The Internet and mobile phones have made the world a global village by establishing connectivity among people anywhere, anytime. Social networking sites on the Internet have become an essential part of the daily lives of millions. A study has found that around 84% of Internet users in India use social media. This translates to around 110 million users who mainly access social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. Usage of social media worldwide also reports a similar trend. Contacting someone in distant places, or sharing personal information, pictures and videos of events as well as ideas and emotions is just one click away. People use social media for not only personal needs but also professional needs such as politics and business. Social media usage among school and college students has increased significantly, making far-reaching impact on their academics and other activities. Consequently, it has attracted the attention of social scientists worldwide. The paper, “Positive and Negative Impacts of Facebook on University Students: Sri Lankan Perspective,” by S Thuseethan and S Kuhanesan, reveals how the usage of Facebook has negative effects on the academic performance of students.

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software package integrates core business processes of an organization into a single application. Through a common database and integration of processes with seamless workflow, ERP solution greatly improves the quality and efficiency of a business while allowing users across functional departments. It offers consistent look and feel throughout the organization, cohesiveness to the individual departments and helps critical decision making with more informed view of the organization and its operations. As so many ERP solutions are available in the marketplace, selecting one for a business is not an easy task. Since ERP intends to transform business providing key competitive advantages to the organization, an ERP failure results in severe costs. Thus, finding the best fit ERP, selecting the right vendor and proper implementation of ERP meeting the requirements of the organization is challenging and draws research attention. Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is a methodology for multi-criteria decision making in fuzzy environments. It has been widely used for a variety of applications and offers improved accuracy in decision making. The paper, “An ERP Selection Framework for Construction Industry Based on FAHP,” by Saeed Rouhani, Mohammad A Shahhosseini and Bahar Rouhi, presents an effective approach for ERP selection in construction business.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), the next-generation software architecture, has emerged as a popular paradigm to develop web-based application which consists of loosely coupled components called web services. Usually, SOA involves three distributed parties: a service provider, a service requester and a service broker. Since these parties interact dynamically on the Internet, monitoring of web service life-cycle is important to avoid downtime and failure of the application. A monitoring mechanism needs to offer an efficient and effective approach to detect, diagnose and defuse service delivery failures. Towards this end, several approaches have been proposed in literature. The paper, “Web Services Monitoring: A Life Cycle Process,” by Navinderjit Kaur Kahlon, Kuljit Kaur and Sukhleen Bindra Narang, provides a refreshing review of various approaches to monitoring of web services and sets the ground for new researches in the field.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the analysis and redesign of business process within and between organizations to achieve dramatic effects on cash flow, service delivery and customer satisfaction. It transforms an organization and the way its people work, and improves performance. Although talk about BPR has been around for quite a long time, there is not much progress in technological dimensions. The paper, “Emergence of Business Process Reengineering: A Literature Review”, by Apeksha Hooda, provides a wide-range introduction to the promising trend and tries to draw the attention of researchers as well as practicing managers to the same.

-- A C Ojha
Consulting Editor