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186 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

2. As the head of a small insurance company with six employees, you are concerned about how effectively
your company is using its networking and human resources. Budgets are tight, and you are struggling to
meet payrolls because employees are reporting many overtime hours. You do not believe that the employees
have a sufficiently heavy work load to warrant working longer hours and are looking into the amount of time
they spend on the Internet.
Each employee uses a computer with Internet access on the job. Review a sample of your company’s
weekly report of employee Web usage, which can be found in MyMISLab.
• Calculate the total amount of time each employee spent on the Web for the week and the total amount of
time that company computers were used for this purpose. Rank the employees in the order of the amount
of time each spent online.
• Do your findings and the contents of the report indicate any ethical problems employees are creating? Is
the company creating an ethical problem by monitoring its employees’ use of the Internet?
• Use the guidelines for ethical analysis presented in this chapter to develop a solution to the problems you
have identified.

Achieving Operational Excellence: Creating a Simple Blog

Software skills: Blog creation
Business skills: Blog and Web page design

In this project, you’ll learn how to build a simple blog of your own design using the online blog creation
software available at Blogger.com. Pick a sport, hobby, or topic of interest as the theme for your blog.
Name the blog, give it a title, and choose a template for the blog. Post at least four entries to the blog,
adding a label for each posting. Edit your posts, if necessary. Upload an image, such as a photo from your
hard drive or the Web to your blog. Add capabilities for other registered users, such as team members,
to comment on your blog. Briefly describe how your blog could be useful to a company selling products
or services related to the theme of your blog. List the tools available to Blogger that would make your
blog more useful for business and describe the business uses of each. Save your blog and show it to your
instructor.

Improving Decision Making: Using Internet Newsgroups for Online Market
Research
Software Skills: Web browser software and Internet newsgroups
Business Skills: Using Internet newsgroups to identify potential customers
This project will help develop your Internet skills in using newsgroups for marketing. It will also ask you to
think about the ethical implications of using information in online discussion groups for business purposes.
You are producing hiking boots that you sell through a few stores at this time. You would like to use
Internet discussion groups interested in hiking, climbing, and camping both to sell your boots and to make
them well known. Visit groups.google.com, which stores discussion postings from many thousands of
newsgroups. Through this site you can locate all relevant newsgroups and search them by keyword, author’s
name, forum, date, and subject. Choose a message and examine it carefully, noting all the information you
can obtain, including information about the author.
• How could you use these newsgroups to market your boots?
• What ethical principles might you be violating if you use these messages to sell your boots? Do you think
there are ethical problems in using newsgroups this way? Explain your answer.
• Next use Google or Yahoo to search the hiking boots industry and locate sites that will help you develop
other new ideas for contacting potential customers.
• Given what you have learned in this and previous chapters, prepare a plan to use newsgroups and other
alternative methods to begin attracting visitors to your site.

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