Posts Tagged ‘customer relationship management’

Business Management and Administration Degree

May 27th, 2011

In simple words, management can be defined as the function of utilizing and managing all the available resources in the organization, such as human resources, material resources and financial resources so that the goals of the organization can be achieved. A degree in business administration and management will prepare you to perform this function of management in an appropriate manner. Here is a list of subjects that will be taught to you at a business school, followed by a list of management skills that you will acquire by the time you complete your degree.

MBA Subjects

General Management
Human Resources Management
Financial Management
Marketing
Business Strategy
Economics
Accounting
Business Ethics
Information Management and Technology
Business Laws
Company Structure and Organizational Management
Entrepreneurship
Logistics
Economic and Financial Affairs
E-Commerce & Technology

Management Skills

Planning
Organizing
Leadership
Decision Making
Communication (Spoken and Written)
Problem Solving
Staffing
Controlling
Customer Relationship Management Skills
Negotiation Skills
Team Building

Today, business administration and management education has evolved a lot, owing to changes that have taken place in the corporate world, due to globalization and technological advancements. There have been new subjects introduced such as e-commerce, international finance, information technology, etc. and the emphasis is shifting more on practical experience and learning by way of guest lectures by industry professionals, case studies, internships, presentations and group assignments. You may read more on benefits of an MBA degree.

Careers in Business Management and Administration

A person who has an MBA degree, years of experience in the corporate world and the desired management skills, has the potential to reach the highest position in an organization i.e. become a CEO. However, to reach such heights, he needs to have the experience of heading various departments and performing all management functions such as planning (setting individual, departmental, short-term and long term goals), organizing ( setting supervisory-subordinate structures, fixing responsibilities, communication flow structure, etc), hiring (interviewing applicants and selecting workforce), directing (motivating and leading people to achieve maximum employee output) and controlling (taking performance appraisals, attaching “rewards and punishments” to ensure results). You may further refer to executive jobs.

An MBA degree will open up a lot of job avenues for you in the corporate world. The salaries at the entry level are pretty competitive too. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2009, an entry level managerial position, after a management degree can fetch you anywhere between $31,500 to $ 110,000, with the finance specialization being the most well paying. A senior manager can expect anywhere between $62,000 to $1,000,000, depending upon the size of the company, his work profile as well as the location.

Benefits of Application Integration

May 26th, 2011

What is an application?
Information is the fuel that powers companies. Information is the record of events (invoices and payments) and describes the entities companies deal with (customers and business partners). Eventually, companies need systems and tools to manage this information. Applications are these systems and tools.

Typically, companies use multiple applications to manage information pertaining to different parts of the business and each application operates in its own domain. For example, financial applications manage the information that describes accounts, debtors, creditors and budgets and customer relationship management applications manage information describing the interactions between the company and its customers.

Companies face the integration problem when applications need to share data across the domains.

What is the integration problem?
The integration problem is working out how best to share information between multiple applications. Unfortunately, solving the integration problem can be hard work. There are many patterns for designing integration solutions and their complexity grows as the number of participating applications increases.

The ideal solution is to integrate applications so that they can share information without significant change to the applications. The optimum approach is to implement an integration solution as a discrete application.

What are the benefits?
If integration is so hard what is the reward and why is it worth the effort?

Integration solutions offer the following benefits:

- Integration solutions help business people by providing them with the right information regardless of its source and the applications that manage the information.

- Application integration helps to reduce the effort required to gather information from multiple sources. Workers no longer need to look up several applications to find the information they need to perform their tasks. The integration solution brings the information together for them.

- Removing data duplication improves the quality of the information. The information becomes an authoritative source rather than several copies at various stages of update. Application integration manages data duplication even when the same data resides in several applications.

- Integration removes the cost of reconciling data inconsistencies across different applications.

- Integration solutions maintain information integrity across multiple applications. The integration solution ensures that information occurring in multiple applications is kept consistent by automating the distribution of changes and updates to the applications.

- Integration improves the timeliness of the information and reduces the maintenance effort.

- Changes occur once, and the integration solution ensures that all copies of the information are updated. Therefore all parts of the company have access to the same information.

- An integration solution will be more cost effective than integrating each pair of applications with point-to-point interfaces.

- An Integration solution lowers the costs of integrating new applications. Integration is faster and the corresponding cost savings are realised earlier.

- Integration separates the applications involved and makes it easier to swap one application for another.

How do you derive these benefits?
Achieving the benefits is a matter of designing a flexible application integration infrastructure. The application integration tool needs to be a separate application with components for managing the interfaces.