Richard J. Bocchinfuso

"Be yourself; everyone else is already taken." – Oscar Wilde

FIT – MGT 5002 – Week 1

Discussion Posts

Provide a one-page document outlining your prior financial and/or investment experience and your current interests in this subject if you have any. I realize that many of you are only taking this class because it is required, which is okay, but I would like to learn what you hope to get from this course.

 

First off I want to apologize to everyone for my late post this week, this will not be a persistent behavior, this week has just been a crazy travel week for me.

Hello! My name is Rich Bocchinfuso; I hold a BS in Computer Science, an MS in Computer Information Systems, and I am pursuing an MS in Information Technology with a specialization in Cybersecurity at Florida Tech. I am 44 years old and have been in technology for the past 20+ years, and I am lucky in the sense that my career as a technologist and programmer is also my passion because I spend 10 to 15 hours a day in front of a computer. I live in New Jersey, and I am based out of my companies New York City regional office, but I am often on the road or working from home. I am married to my wife of seventeen years, Gwen, and we have two little girls Maddy who is twelve and Eden who is seven. Both my wife and I are originally from Pennsylvania, but we have made in New Jersey our home for the past twenty years.

My desire to attend graduate school is driven by personal fulfillment as well as a desire to develop skills which will allow me to grow professionally. My goal is to complete the master’s program in information technology with a specialization in cybersecurity and to put the academic skills I acquire to practical use. I am a driven self-starter who is committed to achieving my educational and professional goals. With the half-life of discrete technical knowledge shrinking I have been leveraging learning platforms such as Coursera, Udemy, CloudAcademy, CBT Nuggets, Codeacademy, SoloLearn and others for years to combat mental atrophy. I regularly listen to and watch podcasts, and read industry publications and whitepapers to stay abreast of industry happenings.

I am an avid listener of The Dave Ramsey Show and Mad Money with Jim Kramer.

For as long as I can remember I have loved tinkering and it is this love of tinkering that became the basis of my love of computing and technology. Over the past twenty-plus years, I have invested an immense amount of time honing my craft. I am an avid maker; I enjoy building things, writing about and sharing what I create. For the past ten years, I have been maintaining and sharing my ideas via my personal blog (http://gotitsolutions.org).

I am an analytical person who enjoys making decisions rooted in empirical data, and I am an INTP (https://www.16personalities.com/profiles/57648d209ea7b).

With regards to my financial experience, I run an engineering division within my company and manage things like labor costs, pipeline, backlog, revenue recognition, resource utilization, gross profit, margins and other critical operational metrics on a daily basis. I have to admit some of the accounting principles like revenue recognition drive me a bit crazy, but MGT5002: Corporate Finance helped me to reconcile many of things that I have been doing for years but didn’t deeply understand why.

Personally, I like to follow the stock market and market trends, especially in the technology sector but I try to maintain a balanced portfolio. Twenty-plus years ago a friend of mine introduced me to Dividend Reinvestment Plans (DRIP) through a book called The Money Paper and the concept of dollar-cost averaging. I started buying stocks directly from companies and have continued this practice of acquiring equities over the past twenty years although today the process is much more straightforward with the emergence of Sharebuilder.

In the late 90s, like many of us in technology at the time, I learned a lot about venture capital (VC), restricted stock, stock preferences, capitalization, and recapitalization. Many of the business decisions that were made in the late 90s and were often driven by VCs and seemed to lack common sense; there was crazy money flowing into tech, venture capitalists were trying to build fast follower businesses and drive to an IPO without sound fundamentals. I learned a lot of what not to do, how not to run a business, etc… during that period of my career.

I am a big Jim Cramer and Dave Ramsey fan, I have read The Total Money Makeover. I would classify personal financial philosophy as fiscally paranoid; my father taught me that you should always be your most significant creditor, meaning that you should pay yourself (save) first and more than you pay any other creditor. This is how I learned to live my life; when things get unbalanced, and the percentages don’t align with my plan I struggle to sleep at night (aka fiscal paranoia).

A couple of my favorite Dave Ramsey quotes are:

  • “If you will live like no one else, later you can live like no one else.” – Dave Ramsey
  • “Act your wage.” – Dave Ramsey

We use many of Dave Ramsey’s techniques in my house, for instance, we have a save, give, and send banks (coffee cans) for each of my children. We ask them to allocate 1/3 or their money for savings, 1/3 of their money for tidings, and 1/3 of their money for spending (acquisition of things).

I hope that I can learn something new and apply academic principles to my applied knowledge which always helps me to develop a deeper understanding of a topic. This was certainly the case with the coursework from MGT5002: Corporate Finance and I suspect it will be the case here as well. With MGT5002, the accounting aspects were not that interesting to me although the material did help me better understand concepts I am exposed to daily, I do have an interest in the capital markets, investing, etc… so I expect to get even more out of this class.

I am happy to be part of this class, and I look for to sharing this learning experience with all of you.

 

Post an investing website you like to use.

 

My apologies for the late response, this will definitely not a persistent behavior, this has been a crazy week of travel.

Here are some of the online investment tools I use on a regular basis:
CapitalOne Investing PortfolioBuilder (formerly Sharebuilder):  https://www.capitaloneinvesting.com/main/investing/tools.aspx
Robinhood (free stock trading):  https://www.robinhood.com/
Google Finance:  https://finance.google.com/finance
Yahoo Finance:  https://finance.yahoo.com/
Investopedia:  http://www.investopedia.com/
Morningstar:  http://www.morningstar.com/
Bloomberg:  https://www.bloomberg.com/
CNBC:  https://www.cnbc.com/
The Motley Fool: https://www.fool.com/

I also use JStock (https://jstock.org/) on both my desktop and Android mobile device.

 

Assignment

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FIT – MGT 5115 – Wk8 Assignment

Create a PowerPoint presentation to address the question below. Your PowerPoint presentation should be 8-12 slides, and developed as if you are presenting to fellow colleagues within the IT industry. 

Discuss whether cognitive overload is a problem in your work or education. Based on your experience, what personal and organizational solutions can you recommend for this problem?

[google-drive-embed url=”https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QkVfDsgU2A8LnnlAcwZvzzmPAankTSzx1Q9QpI3591o/preview?usp=drivesdk” title=”FIT MGT 5115 Week 8 Presentation” icon=”https://drive-thirdparty.googleusercontent.com/16/type/application/vnd.google-apps.presentation” width=”100%” height=”400″ style=”embed”]

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FIT – MGT 5115 – Wk8 Discussion Post

Visit two or more social media sites and review information that people post about themselves and information friends post about them. What types of information is available? What challenges do corporations face with regards to social media? Do companies have social media policies for sharing information? Provide an example.

43% of all social media traffic pictures. This is not surprising given the meteoric rise of Snapchat and conversely the fall of Twitter. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for one billion dollars was also a good barometer for this statistic.

Massive social media sites like Facebook and Google+ are dominated by photo sharing while Twitter is more focused on updates about on what’s happening right now, aka your status, news sharing is also widespread on Twitter. And of course services like Snapchat, Pinterest and Instagram are focused on photos.

Social news sites like Reddit, Hacker News, and Digg use social sentiment to curate new stories. Users of these services vote new stories up or down to curate the relevance of the content.

Social Q & A sites like StackExchange, StackOverflow and Quora allow users to ask questions and vote responses up or down. This process identifies the most probable answer using the social sentiment. Responses are validated, and users are given a rating as time goes on.

People post all kinds of data about themselves on social media, some examples include:

  • Photos of themselves (selfies), friends, family, strangers, inanimate objects, etc… you name it, it has been photographed, linked to someones social media profile and shared for the world to see.
  • Opinions on anything and everything.
    • The mobile device and social media have become the immediate way to connect with like-minded individuals, the mobile couch.  I have two words: “vanity search”.  It’s always a good idea to take a deep breath when your angry and sleep on it before taking pen to paper, the same should be true before composing a questionably literate 140 character message that will likely alienate 50% of the people who inhabit the planet with you.
  • Status updates, again about anything and everything. There’s a disturbing notion with the idea that people care that you’re eating a bean burrito, so you need to stop to photograph it, share it on social media with a witty tagline and wait for others to like it, only to slip into a funk when you don’t get the likes you expected. #freakshow
  • Recommendations and warnings of all types.
  • Links to things people read, news stories, other posts, etc..
  • Videos of any variety.
    • E.g. – A video of the United passenger being forcefully removed from an airplane.
      • WARNING:  Everyone is wearing a body cam, and they are excited to use it and share the footage with the world.  Facial recognition algorithms will identify you even when you’re not looking.
  • Travel plans and itineraries. (e.g. – linking TripIt to your social media profile, why no let the world know you’ll be in Europe for a month, sounds reasonable and safe.)
  • Personal and professional accomplishments.

My golden rule is I never mix alcohol and my mobile device.  Shut it off, respond to that tweet in the morning, no need for pictures, there is plenty of Budweiser in the world and as much as I think I need preserve this picture for future generations, I don’t.

Probably more interesting than what we are sharing directly, is the metadata we are creating and sharing.  How you move, where you go, who you connect with, etc… All this metadata has immense value and it’s the data we protect the least.
One of my favorite use cases for social media data and metadata is how we will determine creditworthiness in the future.  Startups like Tala are using social media and mobile metadata to determine creditworthiness and large consumer credit rating agencies like Fair Issac Corporation (FICO) and TransUnion are also adopting this approach to determining creditworthiness.

Here are some challenges that business face with social media:

  • Integration: Where does social media live within the organization? Every business knows it is essential to engage but who should own it. Social media data and social media analytics are providing such strategic value to organizations today that I am seeing Chief Marketing Officers replacing Chief Information Officers in some organizations. Social media and big data analytics have become more powerful than the internal data that drove traditional BI. CMO’s own the social engagement so in some cases they are taking over the conventional CIO role.
  • Governance: I call this reputation management or defense.
  • Culture: Social media shift the employee and consumer engagement model.
  • Human Resources: This all about establishing a social media policy.
  • Measurement & ROI: How will the organization measure the effectiveness of social media on the business and what is the ROI.
  • Security: Social media is a great place for hackers to look for vulnerabilities, using both sophisticated and unsophisticated approaches.

Most companies do establish a social media policy. An example is Adidas’ Socail Media Policy.

Here are some highlights from Adidas’ Social Media Policy:

  1. Employees are allowed to associate themselves with the company when posting but they must clearly brand their online posts as personal and purely their own. The company should not be held liable for any repercussions the employees’ content may generate.
  2. Content pertaining to sensitive company information (particularly those found within Adidas internal networks) should not be shared to the outside online community. Divulging information like the company’s design plans, internal operations and legal matters are prohibited.
  3. Proper copyright and reference laws should be observed by employees when posting online.

Source: http://blog.hirerabbit.com/5-terrific-examples-of-company-social-media-policies/

References

5 Terrific Examples of Company Social Media Policies. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2017, from http://blog.hirerabbit.com/5-terrific-examples-of-company-social-media-policies/

Armano, D. (2014, July 23). Five Challenges Social Media Will Bring to Business. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://hbr.org/2009/08/a-recent-survey-conducted-by

Hardekopf, B. (2015, October 23). Your Social Media Posts May Soon Affect Your Credit Score. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/moneybuilder/2015/10/23/your-social-media-posts-may-soon-affect-your-credit-score-2/#104ef232f0e4

Nations, D. (n.d.). Check Out These Social Sites to Get Your News Fix. Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.lifewire.com/top-social-news-sites-3486498

Top five risks companies face when using social media. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2017, from http://techxb.com/top-five-risks-companies-face-when-using-social-media

Turban, E., Volonino, L., & Wood, G. R. (2015). Information technology for management digital strategies for insight, action, and sustainable performance. New Jersey (Estados Unidos): Wiley.

What People Share On Social Networks – Statistics and Trends [Infographic]. (n.d.). Retrieved October 18, 2017, from https://www.go-gulf.ae/blog/what-people-share-on-social-networks/

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FIT – MGT 5115 – Wk7 Assignment

Create a PowerPoint presentation to address the question below. Your PowerPoint presentation should be between 8-12 slides, and developed as if you are presenting to fellow colleagues within the IT industry.

Define ERP, SCM, and CRM. Use your textbook as a resource and find additional resources to assist you.

[google-drive-embed url=”https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1epWKxu1Bnx-HhsJXN822feCWUyyWbAiG3VQBDXb5UDI/preview?usp=drivesdk” title=”FIT MGT 5115 Week 7 Presentation” icon=”https://drive-thirdparty.googleusercontent.com/16/type/application/vnd.google-apps.presentation” width=”100%” height=”400″ style=”embed”]

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FIT – MGT 5115 – Wk7 Discussion Post

Find examples of how two of the following organizations can improve their supply chains: manufacturing, hospitals, retailing, education, construction, agribusiness, and shipping. Discuss the benefits to the organizations.

Regardless of industry, a good quote-to-cash (Q2C) process is critical to improving the supply chain. Forecasting is an essential component to managing the supply chain, the tighter the forecast, the better the supply chain management process becomes which ultimately improves time to delivery.

Retailers can leverage market and customer intelligence to try to predict demand concerning volume and products more accurately, allowing them to align their inventory management practices with customer demand. No one does this better than Amazon. Amazon has built a platform that leverages machine learning algorithms to create and predict demand; these algorithms also help Amazon masterfully manage the supply chain. Amazon collaborates with customers, allowing customers to create lists, build shopping carts, performing predictive analytics all along the way and making suggestions based on customer buying patterns, steering customer toward specific shipping options and subdividing customers by providing a premium membership option which gives Amazon even more predictability. Amazon also collaborates with suppliers, providing them with analytics on purchases, buyer demographics, and leveraging EDI to for product availability in both the Amazon fulfillment centers as well as marketplace fulfiller warehouses, managing re-orders based on demand and automagically adjusting reorder thresholds. These are just a few of the ways that every retailer can streamline their supply chain. Amazon uses technology to solve an age-old problem elegantly. Because Amazon has become the place people go on the Internet to search for products their market intelligence is incredible, this coupled with their automated fulfillment process, and the scale they have been able to achieve has made them a retail titan.

Manufacturing companies who rely on components or materials from various suppliers can leverage CRM (customer relationship management), ERP (enterprise resource planning), and MRP (manufacturing resource planning) systems to improve visibility and enable quicker and more accurate decision making. In many cases, EDI (electronic data interchange) can be used to create connections to supplier allowing manufacturers to understand supplier inventories in real-time and suppliers to understand manufacturer demand. EDI can benefit both the consumer and supplier.

Regardless of industry good forecasting, efficient communications between buyer and suppliers, standard operating procedures (algorithmic and automated, even better), and an empowered workforce (information is power) can help to address the “bullwhip effect”. The “bullwhip effect” is a term used to describe the impact on the supply chain when there is a significant variance between orders places with suppliers and sales to end customers. When an inability to forecast demand occurs and consumers over order buy, regardless of demand this ripple effect on the supply chain is known as the “bullwhip effect”.

There is no magic bullet to supply chain improvement. Those who endeavor to leverage efficiencies in supply chain management for competitive advantage need to be committed to continuous improvement and the realization that the optimizations put in place today may be different tomorrow.

References

4 Ways Supply Chain Management Can Reduce the Bullwhip Effect. (2016, October 27). Retrieved October 11, 2017, from https://manufacturing.gppcpa.com/2015/07/30/4-ways-supply-chain-management-can-reduce-the-bullwhip-effect/

Glatzel, C., Niemeyer, A., & Röhren, J. (n.d.). Three ways CEOs can improve the supply chain. Retrieved October 11, 2017, from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/three-ways-ceos-can-improve-the-supply-chain

Kunert 2 Nov 2016 at 07:01 tweet_btn(), P. (n.d.). Str-NAND-ed: Flash chip drought hits tech world. Retrieved October 11, 2017, from https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/02/nand_flash_supply_shortage/

Mandell, P. (2014, April 23). Three Steps to Integrating Continuous Improvement Into Your Procurement Organization’s DNA. Retrieved October 11, 2017, from http://www.scmr.com/article/three_steps_to_integrating_continuous_improvement_into_your_procurement_org

Order to Cash and Quote-to-Cash… What’s the Difference? (2017, March 30). Retrieved October 11, 2017, from https://apttus.com/blog/order-to-cash/

The secrets behind Amazon’s success. (2016, January 21). Retrieved October 11, 2017, from https://www.cips.org/supply-management/analysis/2016/february/the-secrets-behind-amazons-success/

Turban, E., Volonino, L., & Wood, G. R. (2015). Information technology for management digital strategies for insight, action, and sustainable performance. New Jersey: Wiley.

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FIT – MGT 5115 – Wk 6 Assignment

Create a PowerPoint presentation to address the question below. Your PowerPoint presentation should be 8-12 slides and developed as if you are presenting to fellow colleagues within the IT industry. 

Explain both low-tech and high-tech methods used to gain access to a company’s networks and databases, the vulnerabilities of information systems, and cybercrime symptoms.

[google-drive-embed url=”https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1bcZ65QjMQu2yj7zR6VuPYXlg_sLYRveRVX21d8xm_Bk/preview?usp=drivesdk” title=”FIT MGT 5115 Week 5 Presentation” icon=”https://drive-thirdparty.googleusercontent.com/16/type/application/vnd.google-apps.presentation” width=”100%” height=”400″ style=”embed”]

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FIT – MGT 5115 – Wk 6 Discussion Post

Define social media and explain why these technologies are different from earlier manifestations of the web. 

The definition of “social media” that I liked the most broke down the components of the term and defined them individually before deriving a combined meaning.

  • “Social” refers to the social interaction of people bidirectionally sharing information with others.
  • “Media” refers to the form of communication, in this case, the internet vs. traditional forms of media such as television, radio, and newspapers.

Given this contextual understanding of the words “social” and “media,” we can now define “social media” as the use of the internet and internet-based platforms that allow people to share and consume information.  I will add to this definition that this sharing and consumption happens in a near-synchronous fashion.

Unlike traditional forms of media (e.g. – tv, radio, and print) where data is compiled, and the information presented to the consumer in what I will call a two-dimensional world. In the age of “social media” raw data may be shared by the user, and this data may be combined with other user data to create information which can be gleaned only through the aggregation multiple data points volunteered by social media users. The creation of this information, knowledge and alternate perspectives happens knowingly and unknowingly to the users who volunteered the data and metadata.

One of my all-time favorite examples of this was a website called Please Rob Me (now defunct, but still a great example). The use of social media, in particular, Twitter and FourSquare (check-in craze seems to be over but was hot a few years ago; another dead unicorn) check-in data is used to let bad guys know when you won’t be home so they can rob you unencumbered. This is a perfect example of how social media platforms take tangential data and leverage it to create new information.

When we contrast social media with early manifestations of the web, meaning the World Wide Web (and Gopher, can’t forget about Gopher), these were an alternate digital publishing platforms where the creator published information to the web. Early internet protocols like IRC built social communities and sub-cultures, but the data was transient, unlike social media which has turned transient 140 character snippets into information. Social media focuses on capturing the data and metadata (e.g. – geolocation data), the data provided by a single user is aggregated with other user data to determine things like sentiment, statistical inference, etc…

When we look at the difference between social media and traditional media (the early web was just a new delivery method for traditional media), with social media we opt-in to a system where marketing is cheaper, has greater reach and is targeted because of our endless desire to share so many things about ourselves. The quid pro quo created is the ability to interact and influence in a way not possible before the dawn of social media. The benefits to the marketers are obvious; we provide a continuous stream of data which they convert to information and pivot as required.

One of my favorite social media stories is the story of The Ritz-Carlton and Joshie the Giraffe (great read that highlights the power of social media).

I travel a quite a bit, and I write code for a living and for fun; I’ll spare you the details of an unpleasant recent travel situation, but I will share the social media story. Let’s just say I had a situation in a Hilton hotel which required me to check out of the hotel and move to another hotel. When I arrived home later that week traumatized, I called Hilton and filed a report online.  A week later there was no movement on the issue, it was like I was banging my head against the wall. At this point I decided to take to Twitter, my approach was two-fold, one, post a message hashtagging #Hilton, and two, write a Twitterbot that would look for tweets hashtagged with #Hilton and send a reply with a note and a picture of my #Hilton experience. Less than 24 hours later Hilton made restitution for my experience. The power of social media, but it cuts both ways.

My dialog with Hilton on Twitter:

Early manifestations of the web were unidirectional and asynchronous, near-synchronous communication protocols like IRC never really made it to the masses, and IRC was built around closed communities. There is talk that a shift may once again be underway, with social media groups giving way to smaller more target groups like Slack style communities.

The internet and the web are ever-evolving, the pace of innovation is increasing as are unicorn mortality rates. Twitter was the darling of social media four years ago and today they are seemingly embroiled in a sell or fizzle out scenario. No one even knows who Foursquare is anymore. Dare I say Facebook is for the elder generation, blogging seems to be dead, and the world seems to be hooked on pictures and filters (aka Snapchat). I don’t get the Snapchat revolution, but I am part of that elder generation who is still using Twitter, blogs, RSS, IRC, etc… I consider myself more a consumer of information than a sharer of information, I try not to share too much raw data and metadata, but we all do it. Social Media is everywhere; it’s not just the platforms we are all familiar with like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Snapchat, Pinterest, Google+, etc… but there are sites I frequent like Stack Overflow, GitHub, Hacker News, figshare, etc… that have changed the way we live and communicate.  The internet (web) experience today is no longer a way to publish and consume static digital content, it is a near-synchronous platform which delivers an immersive experience.

References

Bennett, S. (2012, July 13). Marketing 101 – Social Media vs Traditional Media [INFOGRAPHIC]. Retrieved October 04, 2017, from http://www.adweek.com/digital/social-vs-traditional-media-marketing/

Frost, A. (2016, April 03). How and Why to Create a Community With Slack. Retrieved October 04, 2017, from https://blog.bufferapp.com/slack-community

Hurn, C. (2012, May 17). Stuffed Giraffe Shows What Customer Service Is All About. Retrieved October 04, 2017, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-hurn/stuffed-giraffe-shows-wha_b_1524038.html

Nations, D. (n.d.). Serious Question: What Exactly Is Social Media? Retrieved October 04, 2017, from https://www.lifewire.com/what-is-social-media-explaining-the-big-trend-3486616

Turban, E., Volonino, L., & Wood, G. R. (2015). Information technology for management digital strategies for insight, action, and sustainable performance. New Jersey (Estados Unidos): Wiley.

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