Team Members:
Anders Hansen
Evangelia Kantiani
Siya Li
Chris Ramsbottom
Business Strategy
Personal Resource Planning (PRP) is a hosted application software that allows users to control aspects of their life, both personally and work-related.
PRP is a SaaS (Software as a service), which means that this is a commercial system delivered as it is, there is no possibility to do customization to the system, but it is however delivered with a customisable front page, much like the netvibes site.
PRP provides users with tools to manage their contacts, schedules, budgets, bill, online shopping and much more…
Users access their PRP software through a web browser, ensuring access is available from any computer and/or via a mobile device such as a pobile phone or PDA.
One of the unique benefits users will find when using PRP is that the software begins to learn user behaviour and preferences. This results in each user having a unique piece of software that is tailored to their needs offering quick, familiar, easy-to-use tools.
This also becomes an advantage when dealing with the Online Advertising Agency as profiles of users are easily created and thus potential customers identified.
Business Model
Primary source of revenue:
The main income for the PRP system is the subscription fee each user pay on a monthly basis.
Secondary source of revenue:
The secondary income for the PRP system is revenue made from advertisments on the page. The advertisements os only displayed to the users which has signed up for the free account, and the advertisment agancy used is Online Advertising Agency.
Pricing structure and access
PRP is a module based application which includes modules as:
- Contact database
- Budget application
- Bills application
- Email
- Filearea
- Blog tool
- MyShop
- Customised startpage
- Shared Calendar
We split the membership subscription types into three different parts, allowing users with different accounts, different modules to access.
Free: The free version only includes a limited contact database, only one email account.
Medium: The medium version includes contact database, budgeting, 5 email accounts, limited shared calendar, limited filearea.
Large: The large version allows unrestricted access to every module available in the system.
Partners
Partners and collaboration is of crucial importance for any company. Through the synergies better results could be ensured.
Our key partners are the E-Budget4U company and P'LABY online advertising agency.
Both of them offer to our company a significant help to create a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Our mutually beneficial relationships ensure the quality of our collaborations. Through a clear identification of the expectation of each company’s benefits, our synergetic development enables us to provide a more tailored service.
The P'LABY online advertising agency is delivering online advertising with a added value. It delivers information about the user who has clicked on the text bsed links added by P'LABY on the site and gives you more than just advertising, but also market research at ethe same time. P'LABY identifies, tags and track every user clicks or views the advert. They deliver value to the customers by letting the customers immediately monitor if their online marketing campaign gives feedback, and the customers can then build a strategy to closer target these potential customers.
PRP are interacting with the P'LABY in two different ways:
1.Share the information about users to P'LABY to get a greater return on the applications specific users.
2.Host a placement on the site in the free version, to let P'LABY display advertisements on the site, and in that way also increase potential revenues.
By sharing information about the users of PRP til the online advertisments, PRP can therefore track the users habits and deliver customised information for the user at the startpage of the application. For instance if the user is interested in sports and music, the P'LABY track this on the user and sends information back to the PRP system and lets the PRP system therefore customise according to this information. There is also a sharing of information from the PRP system to the P'LABY platform. If a user in the PRP system adds an event he ro she is going to attend, for example the Reading Festival, the user pics this from the meny in the calendar. This information get sent to the P'LABY platform and they can then do a broader more specified advertisement to the user.
Theadvertisments hosting is based upon an Iframe on the site which holds the advertisements delivered by the P'LABY agancy. The Iframe will be customised to fit the PRP page and once a user clicks on an advertisement there is created a revenue for PRP.
E-Budget
E-Budget4U
The E-Budget4U website provides their customers with an e-budgeting service. Users have the opportunity to record/file theirs expenditures, keeping track of their spending habits. They provide an easy-to-use personal website that helps millions of users worldwide manage and plan their expenditures. Additionally, users receive recommendations regarding their past purchases. They are targeting at two key market segments; btoc and btob markets. As far as the consumers are concerned, they give them the opportunity to track their budget and help them make better decisions on how to spend their budget. As a result, users save time and money spend on their next purchases. As far as the businesses are concerned, they have the opportunity to manage their costs so as to meet theirs business needs. Important attributes of their provided servise: ease of use, reliability and loyal customer bases
We are going to provide the E-Budegt4U with information about the profile of our users; their spending habits. E-Budget understands and analyzes the consumer behaviour in detail. On the other hand, E-Budget4U is going to send us back recommendations about the specific users’ habits.
External Partners
M-Wallet
Although not a critical partner in the early development stages of PRP it is possible to incorporate M-Wallet into the PRP system to allow the simple, secure transfer of payments to, not just other PRP users, but practically anyone with a mobile phone
Paypal
We will receive revenue from our subscriptions service thorugh Paypal. This will allow customers to easily and securely pay for their subscription to PRP. We may also choose to use Paypal when we make payments as a company. For example, we may pay a supplier though Paypal.
Amazon
We will use Amazon for our file storage requirements. It may also be possible in the future to link our system with Amazon’s retail system so that any products bought through Amazon are automatically reflected in PRP modules such as purchasing and budgeting.
Other Retail Sites
As with Amazon, it may be possible to link other online shops to modules within PRP so that any items bought can be represented in budgeting modules.
Database model
The model below is showing the relationship of the different tables in the database for the Personal Resource Planning system.
Click on the image for a larger view.
The model below is showing the ER diagram for the system
Functional Requirememnts
Functional requirements define specific behaviors of the PRP system. This section outlines the broad areas of functionality that are required in order for the PRP system to function properly. In other words, functional requirements represent all the functions that the system must, should and could be possible to do for meeting the needs of a set of users. An overview of the main functions of the system is described below. The examples under each functional area below are representative of the functions that the system should be able to accomplish.
● Keep track of the user’s contact as the end-user enters data concerning his contact.
● Keep track of end-users’ tasks as the user enters data in the calendar section.
● Keep track of end-users’ budget and bills
● Keep track of his files
● Change language of end-user interface; The user is able to define its preference concerning the language of the system interface
● Product recommendation
Web Services
Internal Web Services
PRP User Information Service
PRP user information Service gives our business partners access to the user information of our users. For example, E-Budget can request PRP database and retrieve the data about the user’s budget account, such as billing and shopping information. Also, P'LABY online advertising agency can approach our database for event details. These companies can analyze the consumer behaviour from these data, and optimize the strategy for the market.
Highlight Services
Provide access to user’s profile
Access to the user’s interested activity.
Retrieves detailed consuming data of users.
Provides effective way to analyse user’s behaviour.
Pricing
So far, this service is free of charge to our business partners. Instead, PRP exchanges the user data with them, so that we can learn better about our consumer’s behaviour and deliver the best service.
Detailed Description
With user information service, our business partner can retrieve real-time user information in specific fields from PRP database.
Detailed User Profile
User profile is a crucial part of the data. The service provides detailed user attributes, including UserID, gender, age, location, career, education, income, and so on. This data enable the companies to have clear idea about their customer or potential customer, and segment them into niche market. It makes easier to analyze the consuming habit and form the efficient marketing strategy.
Consuming Data
The system returns users’ up-to-minute consuming data pertaining to budget account, including budget amount, budget date, item name, item price, task name, task price and task date. The companies that want to research about their market can use this data to analyze the customer or potential customer, such as companies like E-Budget which aims to trace the customer’s spending habit and expenditure control, or P'LABY online advertising agency that intent to learn the products that the users are interested in.
Activity Data
For further enhancing the knowledge about customer behaviour, the service allows the affiliate companies access to all the users’ activities from their calendar. For example, if a PRP user buys a ticket to a theatre Mamamia, and places it on their calendar, the company can tailor its music based adverts to this genre of music, ensuring a greater degree of adverts the customers are more likely to respond to.
Historical Consumption Service
Historical Consumption service is a web service which exposes the data of users’ consuming history to any company who want to research about the consumer behaviour. The researcher company can use consuming record to of PRP users to investigate about the consumption habit of the niche market to any category of product.
Highlight Services
● Provide access to sales history of a specific category of products
● Search in niche market by defining the characters of the user
● Provide an easy way to learn about the consuming expenditure of niche market
Pricing
This will be charged on monthly based subscription.
Detailed Description
Operation overview
User Customization
The service allows defining the specific category of customer by setting gender, location, education, age range and income range. For example, the customer researchers can define only search shoes expenditure of the women users who are aged 20 -30, well educated, more than £1500 salary owned. In this case, it provides an easy and effective way to research about the consuming expenditure of the target niche market.
Date Finder
With this operation, the researchers can easily find out the consuming situation in a specific period. Given a product name and a range of year, month or day, the system will returns all the sale amount that the defined category of users have spend on the product during the period of time.
Product Categorization
This operation allows the researcher companies to choose the product category. Historical consumption service provides extended category of product. For example, fashion → shoes →sporty shoes. In addition, the researcher can also request the sales history by brand.
Spending Look Up
After setting the product category, customer category and the date range, the system returns all the amount that the defined category of customer have spend on particular category of products. The result is displayed in the minimum, maximum, median, and average spending amount over the given date. For example, to find out how much have the users of middle age in London spent on travelling to Europe during January to August of 2006, the researcher need to choose London, 35-55, January to August, leisure → travel → European travel into the value of location, age range, date range, and product. Then the result returns the maximum, minimum, median and average amount that the London-based users aged 35 to 55 have spent on European travel.
External Web Services
E-Budget Recommendation Service
In response of PRP’s user information, E-Budget will parse these data of PRP users with their data mining methods. Each user’s consumption behaviour will be analysed according their purchase items, purchase amount, purchase location, as well as the user’s gender, age, location, career, education, income. After a series of analysis, the system concludes shopping recommendations targeted the particular user. Then these recommendations will be sent back by E-Budget recommendation service to PRP’s system, and displayed on user’s account page automatically.
Business Benefit: with E-Budget Recommendation service, PRP can customise the services provided to every single user. These personalized recommendations can help PRP enhance the knowledge about the customer and help the customer purchase the desired product and make informed buying decision.
Automated Data Sharing Service
By sharing PRP user data with P’LABY Online Advertising Agency, P’LABY also shares with PRP their data of the users who click on PRP advertisement. P’LABY traces the sites in which users feel interested in PRP advertisement, and which adverts users respond positively to. then send this information back to PRP.
Business Benefit: with the information of the customer who click on PRP advertisement, PRP can learn about the potential customer, for example, what kind of website has highest level of visitor to PRP advertisement and which advertisement attracts the visitor most. By enriching the knowledge about the effectiveness of advertisement, PRP can improve the advertising strategy to attract the potential market.
PayPal Service
PRP will use PayPal web service to automate the payment processing, and build new e-commerce applications with the APIs as follows:
TransactionDetails: Uses the transaction ID for a particular payment to return the transaction details. As a result, the information associated with a transaction can be obtained at the time of the payment or at a later time.
TransactionSearch: Searches across a range of transactions for certain criteria and returns a response. For example, find transactions based on date range, payment status, or information about the buyer for further research or for particular actions, like refunds.
RefundTransaction: Automates the refund process by accepting all parameters for a refund and performing the refund. With Refund API, allow your customer service representatives to process PayPal refunds the same way as they process credit card refunds.
(PayPal, 2007)
Business Benefit: PayPal service provides an effective, secure and speedy payment method, and it is easy to implement the PayPal service. In addition, its strong reputation enable the new users to purchase with complete confidence.
Web Services API
Click here to download the Web Services API Specification
Software Architecture
The benefits of an n-tier architecture for the PRP application is that by separating the application into multiple tiers allows the application to scale easier (www.adobe.com, accessed 08.01.2007), which is important to think about at the very beginning in developing a system of this complexity and size. The architecture can in the start be built on a single machine, and then expand to multiple servers later as the system scales, which is likely to happen to the PRP system. By separating the different functions of the system, the different developers and designers can focus on the tier that best suits their skill (www.adobe.com, accessed 08.01.2007). This means that the designers focus on the presentation tier and the database developers focus on the data tier of the system. It is also a benefit of the n-tier architecture that enables the different developers to work parallel on the system, since the different tiers are not dependant on each other (http://www.developerfusion.co.uk, accessed 08.01.2007).
Technological Challenges
The two most challenging technological factors affecting the success of our business regard the security of our system, and its complexity. These two challenges will now be discussed in detail.
Security
The security of our system is obviously of great importance because much of the data and information stored is extremely sensitive. The system will store personal information such as contact details, credit card information, bank details and income and so it is imperative that this information can only be accessed by authorised personnel.
The first level of security afforded to the PRP system is a general login to the system. This will require a username and password to be authenticated by the central server, allowing only permitted people to gain access to an individual PRP system. As well as the login to the PRP system, users may also need to log into other modules of their PRP such as email, Instant Messaging and bank account details.
As with many business systems, the information that requires the most security protection regards financial data and transactions.
For payments we receive from customers (for example from monthly subscriptions) we will use Paypal as they offer a simple and secure third party money transfer system. It will be relatively easy to incorporate the Paypal payment method into our internal systems so that customers are able to effortlessly pay us and we are able to receive continuous subscriptions with ease.
Web services differ to other information systems in that certain functions of the system are shared with other companies. We must strategically decide exactly which elements of the PRP system we will allow our partners access to. However we need to ensure we strike a balance because giving them too little information will result in ineffective working practices and too much information may afford external companies too much access to the internal workings of PRP and our value adding methods, hence effectively passing our competitive advantage to others outside of our control.
In the case of PRP we are passing our financial functions to E-Budget and advertising / marketing elements to P’LABY. With such sensitive information being passed to external entities it must be ensured that communication methods are highly secure.
The Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol can be used to help ensure communication between PRP and external partners is secure and free from eavesdropping and hacking.
Once a secure communication channel is achieved using the TLS protocol there must be a standard adopted to allow different systems to communicate web service elements. PRP will be using Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to communicate with external partners such as E-Budget and P’LABY. WSDL, which is based on the XML mark-up language, allows web services that vary in nature to effectively communicate with one another across a network, such as the internet. WSDL becomes the standard with which different systems must use in order to communicate effectively using XML.
PRP will be using WSDL to communicate with external partners across the internet. This, combined with TLS, allows for the efficient and secure transmission of necessary information.
The need to protect the PRP system from unauthorised access is most apparent. For this reason PRP will require security policies to protect against viruses and hacking attempts.
The PRP system will require up-to-date virus protection software to protect both internal servers and customers external terminals.
To prevent against hacker attacks the system will be password protected, as mentioned above, and communications to external parties will be protected using a firewall. Forum Systems (http://forumsys.com/products_xwall.htm) have recently released a firewall specifically for Web Services. Called ‘Forum X-Wall’, the firewall contains ‘XML intrusion prevention [technology] to actively protect against XML viruses, data corruption and denial of Web service attacks. Forum X-Wall ensures critical applications are appropriately accessible and continuously available by allowing network administrators to enforce perimeter policies that check the integrity of data and control access to exposed enterprise Web services’ (http://forumsys.com/products_xwall.htm, accessed 9th Jan 2007).
As with wired communication networks, we will need to ensure the security of wireless networks. However it is unlikely communications between ourselves and our external partners would be sent wirelessly. Wireless communication is much more likely to occur within the organisational boundaries and not across them. This means we will have to work with our partners, and provide guidelines for our customers, to guarantee that any wireless communication channels are secure.
We will also need to ensure that, as a company, we have the relevant insurance in the unlikely event any aspects of our system security is breached.
Complexity
With any large information system it becomes apparent that the troublesome factor of complexity will occur. With its many functional modules, data transfer interfaces and database transactions, our PRP system is an extremely complex and intricate application. The main reason that the complexity of our system should be considered a significant technological challenge concerns the ease of usability. A user will only allow a certain amount of time to learn how to use a new application. If a system becomes too complex user’s will not only find it difficult to learn to use primarily, but will also become frustrated with the time consuming complicated operations every time they use a system. Users will simply not adopt a new application if it is too troublesome to use. This is something we have to ensure does not happen with the PRP system.
These usability issues are focused upon in the work of Jakob Nielsen. His many academic studies focus upon the usability of e-business interfaces.
Nielsen states that there are five ‘quality components’ that define usability, namely Learnability, Efficiency, Memorability, Errors and Satisfaction.
Learnability
Learnability refers to how easy a user finds the system to use when they encounter it for the first time. It regards the ease with which the user can carry out basic tasks and perform simple operations when they have never used the system before.
Efficiency
Efficiency refers to how the user interacts with the system once they have learned how to use it. It regards the effectiveness with which the user can use the system once they have discovered how to use the system.
Memorability
Memorability regards how easy it is for the user to use the system when they haven’t been in contact with it for a significant period of time. It refers to how well the user ‘remembers’ how to perform basic functions on the system.
Errors
The number of errors a user makes is another indication of the effective usability of a specific system. The quantity and severity of errors and ease of recovery are all factors that should be considered.
Satisfaction
The user satisfaction of a system refers to how pleasant the system is to use. Satisfaction regards the design of the system, the user interface and the extent to which the user enjoys interacting with the system.
To guarantee our system is relatively easy to use we aim to overcome the technological challenge of complexity in several ways.
The most important method to guarantee the above five quality components are fulfilled as adequately as possible is to ensure that the system is usable and easy to use. This means creating an effective application that is considered easy to use including a user friendly Graphical User Interface and a useful help / troubleshooting section. To ensure these goals are met the system should be tested fully at every possible stage of the research and development process.
Nielsen advises monitoring a small number of people who will be using the system everyday and request that they perform ‘representative tasks’. He suggests watching the user interact with the system rather than listen to their suggestions and observe where they go wrong, how they rectify any errors they make and what they get right and get wrong.
We will therefore test the PRP system as often as possible during the development stage, asking a selection of potential users to test the system and we shall then observe how they work interact with it. Any relevant observations will be incorporated into the consequent development of the system and a continuous feedback loop will be achieved. This will result in PRP becoming a user-friendly application that fulfils the five quality components of usability set out by Nielsen.
