Decision Making

Making Choices

Intro: Your grandmother wants a mobile phone. She does not have a price limit as such but she wants to spend as little as possible.
Investigate the phones avaliable for her and suggest one for her. Evaluate very carefully why she should buy the one you suggest. State any assumptions you make carefully.

Answer: Firstly I looked for a phone which would be easy to use and not have too many un-nessasary gadgets for an elderly person to have on their phone, for example, a camera for example would be un-nessasary. I look on the "Carphone Warehouse" to compare a selection of phones that she could use. Seeing as she wouldn't use it as much as a younger generation person, i firstly selected "Pay as you go" so she could top up when she needed to rather than pay £30 a month for a phone she doesn't regualary use. I am also searching for a phone which is under £30 because i see this as a reasonable price to pay for a mobile phone or an elderly people.
URL: http://www.carphonewarehouse.com/commerce/servlet/gben-Home

One phone i picked out was the Nokia 2630 (Pay as you go) which can be bought for £24.95 on orange, vodaphone and T mobile. It is advertised as simple and straight forward which may appeal to an elderly lady. It has a camera phone, video recorder, radio and bluetooth which may not be used, however, i feel the simplicity of the phone may appeal to an elderly lady. It is also designed to do as little or as much as you want on that phone. Though this may be a good phone, i feel an elderly lady may not want all the extra applications the phone comes with.
URL: http://shop.carphonewarehouse.com/pay-as-you-go/nokia/2630-black/orange/ojt/

Another phone i picked out was the Nokia 2310 (Pay as you go) which is even more simpler for £19.95 on vodaphone. This phone has no camera phone or video recorder, yet it does have FM radio and a colour screen. I feel this phone is the most suitable for an elderly lady as it is the best of the simpilist phones. She most probably won't want to use a camera on a phone so theres no need to pay the extra £5 to get one on her phone. It is also very compact which would make it easy to use and travel with. It is also highlighted for being very easy to call as an elderly lady may not want to text all the time and would rather ring someone.
URL: http://shop.carphonewarehouse.com/pay-as-you-go/nokia/2310-red/vodafone/sstep/

Managing information overload

Intro: Many ICT tools have been created to help in dealing with the information explosion. In what ways can the following help in decision-making; spreadsheets, data mining tools, simulation software, exception reporting tools.

Answer:
A spreadsheet can deal with high amounts of information as there are many cells which you can access and retrieve data from. Once you put your data into a spreadsheet, you can the group it so you can manage the information overload much more effienctly. You can then make effective decisions as you have catagorised the data.

Data mining is a way of sorting through large amounts of information and only picking out what is relevant. This would be usefull for managing information overload as you can pick your way through the un-nessary or un-important data and only view the data which is relevant to you. This software is regulary used by buisnesses and financal analysts to make effective decisions on what data is relevant.

Simulation software is used to design equipment so that the final product of data will be as close to the design specification as possible without using expensive modification. So if there was a data overload, simulation software could modify equipment to handle with the amount of data coming in which would alow effective data management and good decision making.