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The issue of globalization and cultural diversity is raised in this article which deals with the realm of business. Steel Maker ArcelorMittal is planning to outsource certain IT infrastructure to India and smaller European countries such as Poland in order to be able to save money and reduce costs. The stakeholders in this situation are the CEO's of ArcelorMittal, the local IT companies in India and the small European countries being outsourced to, as well as the governments of India and the small European countries, the current IT workers of ArcelorMittal, the IT workers in India and the small European Countries, and the people who buy steel from ArcelorMittal. The IT systems involved in this scenario are PCs, servers, data centers, and networks. IT workers in India and small European countries such as Poland will be working with ensuring privacy on these systems as well as taking care of their maintenance. A positive issue that results from the outsourcing of ArcelorMittal is that the company will be able to save money by paying its workers less. This would lead to a decrease in steel prices as well, which would be beneficial for the consumer. Also, outsourcing gives good job opportunities to people in the countries being outsourced to. However, through outsourcing many current IT workers of the company will most likely loose their jobs. Indian workers are also being exploited due to the fact that they are being payed less than a worker in a more developed nation would be payed. Lastly, local IT companies need to compete for workers.

The emergence of Business process outsourcing has transfigured the ways in which companies in developed nations, expand their services globally to businesses in developing nations. Although the cost for labor to support the extension of company engagement in third world countries is acknowledged as being relatively low (a beneficial advantage to most established business corporations), it has come to the attention of the participants (Businesses of developed countries) that it is of major importance to fully recognize the boundaries of business practices, culture, and level of intellectuality and experience within the hired portion of developing nation populace. Companies of information technology services, such as Dell, have come to form heightened concern about such global barriers, having attempted to transition call center labor in India and then deciding upon the withdrawal of such communication employment (due to the lack of consideration of business and cultural differences that impact business results). Based upon the data provided by NASSCOM (Indian software and services trade association), the conclusions drawn positively indicate that Business offshore processing has an overwhelming potential to grow in the next couple of years; although there is much room needed for consistent business growth (developing businesses, such as BPO in India, must rise at least 30 percent), the progression lies mainly upon the driving increase of skillful and educated information technology workers within India. The stakeholders, Information technology businesses in developed nations, surely stand by their statement supporting the increased use of qualified employers in the business environment of developing nations' companies (considered to also be additional stakeholders), for this will lower the cost involved in the off shoring process. The main social and ethical considerations lie upon reliability of developing nations'

My entire post was not posted on diigo, so here is the continuation: business functions, as developed countries' companies increasingly form reliance and trust upon the promise of the elevating skilled labor class, for it is a major component that supports the foundation of software and hardware services and networks on a globally connected basis. The reliability built within the business partnerships and bonds established in two differing cultural environments, is founded upon the agreement of mutual advancement and progress in regards to the establishment of skill by developing nations' employees. Although, the system of globalization and cultural diversity surface the obstacle of continuous intellectual and business development for developing nations, it is the gesture of surpassing cultural and business ideology that will truly trial both stakeholders involved.

The Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS) is providing countries, such as South Africa, with an online patient medical record system.

This article is about the need for OpenMRS in developing countries such as South Africa. This is necessary because it will help improve how people are treated. By knowing about someone's medical history, it can help decrease the spread of diseases such as HIV and Aids.

The issue is that there is a lack of open medical record systems in developing countries. Because of this diseases are being spread when they can easily be prevented. The thing that people were doing that gave rise to this issue is that in some countries, diseases were being spread at a faster rate then in others because of lack of background medical information. the impact that this has on people is that people in developing countries are spreading diseases at a faster rate. So diseases such as HIV and Aids are spreading in developing countries such as South Africa because of lack of medical background. The stakeholders are patients. The IT system is open medical record system. The area of impact is health. The social and ethical issue is equality of access. By having a medical record of everyone, people will be able to be treated equally because the doctor's will have their whole medical history.

This article is about HSBC's pplans to keep outsorucing clerical jobs in diferent countries. This has many owrkers upset because they feel this is eliminating their jobs and putting caps on their wages. THe social and ethical issues involved are Equality of Access and Policies and Standards. There are impacts on the Bank as well. There is the economic impact, they are saving alot of money for setting up call centers they save about $20,000 - $30,000 per job it moved into the call center. There is a psycological impact the bank has to deal with and that is of their unhappy workeres in their base country. Finally there is a global impact, with more call centers the bank may be able to gain new customers in those countries. THe relevant stakeholders besides the banks are, the workers of HSBC bank, customers of the bank, politicians and media, other countries where centers are set up. This includes, India, China, Malaysia, Phillipines, Sri Lanka and Vietnam. The primary IT System are the call centers. This involves the use of WANs and LANs. There are also vairous ways in which call centers can be set up. They can use cloud computing or even be created virtually through the development of software as a service. The employee would only have to susbscirbe to a software that would allow them to work in the center, this makes it easier to receive updates as well.

A very slow recovery is seen in the field of IT after the economic melt down however the bad economy is half the problem since another factor which has been growing since a very long time. It is offshoring of IT jobs from developed countries such as US and in Europe to countries such as China and India. It is also predicted that the IT jobs shall go down by 50% in the next four years in Europe and US.Also in this article the solely blames outsourcing for lack of jobs in developed countries and does not talk about how leads to growth in economies of developing nations which increases the consumption of goods manufactured in the developed countries and also leads to creation of new jobs. Hence this article has only one opinion. It does not talk about the growing opportunities for IT workers in countries besides the US and so on. It should focus on how offshoring had led to the ceasing of digital divides since individuals in developing nations now have economic power to consume similar products as Americans or Europeans and also the growing economies give the government chances to improve the infrastructure. Hence in the end it benefits all.

This article is about how companies use outsourcing and offshoring as a way to reduce costs and as a method for cheap labor. One of the articles' main points about outsourcing is that the decision to outsource is often in the interest of the company to reduce costs, divert or energy-saving measures aimed at making the skills of a particular company or for the more efficient use of labor, capital, technologies and resources. One problem that arises from outsourcing is that it takes much-needed jobs from the U.S. economy. It is not too different from offshoring, because both are beneficial for companies and used to cut costs. When a company chooses to offshore, it means that it does its business in another country. This 'other' country is usually a developing country because rates tend to be much cheaper there, which is exactly how businesses save money. One of the main issues, again, lies within the U.S. economy. Since US businesses are leaving to do business in other countries, the US economy is suffering quite a blow because less companies are becoming dependent on it. This is a big problem and could lead to an even bigger one for the business because third world countries cannot always be trusted. Even though they are saving so much more money by offshoring, the business they now perform is unreliable and could possibly be affected my many more problems. The main stakeholders in this issue are the businesses who are offshoring and outsourcing, the US government, and the countries the businesses now rely on. Also, depending on the company, people in America tend to suffer as well because since the main issue that arises is reliability, the users or owners of the product may not have the same service. For example, if Time Warner decides to station in India, the workers there may be inexperienced and the company will not be able to do anything about it. This means that when the users of Time Warner call their main number, someone in India will pick up. The probl

Through mobile technology, the millions of people in developing countries who had been left behind by the digital divide are now able to access health information and healthcare services at their fingertips. Mobile phones are being used as low-cost tools for HIV testing, data collection, epidemic tracking, and training of health workers, HIV prevention and treatment support.

Through mobile technology, the millions of people in developing countries who had been left behind by the digital divide are now able to access health information and healthcare services at their fingertips. Mobile phones are being used as low-cost tools for HIV testing, data collection, epidemic tracking, and training of health workers, HIV prevention and treatment support.

"beginning of the academic year warning them of social networking issues. Source: Individual schools * Share * Yahoo! Buzz * Add to Mixx * Facebook * Twitter * More o Fark o Digg o Reddit o MySpace o StumbleUpon o Propeller o LinkedIn * Subscribe * myYahoo * iGoogle * More o Netvibes o myAOL * By Kyle Oppenhuizen, USA TODAY More college athletic departments are developing or publicizing online social networking policies for student athletes, experts say. USA TODAY researched social networking policies for 27 schools in six major conferences, including the University of Iowa, which will implement a new monitoring policy Friday. Last fall, pictures emerged on Facebook of two 19-year old Hawkeye football players holding cash and liquor bottles. Five of these schools already have specific monitoring policies in effect - Auburn, Iowa State, Ohio State, Miami and North Carolina. Others warn athletes of the potential dangers of sites such as Facebook and MySpace through student-athlete handbook policies, meetings, coach's discussions and even letters. Some schools don't have a specific policy but allow coaches to monitor at their discretion, or take action if inappropriate material online is reported. Iowa's policy puts senior leaders in charge of monitoring profiles of athletes' on their team and bring problems to administrators, who then work with the athlete, associate athletic director Fred Mims said. Administrators will not get involved, Mims said, unless issues are brought to their attention, in which case they will talk to the athlete about addressing the issue and check out the profile, public or private. Ohio State, on the other hand, requires athletes to have a public profile or add coaches and administrators as friends (which gives access to the private profile). Fred Stutzman, a Ph.D. cand

"Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), have turned a smart phone into an imaging device that can identify and track diseases."

Please use this bookmark to post your reflections. Using a Paper 2 style approach, CRITERION A) identify the IT system and describe the issues. Identify the relationship of the major stakeholders to the issues. CRITERION B) Describe step-by-step how the system works and describe how the system is related to the issue(s). CRITERION C) Evaluate the impacts on society -- both positive and negative or from differing stakeholder's P.O.V. CRITERION D) Evaluate the efficacy of a solution to the problem.

There is another issue along with this involving the ability of researchers to have full access to the information about anyone. Many people want to maintain their right to privacy, but others argue that this could lead to new knowledge about diseases, and the development of new medicines. For those who are afraid of risking their privacy, there are standards developed in order to protect them. Their information, such as SSNs are encoded for security reasons and the DNA part of the project is voluntary, and not imposed. However, ethicists are still afraid of this database. They claim that the future of DNA is a valuable thing because it can predict the probability of diseases, life expectancies, etc. But all copies can be made available to the FBI, schools, etc. at the time of birth. For the Biotech Industry, this is seen as a huge advantage because people an be tested for hundreds of diseases. The awareness of the disease is a great thing, because it could lead to early prevention. However, the system is faulty because it sometimes doesn't provide certainty of a disease and it limits a person's privacy. Other times, there is no cure for the disease, so the patient cannot do anything even if they know. In relation to this, there also will arise severe psychological impacts of a person knowing that they have the possibility for getting a life threatening disease. If this is a disease that will affect them later on in life, it would be detrimental for a person to live their life without the hope of a prosperous future. A solution to this problem could be giving patients the choice of knowing or not.

Criterion A - The IT system is the DNA database containing information about the genetic past, present, and future of the patients. The primary issues associated with this database are of privacy and anonymity. These issues arise when patients, who are one of the major stakeholders, feel that that the information in these databases shouldn't be accessible to others, or anyone for that matter. While some believe this is private information, others believe that the information should not be known by anyone because of the ethical issues associated with knowing what will come in the future. Criterion B - The medical database is a relational database meaning that it establishes relationships between different tables in the database. The smallest building blocks of a relational database are items. Items are individual pieces of information in tables. These items are organized into fields and records. Fields are columns in a table that that represent different categories of information. Records are rows that represent all the information for a specific patient. At the cross-section of a particular record and field lies the item associated with a specific piece of information related to the specified patient. These tables are related to each other through links which are established by unique primary keys assigned to each patient. This system is related to the issue of privacy because the information contained within it is considered by many to be privileged and access to it should be very limited or altogether eliminated. Criterion C - The impacts of such a database on society are varied. Some people are very against the entire idea of a genetic database because of its ethical concerns. When people have their blood analyzed for DNA, they are giving up their genetic make-up. The information that can be obtained from such tests is considered by many to be privileged, and by others to be completely unethical in every way. Often people are against very private medical

Intel is a company that develops processing technologies such as chips that are put into computer hardware. However recently they have decided to outsource certain necessary business operation to India instead of in the US. Additionally Intel has agreed with an investment banker named Morgan Chase, to invest about 1 billion of the company's money into this plan. Intel already has many of it's workers in India however wants to expand the business by increasing its workers within the company. Workers will be needed to help expand the company a long with workers both qualified and graduates due to the increased opportunities and positions. The reasoning as to why Intel continues to offshore work to India is because they are able to find high quality workers and can get work done at cheaper/lower costs. The organization affected mainly is Intel who is able to make a profit through investing in the workforce in India. Additionally the people who are in India that are given the jobs are able to benefit because more jobs are becoming available. The negative side to this is that, they are not paid as much as Intel workers in the US. Additionally another stakeholder is the U.S government itself that frowns upon the idea of offshoring jobs due to the knowledge that by doing this, job oppertunities available to Americans will decrease. The social and ethical issues and impacts of these are related to globalization and its impacts on both the country (India) and the United States. Although workers are given jobs the pay that they receive is not as much as a worker in the U.S would. This is done for the economic benefit of the country Intel itself, allowing them to create a greater profit by off shoring jobs to India. However those who are highly qualified and trained are able to find a job at Intel that matches their level of training. Thus they become employed if they need money. A positive impact to globalization is getting rid of the digital divide in a sense because fr

This article has to do with both offshoring and outsourcing. I thought this was an interesting article to read after reading the article we read in class because it gave a variety of examples of offshoring and outsourcing. This article gave a variety of point of views on the debates around both offshoring and outsourcing. First the article introduces a few examples of outsourcing such as computer processing and back-office business tasks. The author introduces ethical impacts the outsourcing creates because it uses technology and humans that are cheaper rather than using humans that are experts at a field. They also state that the current BPO offshoring profits in Indian have the potential to grow, but we are not allowing it to. People in a variety of countries are being payed less because of the differences in currency because of outsourcing. The author mentions Mr. Bourgeois, and his claim that "Mr. Bourgeois says, makes about $50 an hour, while in India a developer is paid perhaps $10 an hour. If the wages of the American developer are growing at 3 percent a year, and the Indian 15 percent a year the cost advantage will last a long time, he noted." The author mentions that there are a variety of parts of the debate on offshoring and outsourcing. The stockholders for these situations are the business people making money, the people working in foreign countries for less money, and people working the same job for more money. This is a great article to read after the one we read in class because the author provides the reader with a variety of point of views, and how the debate on offshoring and outsourcing can change if we can add other point of views.

In looking at this article and the other articles that I have post The main It IT system is a database to store the medical records of the patients of doctors. In theory this would be great for everyone. There will be less paper waste, and it would be easier to pull up patient information at the doctor's office. Its true potential can be achieved if each doctor's database can be connected to created to create a network so any doctor can access the patients information nationally or internationally. The primary issue however, is that the doctors have no standard. Some doctors are not willing to make a transfer because there are to many implications to actually becoming all digital. So that is the issue, since there are no standard the doctors are not willing to adapt. Now this issue can affect a number of stakeholder's. The doctors can see the benefits and draw backs of this standard issue. The doctor's who adopt EHR, actually save a lot of money in the long run, and are on better terms with insurance companies, in the cases where doctors don't use EHR and if a standard is developed they will suffer for it. They will not be able to process patient information quickly, and be on bad terms with insurance companies, and the U.S government(since the government wants to only have EHR or EMR). If a standard is not developed its the patient that will suffer the most. In this world that that we live in International travel is a common place, many people can get injured abroad a EMR can give life saving information to the doctors from the foreign country. This article displays the particular benefits of EMR, the article above me is the reasons doctors do not want to adopt to EMR, and the article before mine displays the governments interest to change all the paper records to EMR.

"The underlying problem," he says, "is how you can increase their wealth and reduce their poverty and reduce their illiteracy, and improve their health care.' "And what I'm postulating is that this is the technology that will enable them. If I didn't have it, it would be an uphill battle. Even with the technology it's an uphill battle. But I have a tool. There is hope. I can reach them in ways that have not been possible before."

(NOT FINISHED) After the devastation of Haiti's earthquake, impoverishment plagued the millions of patients, in dire need for medical assistance and resources. The "low tech" equipment failed to meet the needs of the population, so tele medicine is being adapted.

Medical facilities in Haiti are in essence trying to integrate satellite connection and internet service (along with increased bandwidth) in order to greatly expand the distribution and administering of medical services. Donated by the other organizations in Miami, the Haitian hospitals are now given the opportunity to form intercommunication via a wireless regional network system (internet service provided by neighboring countries, such as the Dominican Republic). One of the primary stakeholders, the patient and injured Haitian individuals required to maintain necessary medical help from the American doctors and medical professionals (other primary stakeholder). Such IT systems, enable the patients suffering from the devastating results of the earthquake to retrieve an increased amount of help and attention from doctors and other medical health professionals in other parts of the world, specifically recruiting medical help centralized in the United States. The adapted procedures of tele health already in American hospitals, including the use of internet messaging, x rays, scans, and medical reports all enable doctors to obtain confrontation and collaboration with Haitian patients on accurate and more reliable grounds. The scenario included in the article is Health, and the main theme is"medical information administration and marketing sales" for this pertains to telemedicine as a branched off aspect. In regards to the social and ethical considerations, the issue of the digital divide and equality of access is greatly highlighted in the article; telemedicine linked medical services found in another nation, to the needy Haitian population thus diminishing global boundaries placed up by the differences in development and advancement in certain regions of the globe. The digital divide that took control over Haitian lives( due to the catastrophic events of the earthquake) eliminated sources of internet connection, hardware and available software equipment to run teleme

In Diigo, you can always go back in and edit your own postings. It's only in the moodle that there is a time bomb that causes you to comment on your own reflections if you go back later to expand upon your initial thoughts.