MIS-346-001Professor Dai10-1-2015Chun Pong LamThe Weather .docx

MIS-346-001
Professor Dai
10-1-2015
Chun Pong Lam
The Weather Channel
The weather Channel launched on 1982, it is the first the first
24-hour network devoted to weather programming and the first
national TV network able to automatically customize content
based on viewer location. Base on this accomplishment,
information system really added mighty value into their
company. On the earlier of the weather channel tasks, real time
reporting had taken biggest part of their company, real time
reporting can be used on heavy traffic, hurricane, tsunami,
earthquake reporting and more purpose. On that time, live
broadcasting using satellites to live broadcast the news and
other emergency events. Their TV centralized Infrastructure
have been set since 1980s, audience already accustomed to
watch weather information and be prepared before going out. By
the time cell phone become popular, people can call the weather
channel hotline to inquiry about the weather. This service seem
to connect to normal daily life, on the other hand, it is a very
hard time for the weather channel. This action needs database to
handle nationwide weather information system by area code. By
1995, the weather channel first launches their website. Several
years after the website launched, there are not much demand,
and the demand which specified on requesting information on
website, in the early stage of the weather channel website
(1995-2003). On that time, the weather channel website
provides the weather information of the day on their website,
the explanation of low demand is the weather channel only
provide those data of the day onto website. The information
system that they mostly need for their website is collect data
nationwide and publish into website, other form of internet

access are not yet ready for their website. By time goes by,
smart phone coming up so quick and popular, the weather
channel has to keep their path with trend. They need to start a
whole new mobility for their users. In this century, I would dare
to state that people are observing smart phone due to the first
IPhone released.
First IPhone released on 2007, which one of their best features
came along – AppStore. AppStore provide a platform that
everyone can create customized application for different uses.
The weather channel is one of the mobile leader since joining
the mobile space, The Weather Channel surpasses 50 million
cumulative app downloads on all smart phones and tablets. This
number can really shows the weather channel can closely keep
on the trend path. However, above have mentioned IPhone
series might be the originator of smart phone, yet, IPhone keep
participate about half of market share on smart phone market.
The weather channel had put many efforts on optimizing IPhone
application, and the result is after 7 years of competitive
application market, The Weather Channel is named the number
2 all-time free app for iPad and number 7 all-time free app for
iPhone. This milestone not only relate to smart phone or table,
it also generated millions of new users to the weather channel.
Also due to this dramatic user generation, the company has
expand so fast that their IT engineer only can pray information
will not come in at the same time from 144 different servers
around the nation. In about 2014, the weather channel stated
their company get 50 million pages views daily from those 144
different servers. The company had decide to find a better way
to control those numerous data which is give the control a third
party company to handle the AWS (Amazon Web Service)
system. This is might cost more than normal method, but it
really saved a lot of time for those engineers in the weather
channel can develop other more important system. Lastly, their
API (application programming interface) team has done very
nicely, their mobile application are now used for all over the
world, their application have over 10 Billion requests per day

and almost 1 billion smartphone users around the world.
MIS Strategy
Background: The objective of this assignment is to understand
the strategic use of information resources in businesses.
The InformationWeek magazine
(http://www.informationweek.com) conducts annual surveys of
how businesses adopt and utilize information technologies. The
latest survey was in 2015. In this survey, InformationWeek has
documented some of the best IT strategies and practices. The
companies and their projects that are selected as the most
innovative IT users are depicted in the magazine’s articles.
Selected articles are posted on the course website for Week 1’s
readings.
Task: Your task for this assignment is to choose ONE
company/project from the leading companies/projects in the
latest InformationWeek Elite100 survey. See the articles posted
on the course website (in Week 1’s readings), and choose ONE
article for this assignment.
Discuss the company’s overall IS strategy, or the impacts of the
particular information systems and projects. In your discussion,
you can apply the framework of information systems strategy
triangle, and/or resource-based view from the course to show
how the technology is leveraged to create strategic business
value.
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The Weather Company: Cloud Journey Requires Cultural
Change
The Weather Company, the No. 5 company in the
InformationWeek Elite 100, embraced cloud
infrastructure in order to meet dramatic swings in demand for
weather information.
Is it possible to transform a company's technology foundation
and its culture in just three years? Ask
Bryson Koehler, CIO at The Weather Company, and he'll tell
you it is indeed possible.
Three years ago, The Weather Company had 13 maxed-out data
centers and an aging collection of
apps running on a one-of-everything infrastructure. The vision
was to hit the reset button and move
the entire business into the cloud. That infrastructure shift
would let the company scale up data-driven
weather prediction and API-based delivery of weather-related
content around the globe, through a
range of websites, mobile apps, and online services.
The Weather Company is best known as the parent of The
Weather Channel, but it's also the
company behind Weather Underground, Intellicast site-specific
forecasting, and WeatherFX insights
for marketers. In all, the company serves hundreds of millions

of website visitors, tens of millions of
TV viewers, and hundreds of thousands of commercial
customers, including airlines, emergency
services, shippers, utilities, insurers, media companies, and
mobile app providers.
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Page 1 of 5InformationWeek - The Weather Company: Cloud
Journey Requires Cultural Change
9/17/2015http://www.informationweek.com/strategic-
cio/executive-insights-and-innovation/the-weat...
The Weather Company runs on more data than ever.
(Image: The Weather Company)
The first step in The Weather Company's transformation,
launched two-and-a-half years ago, was the
development of a massive Storage Utility Network (SUN) on
Amazon Web Services (AWS). SUN
replaced the company's on-premises weather-prediction
platform. Where the old network captured
2.2 million weather-condition data points from around the globe
four times per hour, the new network
was designed to capture 2.2 billion data points 15 times per
hour.
All that new data -- some 20 terabytes captured per day -- now
supports more accurate weather
forecasting around the globe. But SUN is also the company's
data platform, called via APIs, that
drives Web and mobile applications. Where the prior-generation

platform creaked and groaned to
sustain peak service loads, SUN scales with cloud elasticity to
meet spikes in Web, mobile, and
programmatic data calls during hurricanes and winter storms.
A Reboot For Weather.com
"In February there were 40 billion Web searches on Google,
which is a huge achievement, but in that
same month our data platform served 280 billion weather-
related requests," says Koehler, a veteran
of InterContinental Hotels Group who took over as The Weather
Company's CIO in 2012. "We would
never have been able to handle that level of engagement with
people around the planet if we still had
most of our engineering team worrying about whether a SAN
switch in X data center had a successful
firmware upgrade over the weekend."
The Weather Company CIO Bryson Koehler
(Image: The Weather Company)
With the SUN project completed, The Weather Company spent
much of 2014 on a "Reboot" project
that piloted a cloud-based framework and architectural approach
to content management. The effort
started with weather.com, the online home of the Weather

Channel and regularly one of the top-20
websites in terms of traffic. Until last year, the company still
served up Web and mobile content using
an aging content-management system encompassing 144 servers
spread across company data
centers.
[ Want more innovation ideas? Read about all the Elite 100
winners. ]
"We had to run those 144 servers whether it was a boring spring
afternoon or a hurricane was
reaching landfall on the Gulf Coast," says Chris Hill, senior VP
of data platform and services. "On
most days, those servers weren't very busy, but when severe
weather hit we'd all hold hands and
pray."
Weather.com's new Drupal-based content-management system
runs on just 10 servers hosted on
AWS by the third-party service firm Acquia. Between an
advanced caching strategy (with Akamai
edge servers delivering copies of the site) and an architectural
approach that favors client-side
rendering (rather than burdensome server-side rendering), the
new CMS is barely breaking a sweat,
even during big weather events.
"We get 50 million page views on an average day, but since the
[November 2014] relaunch we've
gone over 80 million without having to touch the system," says
Hill. If weather.com anticipates higher
traffic levels -- like the 200-million-plus page views per day it
experienced during Super Storm Sandy
-- all it needs to do is call Acquia so the firm can spin up more
AWS capacity.

of 5InformationWeek - The Weather Company: Cloud
The Reboot project has also set the stage for growth in
consumer uploads and views of weather-
related videos. The company served up 1.2 billion video plays
across its properties in 2014, and it
expects to support 2 billion plays this year.
"Reboot was the culmination of the movement to an API-driven
data environment and a movement to
a mobile-first strategy whereby we could use the same content
and tools for desktop Web, mobile
Web, and our [native] mobile applications," Koehler says.
Beware The Worthless SLA
Some will see The Weather Company's new dependence on
third-party vendors, particularly on
AWS, as its weak link. But Koehler contends that those who
prefer the do-it-yourself approach of on-
premises, company-run data center infrastructure are paying for
a false sense of security in "having
control."
"With the transformation to the cloud-based environment, you
recognize that none of those things
add value to your business," Koehler says. By not using cloud
infrastructure, "you're spending all of
your time working on table stakes. If you want your business to

really move forward, you're going to
have to rely on others for core capabilities."
Whereas 60% to 70% of The Weather Company's tech effort
went into maintenance and operational
support as recently as two years ago, that figure now stands at
20% to 25%, Koehler says. That has
freed up the 450-person engineering team to focus on what he
describes as "next-generation
development."
However, for companies that do make the move to cloud
infrastructure, don't count on "worthless"
SLAs, Koehler warns. You have to plan and build for the
inevitability of third-party providers not being
able to deliver on their promises.
The Weather Company is now acutely dependent on Amazon,
but in March it struck up a strategic
deal with IBM to run a version of its cloud stack -- serving the
business-to-business side of the house
-- on that vendor's SoftLayer cloud. IBM is making Weather
Company data available to cloud
customers that want to inject Weather intelligence into
marketing, supply chain, and Internet-of-
Things-style applications. From the Weather Company's
perspective, it gets alternative cloud
capacity available so it's not entirely dependent on AWS.
It's not that Koehler doesn't have faith in the redundancy and
resilience of multiple AWS availability
zones and The Weather Company's own provisions to work
around AWS failures. The point is having
options and the ability to run the company's stack on other
public clouds.

"I believe that any serious cloud-based business or application
needs to be built in a cloud-agnostic
way," says Koehler. "That's what has enabled us to deploy our
data services platform onto IBM
SoftLayer so we can power our business and strategic
opportunities with IBM beyond what we could
do with AWS alone."
The transformation at The Weather Company has not been
without its costs. Koehler admits the
company has seen turnover in personnel as the company has
changed its approach.
"We've seen a lot of technology change, but the hardest thing to
change is your culture," he says. "IT
organizations have been staffed, funded, paid, and rewarded to
do things in certain ways for
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decades. You have to unlearn all of that behavior and evolve.
To change engineers' mindsets around
things that they spent the last 20 years doing and being told was
the right way is hard, and it doesn't
happen overnight."
That statement is obviously literally true. But taking just three
years to transform in the scope and

scale that The Weather Company has seems very close to an
overnight success.
Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where
he covers the intersection of enterprise applications
with information management, business intelligence, big data
and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of
Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of ... View Full Bio
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UPS: Where Good Is Never Enough
UPS, the No. 1 company in the InformationWeek Elite 100, is
analyzing a constantly changing, 100-
terabyte data warehouse in order to start predicting problems
and delays and dealing with them
sooner.
UPS invests more than $1 billion per year in information
technology, and the latest large-scale project
driven by that investment is Near-Real-Time Service
Performance Reporting, or NRT for short.
Launched in 2014, the goal with NRT is to combine near-real-

time monitoring of events with
predictive analytics, so UPS staff and customers can detect and
respond to potential service
problems.
UPS already had detailed insight into the state of every package
in its network, thanks to scanning,
sensing, and signature-capture technologies spanning the
pickup-to-delivery lifecycle. UPS enhanced
those capabilities in 2011 through another, major technology-
driven project, UPS MyChoice, which
lets customers set up delivery-time windows, reroute deliveries
to new locations, or ask UPS to hold
packages for pickup at a distribution center.
With NRT, UPS sought a bigger-picture view above the
individual package level, such as by local
delivery truck, tractor-trailer, train, aircraft, or by shipper, so
UPS staff can use that information to
better understand broad problems emerging on its network, or
for a particular customer.
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Page 1 of 6InformationWeek - UPS: Where Good Is Never
Enough
9/17/2015http://www.informationweek.com/ups-where-good-is-
never-enough/d/d-id/1319795?print=...
CIO Dave Barnes and Group VP Nick Costides, in UPS's
Worldport, the world's
largest automated package handling facility.

(Image: UPS)
"If we have a tractor-trailer on a route that's discovered to be
impassable because of a blizzard, or we
learn that there's a derailment on one of the train lines that we
use, NRT gives us insight into which
shippers might be impacted and the value of shipments at risk,"
says Dave Barnes, UPS's CIO since
2005.
Before NRT, UPS could look at performance historically, of
course, using conventional, batch-
oriented reporting approaches, but that only showed UPS and its
customers what happened hours or
days ago -- too late to do anything to change outcomes. NRT
gives UPS and its customers a heads-
up warning about a specific problem within seconds or minutes
-- in time to proactively reroute
shipments or make contingency plans.
NRT is just the latest example of "constructive dissatisfaction" -
- the mindset Jim Casey introduced at
UPS, the company he founded in 1907, that no matter how good
of a job you're doing, you can
always do a little better.
We all know UPS as one of the world's largest shipping and
logistics companies. But according to
Barnes, UPS has evolved dramatically over his 37 years with
the company. In his earliest days there
it was a shipping company that applied technology to its
business challenges, but now, he says, it's a
technology company that happens to have trucks, trailers,
planes, distribution centers, and collection
points.

of 6InformationWeek - UPS: Where Good Is Never
Enough
Barnes and Costides, with Airlines Capt. Norman Seawright.
UPS runs the
world's ninth largest airline as part of its worldwide delivery
network.
(Image: UPS)
"IT is an integrated, core part of the company, not a cost
center," Barnes says. "We embraced
technology as a strategic enabler of our future in the late 1980s,
and we've been steadfast ever since
in investing in IT to accelerate growth and profitability."
NRT's Holiday Trial By Fire
UPS developed and deployed the NRT system over a six-month
period from March to September
2014. After a brief shakedown period, NRT had a trial by fire
during peak 2014 holiday-shipping
season. The project's reporting, alerting, prediction, and
proactive planning capabilities were exposed
to UPS ground, air, and international operations, UPS sales and
senior management, and to the
company's largest customers.
"NRT gives us a single pane of glass through which we can see
the state of performance across all
packages, all modes [of transportation], all buildings, and all

customers," says Nick Costides, VP
information services, a leader of the project. In the peak season,
that meant visibility into that status
of as many as 35 million packages per day and more than 550
million packages delivered between
Black Friday and Christmas Day.
NRT certainly qualifies as a big data project, capturing as many
as 8,700 events -- pickups, sorts
within distribution centers, transfers between transportation
modes, and deliveries -- per second, 24-
hours per day. This highly structured event data was already
flying around UPS transactional
systems, but NRT introduced a new, low-latency data mart built
on Microsoft SQL Server Parallel
Data Warehouse. The new store holds more than 100 terabytes
of data at any given point in time, a
rolling window of recent delivery information with in-memory
OLAP cubes giving users the ability to
slice their way through different views of the data.
Enough
Much of the technology behind NRT is from Microsoft's data-
management stack, including Microsoft
SQL Server Analysis Services. But UPS had to do custom work
to ensure low-latency ETL processes
and refreshes of the in-memory OLAP cubes every 30 seconds.
UPS also internally developed the
predictive algorithms and models that give users insight into the

probable impact of a delayed truck,
train, or flight.
"The predictive analytics are a work in progress, but we're
bringing a growing number of attributes
into our models," says Barnes. "If we know, for example, that a
particular railroad is at capacity, we
can predict which trains travelling on that line will be delayed a
few days from now, even if they're not
in trouble today. What do you do about it? Now we can look at
our options to reroute that train before
we experience a delay."
[ Want more innovation ideas? Read about all the Elite 100
winners. ]
NRT proved its value during holiday season 2014, according to
Barnes and Costides, so UPS rolled
NRT out across the entire network in the first quarter of 2015.
NRT isn't something UPS customers
access directly, but having it across the whole network means
UPS employees can use the data to
help all shippers, not just the largest customers, using near-real-
time information and proactive
alerting capabilities.
Previously UPS only offered proactive monitoring-and-
notification capabilities like these to a limited
number of high-value shippers, such as pharmaceutical
manufacturers and other providers of
perishable goods. NRT is bringing that level of insight -- minus
the special temperature- and
environment-monitoring -- to the entire UPS network --
bringing proactive insight to the movement of
more than 4 billion packages per year worldwide.

Existential Threats
What will constructive dissatisfaction lead to next? Is UPS truly
thinking outside of the brown box
truck? Or are there potential disruptive threats, with customers
like Amazon experimenting with
drone-based delivery? Could some variation of Uber steal a
chunk of the last-mile deliveries UPS
handles today?
"Drones are interesting, and they're something we've tested, but
it's not the type of thing that's going
to move 35 million packages in a day," says Barnes. "You could
use drones for special-needs use-
cases, like delivering medical supplies in areas where roads
don't exist. But we're looking a level up
at things like autonomous operation."
Enough
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One down, another 18 million or so to go today
(Image: UPS)
Barnes describes autonomous operation vaguely as "a new way
to manage things that move." As the
capability of driverless vehicles steadily improves -- Delphi
recently completed a coast-to-coast trip

with an Audi in automated mode 99% of the time -- it's easy to
imagine at least parts of the UPS
network -- trains, planes, or trucks -- guided in some way at
some point in their journey by sensors
and smart computers.
"I don't know that it's specifically about drivers, but it's the idea
of augmenting drivers or
complementing them for safer, more efficient operation,
introducing control systems for things like
planes -- I think that's where UPS is focused, and it's very
exciting."
It's exciting, indeed, to realize that there's so much you can do
to improve the efficiency, reliability,
visibility, and timeliness of getting a package between point A
and point B. And it's a problem UPS
has been working at since 1907.
Doug Henschen is Executive Editor of InformationWeek, where
he covers the intersection of enterprise applications
with information management, business intelligence, big data
and analytics. He previously served as editor in chief of
Intelligent Enterprise, editor in chief of ... View Full Bio
MORE INSIGHTS
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Cloud Security Concerns & the Perceived Effectiveness of
Traditional Security
Solution
s in a Cloud Environment
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Enough
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