The importance of information in Elections.
Figure 1: Truman celebrating his re-election.
On the 3rd of November 1948, the headline of the Chicago Daily tribune was:
“Dewey defeated Truman”
However, Truman was re-elected as president due to the fact that he won the majority of the votes.
Therefore, the question remains how could it be possible that one of the most prominent news providers got it wrong?
The pre-electoral polls gave Dewey a large advantage over Truman. The issues with those polls were that there were not representative of the US population in the fall of 1948.
This historical example shows us that having the wrongful information can lead to tragic consequences. It also shows how information systems can help an election process. Unfortunately, for Dewey the technology at the time did not allow for it.
Today, Information technology allows for very précised and detailed segregation of the population. The voting population can be segregated by income, gender, sex, religion, ethnicity, and age. Almost everything, you name it!
A serious campaign manager knows with reasonable assurance the proportion of votes that his candidate will gather within each district. Moreover, it allows them to focus their campaign on certain geographical areas or topics.
In the US presidential elections of the year 2000, there was a minuscule gap between Albert Arnold Gore, and George Walker Bush. In the final days before the elections Florida was one of the biggest battleground states, meaning that polls could not predicts which way the state will vote at the elections. Bush’s electoral campaign decided to put all it’s forces onto winning the Sunshine state. This gamble paid off because Florida overly voted for Bush and was one of the main reasons got his first term in office.
There is a saying that politicians change opinions as the wind blows. Often it happens that politicians change their rhetoric to please their electoral base. However, as Big Data made an entrance into the US presidential elections in 2008 and at a more advanced level in 2012 it became clear that politicians can do much more than that. For a reason Obama employed more than 100 data scientists in the 2012 elections. Through them they were able to build a data set larger than 100TB. They were not only processing and collecting much bigger volumes of data but mostly able to automate personalized communication with potential voters. This data set could be used to e.g. automatically send you a personalized email from your local politicians about topics you previously seemed interested about when a campaign helper visited your home 2 days earlier.
In light of the above-mentioned facts, do you think that politicians will use big Data to program their campaigns with the sole purpose of pleasing the specific voters or whether they have inherent beliefs and values that will remain phrased the same for each voter?
Source: https://datafloq.com/read/big-data-obama-campaign/516
Bridging the Gap between Business Information Management and Accounting
Bridging the gap between IT and Management is why we study Business Information Management. We learn frameworks on how to manage information and IT within the company. With a rising need for a higher understanding of this topic, we are certainly not the only ones studying this in our Masters. However, when talking to an Accounting major it turned out that we had completely different ideas about the subject and the frameworks we were studying. One of the most talked about frameworks when talking about Information management within Accounting is the COSO framework, which I will explain below.
The COSO Framework
The Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of Treadway Commission (hereafter, COSO) was an initiative started in the mid 1970 in the United States. Its goal was to provide a framework for firms to help them deal with internal control issues.
Nevertheless, COSO remained unknown until the emergence of accounting scandals such as: Enron, Worldcom, Ahold, only to name a few.
These scandals all incurred in the beginning of the new millennium, and one of their common denominators was the lack of internal control within an organization. This meant that a lot of override was possible within the firm and money could be funneled out of an organization, which ultimately did not help achieve the goals of the enterprises.
After the accounting scandals a lot of effort was put into upgrading and improving COSO. This framework is composed of five essential building blocks:
- Control environment: It is the foundation of the COSO framework; it is the tone that the organization adopts. In other words it is the integrity, the ethical values, and the managers operating style. Without the control environment all other characteristics would be useless, because if a manager does not abide, promote nor enforce control activities, you can be certain that the lower level employees will not abide to it either.
- Risk assessment: It is essential that a firm is aware of the risks that it is faced with. Therefore, there is the need for it to assess its risk level. That will enable it to distinguish between the acceptable and the unacceptable risks.
- Control activities: The activities that ensure that management orders are carried out at the lower hierarchical levels. These are the activities that prevent fraud within an organization. The most common example is the segregation of duties.
- Information and communication: The importance of information system within the organization to provide reliable and relevant information to the right people.
- Monitoring: Although all the processes help avoid error or fraud, there is still the need for general monitoring of all these processes.
Looking at the exponential development in information system, will this have a marginal benefit towards the goals of COSO and will help avoid fraud within companies?
Committee of Sponsoring Organizations of the Treadway Commission. (2015). Retrieved September 23, 2015
Technology of the Week- NFC vs. BLE
One of the most important trends within B2C e-commerce is its offspring mobile commerce, also known as m-commerce. Only in the U.S. this market has grown with 19% during the last four years.
Within both B2C e-commerce and mobile commerce Near Field Communications (NFC) and Bluetooth low Energy technology (BLE) are trending technologies. Whereas NFC technologies are already in a more mature state, the BLE technology is still in its infancy.
What are NFC and BLE?
Both of them are wireless communication technologies currently installed in a lot of smartphones.
NFC
NFC smartphones communicate with wireless transmitters in very close proximity. They are usually a one on one experience, meaning that one transmitter (the NFC tag) communicates with one phone at a time. The transmitter can be a NFC tag positioned somewhere in a store or other place. Upon tapping your phone onto the tag, the tag recognizes you phone and interacts with it. Possible applications are as follows:
- Smart device automation and NFC tags:
- Transportation passes
- Event ticketing
- Access cards
- Smart homes
- Data sharing (retail marketing)
NFC is also being used as a technology for cardless payment but seems to be slowly replaced by the BLE technology. One of its greatest weakness is the increased power usage of smartphones.
BLE
BLE smartphones communicate via Low Energy Bluetooth in distances up to 100m. It is a one to many experiences, where the phone detects the beacon and triggers an app that then communicates with the user. The Beacon is the size of a matchbox and can also be placed in any position. Contrary to the NFC tag the two devices interacting do not have to touch, thus allowing the user to leave the smartphone in their bag and out of reach while still interacting. Following markets serve as an opportunity:
- Retail, B2C marketing:
- Indoor positioning system
- Contactless payment
- Advertising
- Smart homes
- Industrial applications
The greatest threat of the BLE technology in retail is the threat of “overbeaconing“ the customer. Research has found that 45% of users being beaconed once were interacting with the app. In the contrary, companies that beaconed their users twice during an experience (e.g. one shopping trip) saw a 313% drop in app usage.
An outlook into the future
Looking at Gartner’s Hype Cycle, it can be said that the NFC technology is expected to soon reach the plateau of productivity in Gartner’s hype cycle. This will mean within 1 to 4 years the technology will be widely implemented and well known amongst its users (Gartner, 2014). The Beacon technology as a sub-part of the Internet of Things is depicted at the peak of inflated expectations (Gartner). However we believe the technology is still exploring its possibilities and hence is still very much in its infancy (TechCrunch, 2015). Hence beacon technology is yet to reach the through of disillusionment before approaching the plateau of productivity. At this moment early adopters are implementing the Beacon technology. In the near future the focus will shift from the possibilities of the technology to the failures and flaws the technology possesses.
All in all we believe that both applications will establish a market and serve as a great opportunity to make e-commerce more efficient.
Team 14:
Jepma 367048bj, Lei 365616ml, Müller 371369dm, Penot 371082fp, van Rijn 355921ir
LeHong, Hung, and Alfonso Velosa. ‘Hype Cycle For The Internet Of Things, 2014’. Gartner.com. N.p., 2014. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.
Loiwal, Navneet. ‘The Potential Of Beacon Technology’. TechCrunch. N.p., 2015. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.
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