Simulating Business Situations and Using Web 2 0 Technologies

¶ … statistical techniques that managers can use to simulate business situations, optimize variables, and forecast sales or other figures? Statistical techniques that managers can use include goal seeking, optimization, what-if analysis, and forecasting. Wallace (2013) shows that a what-if analysis is particularly helpful for simulating a business situation, as it presents a model that can calculate the way that two or more variables relate to one another. Using the what-if analysis, workers can see what happens when variables are altered or changed and they can view how such changes effect different outcomes.

For example, if one desired to see how marketing costs might impact a project in relationship to the overall budget, the what-if scenario would be a perfect way to investigate this. Goal seeking is another way in which the Excel model format can be utilized to help managers simulate business situations, optimize variables and forecast with accurate results. Goal seeking is based on the decisions support tool and allows the individual to set a goal and determine the pathways to its achievement.

This gives the user the opportunity to navigate a series of avenues and alternatives to see which delivers the best results, while altering variables as desired. Forecasting is another decision-making method of allowing one to produce a budget, plan or estimation of what the future holds for the organization in terms of growth and expectations. Forecasting is essential a method of using variables to make predictive outcomes and it uses past outcomes and precedents as a way of measuring what the future is likely to be.

2.What are the five Web 2.0 technologies that facilitate collaboration? What features does each technology provide? Five Web 2.0 technologies that facilitate collaboration are 1) blogging, 2) chat, 3) online collaborative document construction (such as Google docs), 4) social media (such as Twitter), and video connection chat (Facetime, Skype) (Talbot, 2009). Each of these technologies offers different features to the users in terms of facilitating collaboration. Blogging allows users to convey a detailed bit of information at a site where "blogs" can be stored and archived for later retrieval.

These posts allow users to connect in an informal way to view opinion pieces and/or helpful how-to pieces that convey knowledge and understanding. Chat can be used by organizations or workers and allows two parties to connect via the Web and to share typed communications in real time.

Online collaborative document construction allows users to work and share documents within a single sharing space, so that persons who are not in the same locale can work on and construct in real time the same piece of work, which is uploaded.