Expert: Philip Lafeber - 9/21/2000

Question
Hi,

im not sure if you are the right person to ask, this is my first time on this website, so advanced apologies if this is wasting your time.

Pls can you suggest any interesting topics that i can do for my University Dissertation?  Im doing a degree in Information Systems with Business Management, and have not found any original topics that i can research for my final year project.  Im interested in the Internet and would like to incorporate this into my dissertation somehow.

Hope to hear any suggestions you may have.

Monica.

Answer
First of all this _is_ an interesting question and especially the way you formulate it makes it _not_ a waste of time. So here goes...

Business and Internet make a tasteful mix these days. I take it that when you say " I have not found any original topics" you mean "All the interesting topics have already been researched". If this is so, I can tell you this is not the case. There is a gap between the purely theoretical studies that can be funded by a university and the purely commercial ones that businesses will be most interested in. In between lies the application of science to business areas where profit can not yet be found.
But to find profit, you have to invest money in the search. At this time, companies are investing in websites because the profit has been demonstrated. What else is there in Information Systems that can bring profit to higher levels?

One subject that right now finds it's way to management level is knowledge management (Tadaa, my area). Escpecially settled businesses, big ones from the old economy, have not yet fully recognised the added value of extra knowledge throughout the company. There seem to be more and more solutions for this, but you might want to swat them around the ears with an eye-opening report on the proven added value of knowledge management systems (in whatever form) by researching the results for different businesses. Do keep in mind that this will not amount to proof, but empirical observation.

Another hot item is customer service support using IT. A lot can be done to get the user to your business if you provide the right service on the Internet. Amazon relies solely on this, UPS partially, and Meryll Lynch not at all. Why is that?

One thing that really captures my particular interest each time is the specific research for new knowledge for a business using algorithms like nueral networks, genetic algorithms, heuristic search, classification, etc. For instance, an airline company uses neural nets to predict passenger amounts on their routes for the future based on historic figures. But I'll not bore you by going into detail there. Suffice it to say there's enough to be done if you can combine the exact need of a business and the right technology to deliver the result.

Lest you fall asleep, I'll keep it at this. If there's more that you want to hear about this, just say so.