Define knowledge tone and its applications framework.

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E-business

* Define knowledge tone and its applications framework. What is the significance of knowledge tone as a prerequisite to creating a responsive business model?

Knowledge-Tone Applications are said to be the Next Generation of Decision Support Systems. Knowledge tone and its applications framework refers to "personalized decision support, modelling, information retrieval, data warehousing, what-if scenarios and reporting. The objective of these applications is to make effective use of the tremendous stores of data generated by enterprise software systems. The core technologies for knowledge-tone applications are data warehouses that extract, cleanse and aggregate data from multiple operational systems."

The significance or importance of knowledge tone as a prerequisite to creating a responsive business model is that it enables executives to refine marketing campaigns, develop optimal pricing schemes, rationally allocate inventory, and proactively schedule factory production.

However, customized software applications are often more expensive to develop than packaged software because the software is tailored to the company's specific operations. Many times these higher costs cannot be avoided, because no packaged software exists for the task the company envisions. The capabilities of enterprise software applications, however, are continuing to grow. Thus the warning: today's customized Web-based application may be a feature in tomorrow's packaged enterprise system."

Reference: http://www.advancedmanufacturing.com/index.php/E-Manufacturing/Manufacturing.html

* What is top-down analytic planning and bottom-up "just do it" planning?

Kalakota & Robinson (2001) references that, "top-down planning takes a broad view of the environment, identifies options, and then defines the organization's mission and direction.

Bottom-up planning, which has a more tactical approach (meaning actions based on reaction to circumstances) has a "more focused or narrow view of the environment" and is focused on the short term results.

In reality, the experience of many companies is in fact a combination of both types. Most companies make an effort to have top-down planning since this will result in, theoretically, wise decisions based on well thought out points. However, the fast pace of the competitive and technological environments often force companies to also incorporate ...