E-Goverment


E-Government:




Various countries, including Malaysia, are implementing electronic government, which is more commonly known as e-government. The implementation of e-government was initiated by the introduction of the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) in 1996 with the mission to lead the country into Information Age. The implementation of e-government helps to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of internal government operations, communications with citizens, and transactions with both individuals and organizations. This would enable the government to be more responsive to the needs of its citizens.



E-government is one of the seven flagship applications introduced in MSC. There are seven main projects that were identified to be the core of the e-government application under the e-government flagship, including Generic Office Environment (GOE), Electronic Procurement (eP), Electronic Services Delivery (e-Services), Human Resources Management Information System (HRMIS), Project Monitoring System (PMS), Electronic Labor Exchange (ELX) and E-Syariah.



The myGovernment Portal acts as the one-stop source of Malaysian government information and services for the citizens in Malaysia.





Citizen's adoption strategies:


Education and publicity

To promote the use of e-government, schools and colleges can equip people of the country to know better about the e-government services, systems and procedures. Marketing tools like newspaper articles or the World Wide Web would help boost the convenience and services of e-government offered to the public in the citizens’ eyes.


Service quality

Service quality impacts satisfaction and, ultimately, adoption as the quality of service generally plays a very important role in online business environments. It is extremely crucial to understand the needs of the customer and tailor service to cater to those needs. Short processing time and ease of use and control, reliability of services provided can attract more citizens choose to use e-government. E-government should provide a high level of service by catering to the specific needs of people and ensuring availability of relevant and reliable information that is highly correlated with satisfaction.


Website design

Great attention is often required to ensure the attractiveness of a website, as it is influential to the online marketing strategy. Some important features of a website would be the ease of navigation, aesthetics, content, accessibility, and other attributes, namely personalization, customization, customer self-care, and communities. The synergy of these key attributes will affect the way the users perceive a given website.

Corporate Blogging: A new marketing communication tool for companies


Many people may ask what is corporate blogging?
Corporate blogging is a great marketing tool and Wikipedia simply define a corporate blog is published and used by an organization to reach its organizational goals. Nowadays, many organizations have started to create their own corporate blog, but how can a particular organizational goal be achieved by just using a corporate blog?

A corporate blog is used to disseminate all sorts of information about the organization; this includes organizational goals for that particular year, any news update of the company, latest news or information about some new launched product or events and etc. For instance, the top management posts the date, venue and time of the company’s annual dinner and they may also request all employees to give some feedback if they can attend. Corporate blogging allows potential customers, suppliers and staff to easily get tracked of a company recent news and event.


There are basically three types of corporate blogging : Internal blogging, External blogging and CEO blogging.

1. Internal blogging – It’s generally accessed through the corporation’s Intranet and it is also a weblog which allows every employee to view. Internal blogging may not be as formal as the external and CEO blogging and this informal nature of blogs may encourage employee to participate more, free discussion of possible issues, collective intelligence and lastly, a direct communication between various layers of an organization.

2. External blogging – It’s a weblog which publicly available to employees, teams, or spokespersons to share their views. It is more likely to be used by the organization to announce when their new products and services be launched, explain and clarify policies, or to react on public criticism on certain issues. In some corporate blogs, all posts go through a review before they're posted. Some corporate blogs, but not all, allow comments to be made to the posts.

3. CEO blogging – Blogging among CEO is getting popular in the recent years. CEO blog is meant for a weblog whose the blogger is only CEO of the organization. CEO can use their personal blog to announce the future planning of the organization.
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There is a very well-known corporate blog in Malaysia-http://blog.airasia.com/. This corporate blog consists of many elements, for instance, customers can give whatever feedback which they think it’s important for Air Asia to improve on it, or, anyone is welcome to share their travel experiences in the blog so that people may get to know more information and ideas on where to travel next time.

E-learning



When the World Wide Web was introduced to the world back in 1991, there was a huge interest in the chances of electronic learning (or e-learning). It is a very general term for all types of technology-facilitated educational process, where technology is used to assist the learning process. It is common the computer technology is used as the medium of instruction, especially those involving digital technologies. In most tertiary education centers, e-learning is used to define a pre-determined option to participate in a subject where the students were rarely present physically because the imparting of knowledge is done online. The e-learning has taken a step forward lately, as teachers and students become more familiar with the technology.



E-learning is good option in education, particularly when there are challenges to traditional learning situations. The advantages for students who learn online are as follows:


1. Convenience and Portability

· There are no time and place constraints

· Online learning does not require physical attendance

· Reading materials are available online and can be downloaded for revision

· Courses can be accessed anytime

· The speed of learning depends on the learner

2. Cost and Selection

· Ability to choose any range of course desired

3. Flexibility

· Online learning allows prioritize on student preferences and needs

· Availability of alternatives on self-study or instructor-led learning process

· Focus only on topics students wish to learn

· Students may use tools they wish that suits their learning process

4. Higher Retention

· Online learning will lead students to the topics they like. Therefore their attention will be captured throughout the process of learning

5. Greater Collaboration

· Most projects involve collaborative efforts. As such, the online environment is convenient to work in since physical presence and face-to-face communication is not required.

6. Global Opportunities

· Students can gain access to multiple resources and information where there is no such opportunity when studying in a classroom.




Despite having the advantages as mentioned, e-learning also has disadvantages. This includes:

  • Learners with low motivation may fall behind the learning process
  • Students may have extra excuses that their coursework is not completed (e.g. internet connection failed)
  • Students may get lost or confused about programme activities
  • Students may have no teachers to lead or guide them when they are in need
  • The learning process may only cover theoretical works rather than hands-on experience
  • Students may feel isolated and miss social interaction, barring them from learning to communicate better
  • Slow or unreliable speed of Internet connection may lead to frustration for students
  • Students with poor computer skills may find it difficult to handle to study via the computer and internet.

Review a local, transactional e-commerce site


As time goes by, transactional e-commerce site has been incredibly rising up and in the meanwhile it has becoming more and more popular in Malaysia. One of the local transactional e-commerce sites is Tanjong Golden Village Cinemas, which is also known as the TGV cinemas, http://www.tgv.com.my/.


They are providing a friendly-oriented webpage to all Malaysian users, the webpage design is just understandable, good color matching, simple and yet impressive. All users can search for any information about the movie they enquire, e.g. the time, date availability, price for the movie tickets, seats reserved for online booking and payment method. They may also check out all TGV’s branches through the website so that customers know which branches will be the nearest to them.


The most important thing, all customers can enjoy the convenience of online purchasing ticket to avoid queues by just a few clicks. Prior to this, users have to register to become members. During the transaction, members are required to select the location of the cinema, movie, date, show time and the method of payment; whereas, for reservation, members can either choose to pay online or to pay at the counter 45 minutes before the show. For those who have paid online, they are not restricted to certain time to collect their movie tickets. The payment could be made by M-Money or credit card such as Visa cards or Master cards. Once the transaction is success, RM1 transaction fees will be charged and is non-refundable.


Nevertheless, this membership system is also one of the drawbacks. This system highlighted only members are entitled to purchase or reserve e-tickets. For non members? They can’t even purchase online (movie tickets) directly. In case the user is rushing to buy movie tickets, they still have to register to be a member before any transaction made. It is a bit time-consuming and may chase some last-minute customers out.


Overall, TGV cinemas website is convenience and well-designed. However, there are certain areas which they still need to improve in order to attract more users to visit its website and indirectly to generate sales to the company.



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News update: Check and book TGV Cinemas E-ticket from mobile phone



TGV is the main subject on Flavert Media Lab latest attempt of creating useful mobile content application based on what most people use regularly and frequently.


Everyone loves movie, but very few of them like standing in the long queue to buy ticket, if you happen to see your favorite star movie just been released, without you even noticed it earlier .This is where this application become very handy.


This application allows users to check movies availability, showing time, synopsis and booking the ticket on all TGV cinemas across Malaysia right on mobile phone. No more queue. It require just an internet connectivity via WIFI or the mobile’s telco service which require additional charges to function properly.


With a phone, a proper network and a few clicks, everyone can enjoy movie more conveniently.