Amazon Web Server (AWS) Initiation

Upon following the guidelines from EC2 for Poets, I was able to successfully set up my Amazon Web Server (AWS). I felt that the instructions provided were really specific which allowed for an easy set-up. There were only a few areas for which I had complications due to differences in his instructions and my options. For example, once I create a "Key Pair," the file with the 'all mighty powers' would not save and would not open with any program that I used. However, after playing around with it a while, I was able to open and locate the file. Woot! The remote desktop was pretty neat, though not practical for me at this point.

In my opinion, the set-up process was tedious (which I assumed after reading it can take "10 minutes to an hour") and I almost developed a head ache. However, in the end, I was able to complete my mission and had a little extra time to review some of the technical jargon necessary for me to better understand AWS.

http://ec2-72-44-63-92.compute-1.amazonaws.com/helloWorld/

Thanks for reading!

Yay for Field Trips!

From our field trip experience, I learned that business processes are absolutely everywhere and are very useful! I really enjoyed that I got to see how BPMN can be applied in a real job situation. Our group interviewed one of the workers responsible for handing the customer complaints for Blackberry & Student/Staffing e-mails here at GSU. With her 13 years of experience with this process, she was able to easily walk us through all the steps required to resolve a customer complaint.

The process of maintaining customers complaints overall was pretty good. Whenever a call is received, a ticket is generated for that customer and if the problem cannot be resolved right away, the customer will be updated automatically allowing them to know the status of their issue. I think this is a great technique because often, the customer doesn’t know if the complaint is being resolved, if the worker forgot, or if it is a complex problem that is taking a long time. Without this method, a company’s process would be slower because customers would constantly call-in to see why their problem has yet to be resolved.

However, on the downside, when a problem cannot be resolved within the company, they are to inform the appropriate vendor so they can resolve the issue. This is not bad except for the fact that they do not have a predefined time frame to stop the event in case the problem goes untouched or just can’t be resolved. Lacking a predefined time frame means that there is not an end event (timer) and therefore, if the process is not resolved, the process cannot continue and will be stuck. This goes against BPMN’s “Best Practices.” In our process model, you can see that we have timer events; however, these have not been established within the company and are just rough estimates for how long our interviewer thinks the process might go-on.

Overall, I feel that this field trip has been an excellent “real-life” experience that has allowed me to see how I can apply BPMN principals to help resolve and improve business processes.