’ manufacturers used the freely available VHS standard. Today, Sony considers the global market whenever it introduces new products and it struggles to establish the de facto standard. For instance it has been striving to unify the standard format for DVD (Digital Video Disc) technology with Toshiba in order to increase the market share for them both. If they have different DVD formats the market share for DVD technology will not expand as much as it would have done with a shared standard.                         In addition alliances can be inflexible compared with markets. Technology changes rapidly, and being bound by an alliance can be an obstacle to strategy change. As well as using retailers, Sony now advertises and sells goods directly to consumers through the Internet, which allows it to sell a much wider range of goods at a lower price, as well as reduce its inventory. There are only 2000 Sony shops and these are not totally captive they are large shops that also sell the products of other companies.                         Complementary capabilities and economies of scale can lead to worldwide competitive power. For example Sony provides the hardware for its PlayStation while its software suppliers provide outstanding software. In this way the PlayStation quickly became a highly successful product.                         The shift from multi-domestic production to global production is somewhat similar to Vernon’s (1966) life cycle model. The current trend is towards more specialized subsidiary production, made possible by lower import taxes and the establishment of free enterprise zones. Changes can be seen at Sony in San Diego, where production has shifted from color televisions for the US market to cathode ray tubes for the world market. The Sony plant in Barcelona has become a production centre for color televisions for the EU, and Nissan in Mexico now specializes in the production of small cars for the NAFTA countries. Sony in San Diego (3700 employees) now has more than a hundred development engineers while Sony in Barcelona (1600 employees) has about 40 development engineers to design TVs that fit the different broadcasting systems in Europe. Research and development activities are increasing in subsidiaries.                         Companies with large head offices have sufficient resources to draw on to take innovative action. Sony tripled its sales over a ten-year period by putting resources into electronics components, computer-related products (such as displays) and the expansion of AV products. The concentration of resources into these growth products would not have been possible under a decentralized product division structure. Strong corporate head offices also have the resources to create and sustain project teams in the incubator department of the head office for planning and implementing risky new ventures. A large head office also has more resources for the aggressive expansion of worldwide operations by establishing production centers around the world.                         Effective head office organisation depends on the collection and management of corporate knowledge, data, information and know-how. Crucial questions for central knowledge management include future opportunities and threats to the domain. Such questions are typically not the responsibility of the product divisions; they often focus on more than two divisions, or can propose corporate restructuring in ways that the existing divisions would find difficult to address. Information on how to improve present products, improve quality and increase productivity is collected and used at lower levels. Diffusing it to other departments is a central role of the head offices.                         If a company has decentralized product groups and a weak head office, the company can turn into a collection of separate small units that cannot easily develop an infrastructure of strong core competencies.                         Large manufacturing companies such as Sony and others have established intracompany units. A problem with this system is the overlapping of functions among units. Thus Sony reduced the number of units from ten to four and combined their marketing and research functions. Sony also bought back the shares of its successful subsidiaries, including Sony Music Entertainment and its insurance companies, in order fully to control them. In this way it could move resources to growth areas in accordance with top management strategy. There is a tendency for subsidiaries that are losing money to rely on the parent company, whereas subsidiaries that make a profit try to distance themselves from the parent company and refuse to move their resources to other departments.                         In many companies there are two promotion ladders: the hierarchy of job grades and the hierarchy of status grades. As a result there are many opportunities for promotion, but wages are usually determined by status grade rather than job grade. Employees are promoted up the status ladder in accordance with length of service and merit. This system is quite different from that in the US, where if an employee’s job does not change then his or her grade (and wage) does not change. We can see the system in use by looking at the case of Sony, where there are three ladders. At the lower levels there is only the status ladder, with eight grades; for positions higher than section manager there are three ladders with eight grades. This system applies to all departments. Salary is decided only by status. For promotion to occur there has to be at least one recommendation by a supervisor, a test or an interview. All employees are eligible for promotion up to the ninth grade (assistant to section manager). Until the age of 29 there is no differentiation in speed of promotion but after 30 years of age there is competition for promotion. Employees have to serve a minimum number of years in a grade before they can be considered for promotion. In this way overly rapid promotion is prevented. From the lowest grade up to that of group leader the minimum stay is about two years; after that, three years is the minimum tenure. Above the level of department manager there is no minimum stay period.                         As at Sony, a minimum period has to be spent in each grade before promotion can be considered, for example two years in grade 2, four years in grade 3 and four years in grade 4. Thus length of service is to some extent used to prevent unduly rapid promotion. At the same time slow movers are offered the possibility of catching up. Recently, more than 30 career paths were introduced. These career paths have four status grade groups and as usual salary is determined by status grade. New Post                                            New posts are advertised throughout the company and applications are sent directly to the personnel department, without the need for permission from the section head. Examples of new posts are jobs in foreign countries, other places in Japan or in new businesses (for example Sony set up a new life insurance business). About 2500 of Sony’s employees have moved since the introduction of this system in 1966. At Matsushita about 100 people a year move as a result of the system. The system differs from applications for promotion to a higher grade in the status ladder or a higher post. It is initiated on the demand side and mostly involves horizontal moves. Other companies are adopting a similar system, the advantage of which is that employees can choose their own opportunities; thus, potentially, greater motivation and respect for individuality can be achieved. If a superior does not take good care of his subordinates, it is sometimes the case that they will rapidly transfer out of that section. Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com

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Methodologies are outlooks on research

Chapter 3 Methodology             Methodologies are outlooks on research; they set out an image for what research is and how it should be carried out. Basically, axioms and methods are connected to each other. Methods are tools or techniques of gathering of data, techniques of analysis, and techniques of writing. Since it is a tool, then a scrupulous method can often be used by many different methodologies (both qualitative and quantitative). Therefore, methodologies are at a more abstract (or general) level than are methods. Apparently, www.encyclopedia.com defined ‘methodology’ as a strategy or plan for achieving some goal. In contrast to this, methods are the tactics that can be used to service the goals of the methodology. In essence, methodologies provide the blueprints that prescribe how the tools should be used. Those prescriptions can be traced to the axioms — beliefs about how research should be conducted. According to Saunders, Mark; Lewis, Philip & Thornhill, Adrian (2004), all research will possibly involve categorical or numerical data or data that can be use for analysis to help the researcher answer the research questions.  In connection to this, Saunders, Mark; Lewis, Philip & Thornhill, Adrian (2004; p.327) defined quantitative as a type of empirical knowledge. Actually, qualitative data are described in expressions of quality. Qualitative is the converse of quantitative, which more precisely describes data in terms of quantity (that is, using ‘formal’ numerical measurement).             In connection to this, this chapter will discuss the research design, significance of the study, conceptual framework, participants & the methods course, data sources, historical thinking skills, data collection, data analysis, validation of the data, ethical consideration and summary of the chapter. The Research Design             In order to come up with the most suitable research approaches and strategies for this study, the research process “onion” is undertaken. This is because conducting a research is like peeling the back layers of an onion—in order to come to the central issue of how to collect the necessary data needed to answer the research questions and objectives, important layers should be first peeled away. With the said process, the researcher was able to create an outline on what measures are most appropriate to be applied in the study. Saunders et al (2004) said that while it is not unusual for a researcher to first think of his research undertaking by considering whether one should, for instance, administer a questionnaire or conduct interviews, thoughts on this question should belong to the centre of the research ‘onion’. That is, in order to come to the central issue of how to collect the data needed to answer one’s research questions, there are important layers of the onion that need to be peeled away: the first layer raises the question of the research philosophy to adopt, the second considers the subject of research approach that flows from the research philosophy, the third examines the research strategy most applicable, the fourth layer refers to the time horizon a researcher applies to his research, and the fifth layer is the data collection methods to be used. Credit:ivythesis.typepad.com

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The Sony Corporation Sony was essentially established as a venture business created in cooperation with a number of ...