Business model
Porter's Competitive Forces Model Porter's Value Chain Model
Threat of new entrants
Supplier power
Buyer power
Threat of substitute products/services
Rivalry (competing other organizations)
Porter's strategies for competitive advantage
Cost leader: I can sell at a lower cost than
you can
Differentiation: I am better because I am
different
Innovation: I’m doing something new, and you can't catch up
Operational effectiveness: I can do the same thing more efficiently than you can
Customer oriented: I treat my customers better than you do
E-commerce: process of buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products/services or information
via computer networks (including the internet)
Types of E-commerce:
o Business-to-consumer (B2C)
o Business-to-business (B2B)
o Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) - ebay, marktplaats
o Business-to-Employee (b2E) - intranets, travel tickets, benefits
o Government-to-citizen (G2C) - deliver infromation and public services to citizens
o Government-to-business (G2B)
E-business: broader: servicing customers, collaborating with business partners, performing
electronic transactions within organization
Barcodes: traditional barcodes for article identification. Longer barcode captures more information
Two-dimensional matrix codes: QR codes: can capture even more information
RFID: chips that pass by antennas. Can be active or passive.
Sensor: a device, module, or subsystem whose purpose is to detect events/changes in its
environment and send the information to other electronics
Continuous vs discrete – temperature vs shock
Active vs passive – need or don't need a power signal
Offline vs connected – increasingly wireless
Smart vs dumb – including or excluding local data storage/processing
Artificial intelligence: behaviour by a machine that, if performed by a human being, would be
considered intelligent. Such as:
Ability to learn, ability to process natural language (speak, hear, read, write) & ability to
process vision (see, recognize)
o Maps & Navigation: location, route (optimize – indicate road barriers, traffic)
o Facial detection & recognition: unlock your phone
, o Text editors: correcting words
o Search & recommendations: searching for something, suggestions that make sense
o Chatbots & digital assistants: automatic interaction, talk to your tv
o Social media: monitor content, suggest connections, target advertising
Turing test: human questioner
asks series of questions to both
respondents. After specified
time, the questioner tries to
decide which terminal is
operated by the human
respondent vs computer
Data
Master data: core business data
Typically managed centrally
Typically shared/single version of truth
Data that is informative (adds meaning to transactional data)
Transactional data: about events, data about the here-and-now
Typically not shared with business partners, often distributed across organisation
Often comes from automated systems / log data
Needs master data for meaning
The relational model – key concepts
Tables: rows (entity -), columns (attribute |), domain (type of data that’s allowed in column)
Relationships:
o Primary key (PK): attribute(s) in a table which uniquely identifies each
row/tuple/entity in the table. Primary keys must contain unique values
o Foreign key (FK): attribute(s) in a table that points to an attribute(s) in another table
(which is often primary key) there by creating a link or relationships between the
two tables
Every database should have a PK and 0+ more FKs
Eliminate redundancy – normalisation: process of structuring a relational database in
accordance with a series of so-called normal forms in order to reduce data redundancy and
improve data integrity.
o 1st Normal form: all attributes are single valued
All rows same number of attributes & are atomic (non-decomposable)
o 2 Normal form: if it’s in the 1st normal form & all non-PK attributes are dependent
nd
on all the PK attributes
o 3rd Normal form: if it’s in the 2nd normal form & an attribute that is not part of PK is
not a fact about another non-PK attribute
Functional dependency: Entity-Relationship (E-R) diagram
o One-to-one: 1-1
o One-to-many: 1-m
o Many-to-many: m-m