COMP8780 Future of IT Technology Assessment

The task

In the first couple of weeks of semester, we considered the future of IT, including digital disruption, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, IoT, RPA and blockchain, etc.
Choose ONE of the technologies discussed to answer the following questions.

1. Provide a summary of the technology, past, present, and future. How has it evolved in recent years, where are we today, and what do analysts predict about its future?
2. Provide an example detailed case study on how an organisation successfully uses this technology to gain a strategic advantage. We are more interested in leading-edge applications.
3. Research a major publicly listed company. The company can be here in Australia or overseas. Provide a summary business case for using your chosen technology (stated above) in a novel manner that the organisation is not currently doing. There needs to be an alignment with strategy, culture, and capability for the organisation to derive a strategic benefit. Financials can be expressed in rough terms to answer the question as to the possible cost implementation, as well as the potential financial benefit.

Appendix 1

Writing at the university level means academic writing. Academic writing is not like writing a novel. Informal writing styles are not encouraged. You are required to substantiate what you write/say in your academic and professional lives. It is only in rare instances where you will be permitted to write works of fiction at university, it is also for similar reasons that the first person singular (I feel, I think, I did, My feeling is ...), is generally to be avoided in writing university assignments (there are some exceptions to this rule, for example, law faculties often adopt the first-person-singular in their writing style).

As insulting as this may seem, as a student, you are not considered to be an expert at anything (that usually comes with the title Dr. and then later Professor). The point is you need to state the source of your information in assignments. Furthermore, it is generally considered politically-correct to avoid gender-specific writing styles; in other words, dont refer to authors/people/whoever as he, unless they actually are male - examine the following links. 2

For the purposes of this assignment, we will use the Harvard referencing style, although if you are comfortable
with footnoting, please do so. See: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html

Citing vs. quoting

1. Where an idea is adopted/adapted from an author but restated in your words one uses citing as a means of establishing where the information was derived from. For example...... Smith (1990) was inclined to believe that ... blah blah blah, ... (where blah blah blah are your words, but the authors ideas). No page number needs to be included for citing authors (but you must include the authors surname, and date of publication of the reference where you have derived the information from). No, you cannot cite your friends or lecture/tutorial/practical material.

2. Where the words have simply been lifted/copied directly by you, is referred to as quoting someone. For example ..... it was felt that of all the database schemas, the object relational approach is ..... (Zhang, 1990 p. 53). In this case, quotation marks are used as well as a page number stating where the information directly came from. Where you have a quote that is longer than, say 20 words, you indent these as a separate paragraph from the main body of your text, and you single space the blockquote, like so When faced with a small problem domain, system development can be all about modeling of user functional requirements. However, when faced with a large problem domain, such as with an enterprise information system, system development must recognize its demands by the non-functional system qualities. The quality of interest in this paper is supportability (Maciaszek and Liong, 2003; Maciaszek et al., 2004). Supportability is really the combination of three qualities understandability, maintainability, and scalability. An unsupportable system is a legacy system (Maciaszek, 2005 p. 17).

.... Note, no quote marks are necessary, but you still include the author surname, year of publication, and page number. You do not need to italicise block quotes (or normal quotes for that matter).

Lecture notes/course notes DO NOT count as references- these are not to be referred to in written assignments/reports. You should refer to the original source material (see footnote about scholarly ...).