UNIT IITECHNOLOGY AND BUSINESS RESEARCH

Dr. Thulasi Krishna. K

Dept. of Management Studies, MITS, Madanapalle. A.P.

INFORMATION NEEDS OF BUSINESS

• To run a business, useful, timely, accurate, reliable, and valid data are needed.

• When data in their raw form are evaluated, analyzed, and synthesized, useful

information becomes available to managers that helps them make good

business decisions.

• Typical information relating to accounting, administration, budget, finance, sales,

marketing, human resources accounting, employee surveys, and the like is very much

essential.

• Internal and external sources of information often overlap, as and when external

research on customer preferences, financial markets, and economic indicators

determines internal decisions regarding product lines, marketing strategies, and

distribution systems.

TECHNOLOGIES USED IN BUSINESS RESEARCH

• Internet

The internet began in 1969 as an experimental hook-up between computers at

Stanford University, The University of California at Santabarbara and the University of

Utah (USA) in conjunction (combination) with the Department of Defence, America.

• The defence department was involved because it wanted to develop the

communications network that would avoid being destroyed under severe battle

conditions.

• The internet gradually groom into a Nation-wide network of connected computers.

Now, it is a world-wide network often referred to as Information super high-way.

• The internet is helpful to get information about any industry easily.

• Information can also be obtained from un-published materials on any topic of

interest.

• One can easily download secondary data and print them as well.

• One can also conduct computer-interactive surveys very efficiently with large global

audiences, where the computer will sequence and personalize the questions as we

would desire (skip questions and ask appropriate follow-up information).

• This will require that the respondent at the other end has access to a computer and

is willing to respond.

• Business research can proceed using the Internet and search engines, even where

sources of information on a particular topic are not readily known.

Electronic Mail

• Electronic mail, most commonly referred to as email or e-mail since 1993.

• Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same

time, in common with instant messaging.

• Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model.

• Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages.

• Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need

connect only briefly, typically to a mail server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages.

• An E-mail address consists of two parts, separated by ‘@’ symbol. ‘.Com’ indicates that it is a

commercial site.

• Educational sites end in ‘edu’ or ‘ac.in’, Government sites end in ‘gov’ and other types of

organizations end in ‘.org’.

• E-mail is inexpensive, almost instantaneous, and has the added advantage of guaranteed delivery

subject only to the correctness of the e-mail address.

• E-mail is a simple and effective way of requesting and obtaining data on a variety of topics from

both within and outside the organization. Short surveys could also be conducted via e-mail.

World-wide Web

• The World Wide Web (www, W3) is an information system ofinterlinked hypertext documents that are accessed via the Internet.

• Tim Berners-Lee (a British Computer Scientist) invented the World Wide Web in1989.

• At that time, Tim was a software engineer at CERN, the Large Particle PhysicsLaboratory near Geneva, Switzerland.

• The ‘WWW’ refers that portion of the internet made up of servers that supports a

retrieval system that organizes information in to documents called web pages.

• WWW documents which may include graphic images, video clips and sound clips are

formatted in special programming languages such as Hyper Text Mark-up Language

(HTML) and Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) that allow for displaying to linking

and sharing of information on the internet.