Rahul Bhaskar

A Customer Relationship Management System to Target Customers at Cisco

This case describes the implementation of an Internet empowered Customer Relationship Management (CRM) at Cisco Systems Inc. After describing the organizational background of Cisco, the case takes the student into the issues that the executives faced after the market crash in 2001. John Chambers, Cisco CEO, and his team decided to strengthen Cisco’s relationship with the customers so that the company could emerge stronger when the markets recovered. Questions are raised as to the implementation of technology and supporting processes in a company that traditionally had not considered CRM as its core marketing strategy.

A conceptual framework for quality healthcare accessibility: a scalable approach for big data technologies

Healthcare accessibility research has been of growing interest for scholars and practitioners. This manuscript classifies prior studies on the Floating Catchment Area methodologies, a prevalent class of methodologies that measure healthcare accessibility, and presents a framework that conceptualizes accessibility computation. We build the Floating Catchment Method General Framework as an IT artifact, following best practices in Design Science Research. We evaluate the utility of our framework by creating an instantiation, as an algorithm, and test it with large healthcare data sets from California. We showcase the practical application of the artifact and address the pressing issue of access to quality healthcare. This example also serves as a prototype for Big Data Analytics, as it presents opportunities to scale the analysis vertically and horizontally. In order for researchers to perform high impact studies and make the world a better place, an overarching framework utilizing Big Data Analytics should be seriously considered.

Pioneering the Health Care Quality Improvement in India Using Six Sigma: A Case Study of a Northern India Hospital

In India, the notion of Health Care Quality has become a relevant topic. Even though Quality Management processes such as Six Sigma have been proven in the health care industry in the United States, there is little record of Six Sigma implementation in India. Despite the lack of proven success in the country, Simplified Health Care, a prominent health care provider in North India, launched successful Six Sigma implementation, which was supplemented with other IT initiatives including Electronic Health Care Records. Simplified Health Care success is a testament for Six Sigma, despite challenges ahead.

Health Care Reform Requires Rethinking on the IT Strategy

True Health Care Organization THC was a national leading health care organization. Its CEO and the management team were concerned with the implications of multiple laws, aimed at improving health care in the United States, passed that impacted the health care insurance industry including the THC Company. The CEO and the management felt that the company faced many challenges as it looked for solutions to the requirements of the new laws. Their industry was going through an unprecedented change due to the new laws and a general consensus that health care should be improved. They had concluded that the solution to the new challenges faced by their company laid in implementing the new Information Technology systems. The CEO and management were acutely aware that it was not easy to implement these changes by implementing Information Technology systems. The challenges that they were concerned about included skillsets of their work force, the disjointed nature of their current information technology infrastructure and the urgency of implementing all the changes within a short period.

A Case Study of the Emergence of Data Analytics in Health Care

In the era of health care reforms, the executives and CEO of the SBC Company are faced with many questions. They wonder about the impact of these changes on their market share. They also wanted to determine the impact on prices they can charge for their services. The changes in the ways the health care will be bought were causing a rapid transformation in the behavior of the consumers. The executives determined that they need to focus on specific areas to keep abreast of all the changes. These will have a profound impact on the information technology implementation across the company. For example, the need for analyzing a large amount of data and data in real time was becoming acute among many departments; there was a need for different skillsets in the employees in almost all the departments across the company. These changes across the industry were presenting new and unique challenges to the executive team.

Data Analysis for Dynamic Pricing in Airline: The Role of Tactical Pricing

The competitors in the airline industry often rely on pricing strategy to capture more sales as a main mean of competition. Thus, dynamic pricing is often utilized to maximize profit while allowing better pricing against competition at the same time. In order for dynamic pricing to be effective, airline company has to take in consideration both internal and external information. Tactical pricing is an important component for airline, for it provides both short term and long term strategies to ticket pricing. The case is an exemplification of how tactical pricing plays an important role in the decision making process of an airline company.

Enabling Quality Assurance Analytics through the Use of Information Systems: The Case of a Juice Manufacturing Company

The juice manufacturing industry is a nascent industry. The increased pace of life and focus on a healthy life style has given rise to the industry. Orange Juice Company OCJ, based in California, is one of the leading juice co-packers in the nation. However, despite their excellence in manufacturing, their technology adoption is behind that of their competition, especially in quality assurance. Because quality assurance plays an essential part in their businesses, they want to improve the processes by digitization and enable quality assurance analytics. They hope that by investing in quality assurance, they would be able to gain competitive advantage in juice manufacturing.

Using Pattern Recognition in Decoding Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points HACCP for Quality Assurance: The Case for a Start-up Company

Jack Grealish is an aspiring entrepreneur. During his undergraduate in UCLA, he worked in his fathers business, which focused on selling specialized foods. He became fascinated with the food industry and find out more what it entails. His investigation has unveiled the landscape of the food industry. Furthermore, he discovered that the hazard analysis and critical control points HACCP system implemented in the food industry was rather disjointed and could benefit from automation. He conducted a preliminary research about current HACCP development and determine to plunge ahead. Jack ponders about the possibility of integrating different pattern recognition methodologies in HACCP processes to improve the effectiveness of overall quality control at his company.

Chapter e82 – Homeland Security

The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, permanently changed the way the United States and the worlds other most developed countries perceived the threat from terrorism. Massive amounts of resources were mobilized in a very short time to counter the perceived and actual threats from terrorists and terrorist organizations. In the United States, this refocus was pushed as a necessity for what was called homeland security. The homeland security threats were anticipated for the IT infrastructure as well. It was expected that not only the IT at the federal level was vulnerable to disruptions due to terrorism-related attacks but, due to the ubiquity of the availability of IT, any organization was vulnerable. Soon after the terrorist attacks, the US Congress passed various new laws and enhanced some existing ones that introduced sweeping changes to homeland security provisions and to the existing security organizations. The executive branch of the government also issued a series of Homeland Security Presidential Directives to maintain domestic security. These laws and directives are comprehensive and contain detailed provisions to make the United States secure from its vulnerabilities. Later in the chapter, we describe some principle provisions of these homeland security-related laws and presidential directives. Next, we discuss the organizational changes that were initiated to support homeland security in the United States. Then we highlight the 9-11 Commission that Congress charted to provide a full account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks and to develop recommendations for corrective measures that could be taken to prevent future acts of terrorism. We also detail the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 and the Implementing the 9-11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007. Finally, we summarize the chapters discussion.

Chapter e27 – Information Technology Security Management

Information technology (IT) security management can be defined as a process that enables organizational structure and technology to protect an organizations IT operations and assets against internal and external threats, intentional or otherwise. The principal purpose of IT security management is to ensure confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IT systems. Fundamentally, security management is a part of the risk management process and business continuity strategy in an organization.