The Importance Of Information Society

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It is clear from studying society today, that being able to gather information and use it correctly is key to running a successful business or organisation. Information societies exist in every aspect of our lives and they are important for developing and improving the world we live in. But what exactly is an information society? Who uses them, and why? Information society is a term for a society in which the creation, distribution, and manipulation of information has become the most significant economic and cultural activity (WhatIs.com, 2016). These information societies are used by businesses and organisations to help them keep up to date with customer’s trends and preferences, and so they can keep an eye on what similar companies are doing …show more content…

It is fair to say that supermarkets have used them to their benefit superbly with the introduction of loyalty cards in the early 1990’s. Superquinn were the first supermarket to do this and they were soon followed by other large firms such as Dunne’s stores, Tesco and Supervalu. In an article written in “The Irish Times” by Conor Pope in 2013,(The Irish Times, 2013) he discusses this loyalty card system. Every time a customer purchases goods instore, it is recorded by the loyalty card. This builds up both a personal data model for the individual customer and a general data model. From what a customer buys, the supermarket can tell what age they are, if they are married, if they have kids and even if they are after a breakup. It is believed that somebody is most vulnerable when they are pregnant or just after having a baby. They are highly likely to be under a huge amount of stress and to be extremely tired. Thus, they are going to be more likely to shop in just the one store and to spend more money there. The supermarkets target these people by placing the diapers at the back of the store forcing them to walk through the whole shop and increasing the probability of them doing most of their shopping in this store. This is a tremendous business technique and it is clear that these large supermarkets are reaping the rewards of the information …show more content…

They introduced a new player tracking system in 2013 which has been fitted in every NBA stadium. This is a SportsVU system which includes 6 cameras, 3 on each half court. These cameras can record a vast amount of data at a time, and has changed sport forever. This system can track every player and ball movement 25 times per second. It will provide an in depth analysis on a certain aspect of the game, for example, rather than just figuring out how many rebounds per game a player got, SportVU can tell us how many chances to get a rebound a player had, and what the space on the court was like when the player was most successfully grabbing rebounds (Plafke, 2016) . It creates a data model for each player and team in the NBA which makes it easier for teams and players to improve themselves. By helping coaches make better decisions about tactics and player signings, it increases fan support and loyalty which generates millions of euros profit for the NBA each year in gate traffic, television sales and licensing (Turban, Rainer and Potter, 2001) . Before this SportsVU system existed the volume of data was enormous and it was practically impossible to record. An average basketball game could see over 200 possessions with over 1200 games per year. Because of this only basic data was collected and it wasn’t of much use. With the introduction of

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