SIT113 – Cloud Computing and Virtualization
Activity 1
Product Innovation Charter (PIC)
Product innovation charter can be regarded as guiding document which serves the purpose of informing about the wider role of innovation for customers as well as for the organization. The following product innovation charter has been prepared for Goodle, which is providing services to education providers for sharing of learning resources with students. The innovation is aimed to enrich the services of Goodle and detail is presented in PIC.
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Background Goodle is already aiding education providers to support the learning of students, yet need of this PIC is aimed to provide information about new services, which will be added to enhance learning experience of students and to improve satisfaction of students. The increasing trend of distant learning and enhanced focus on web based communications and material sharing for both traditional and distant teaching creates need for interactive communication platform. The inclusion of video meeting, webinar features and chat rooms availability will enrich the service portfolio of Goodle and will enhance ease of educators to support learning of students. |
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Focus Technology Dimension: An online space that offers opportunity to students for engaging in shared and interactive learning experience, through online meetings and real time discussion rooms. The webinar will be supported even with low bandwidth to offer high quality experience to consumers. Security and privacy features of the platforms will be enhanced. Market Dimension: Market has substantial need for interactive platform where both teachers and students can get engage in conversations through interactive platforms. Group conversations through video meetings and chat rooms are appreciated by education providers and students to get engage in shared learning. Physical spaces are no longer making up core platforms to engage students with learning and online spaces are making up new reality of technologically advanced communities. Thus, need for online interactive learning platforms is regarded as emerging aspect of modern society. The services of webinar and chatrooms availability are both interactive as well as remote to support learning of students. |
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Goals/ Objectives · To ensure engagement of students with each other · To bring feature of two way communication through webinar and chatrooms · To ensure interactions among students, such that they can support learning of each other · To bring improvement in learning of students · To improve team communication and social skills of students by engaging them in online conversations |
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Guidelines The provision of innovative services through webinar and chat rooms will not lower the quality of Goodle and it will be supported with low bandwidth. The slowdown of web portal should not be witnessed followed by introduction of new service features. The provision of services will be cost effective and can be supported through existing subscription plans |
Description of Product Concept
Product Concept Statement: Introduction of webinar/ video meetings and chat rooms services to the clients of Goodle, such that shared learning, collaboration, engagement and real time communication among multiple individuals can be made easy and learning of students can be enhanced.
The new product concept of Goodle incorporates three key attributes of the product, which are form, technology and benefit;
Form
The new services which will be offered to customers include the webinar or meetings, as well as provision of chat rooms, which will allow students to enter into group discussions with one another for enhancement of shared learning. This service will be provided to education providers by creating feature of virtual meetings and discussion chat rooms. The video meeting feature of Goodle will the capacity to add 100 to 200 participants in the video meeting, which will meet the need of educators who have large number of students in specific course. The availability of extremely high quality video capacity and large number of participants in video meeting will be assured to clients on subscription.
Technology
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have developed substantially over the years and these technologies aid the creation of interactive platforms (Lyytinen, Yoo and Boland, 2016). The two technology elements which will assure provision of high quality video meeting and chat services to clients are; cloud network and video architecture. The cloud network will develop multiple data centers, which will assure to deal with the load of data on network and thus easy connectivity will be offered to end users. The meetings as well as chat rooms will be based on distributed architecture, whereby data will be distributed over the whole network to provide high quality video and chat features to the clients and end users. The multi-layer security system will serve as the way to provide privacy and end to end encryption of all video meeting and chats. The privacy and security of users will be preserved effectively and thus information can be shared among students with greater ease and comfort.
Benefit
With the rise of technology, interactive platforms are highly needed by education providers to enhance learning of students through virtual means (Kostarikas, Varlamis and Giannakoulopoulos, 2016). The online and interactive platforms to share learning material and for promoting communication are desired by both traditional education providers as well as by distant education providers. The proliferation of online learning has been witnessed in contemporary era of technological advancement and institutes who offer online learning are in need of interactive platforms (Horvath, Thomessen and Sziebig, 2018). Although, learning material sharing is made possible by existing features of Goodle, yet new features will enhance service diversity by allowing educators to communicate and interact with students through video meeting and webinars. Additionally, in spite of using e-mail communication to individually approach the educators, online chat room feature will offer service to both students and teachers, for maintaining two way communication with each other .
Additionally, the team engagement is not only the feature of contemporary workplaces, but it should be the key feature of learning for students as well, which creates high demand for learning portal that offers prospects of group engagement. Shared learning is viewed as extremely important in fast pace world of technology and students want handy solutions to approach their learning sources along with engaging in conversations with peers, such that learning prospects can be enhanced. The engagement with team and peers will be encouraged through webinar and online chat room services of Goodle. Students can set video meeting for discussing about any group based activities or can simply get engage in group studies. The chat room can also be used for the purpose of group communication in informal way. It will allow students to enhance their communication and social skills, along with enhancement of their learning. Therefore, the innovation in existing service base of Goodle is expected to deliver substantial benefits to both education providers as well as to students.
Barriers to Creativity
One barrier which was faced during idea generation process was linked with notion of social cohesion. There were strong ties among the group members, which acts as restricting factor in the way of creativity (Chen et al., 2019). For instance, willingness to challenge the opinion of other was limited which has reduced the aspect of criticality and thus creativity was hindered. However, longer discussions and too much push on group members to brain storm the idea, has somehow helped in overcoming the issue.
Another barrier was witnessed with respect to support from management. The management was too concerned about the risk involved with any new idea, in spite of expected outcomes which could be generated. It can be noted that existing innovation is merely an incremental innovation and not a disrupted or breakthrough innovation. The cause of this is lack of support from the top management (Danneels, 2002), which served as hindrance in way to creativity.
The acceptability for complexity was limited among the team, which was also a barrier. The limited knowledge about the technology which can help in introducing new services in the form of video meetings and chat rooms has also restricted the process. However, aggressive research has enabled the acquisition of knowledge about technology and led to acceptability among team.
Activity 2
Attributes of Service
Features: The service of video meeting and chat rooms have followed key features which are likely to provide substantial benefit to end users;
- HD quality of video for virtual meetings and webinars
- High quality voice offers smooth voice during both video as well as audio meetings
- View only attendee feature is available when anyone is not free to attend the video meeting
- Recording of video and audio meeting for latter user
- Group creation feature allows to create groups for video meetings and chats
- Supported by both iOS and Andriod based mobile devices
- Screen sharing is possible in new services
- The voice detection feature of Goodle will allow the users to recognize the voice of communicator
- Access to white board is enabled for educators to provide online lecture
- Admin features can be used to control flow of information during large group meetings and chats
Functions: In order to use web based interactive platform of Goodle, customers need to setup their accounts in Goodle on their desktops, laptops, tablets or mobiles. The clients will be able to use hosting the meeting feature of Goodle to initiate video meeting and can send meeting IDs to other people, whom they want to be the part of video meeting. The persons receiving invitation to join the meeting can then use the same meeting invitation code to join the video meeting session. The individuals can choose to use their video cameras, or might turn it off based on their ease. Additionally, the users can also choose to share their screen by using the share screen feature. In order to use the chat rooms, the user can go to chat room from menu and can members in the group to initiate chat. Anyone can quit the chat based on their will. Additionally, both the teachers as well as students can create permanent group within their Goodle account, such that any video meeting or chat invitation can be shared with group, instead of choosing individual participants for each meeting.
Benefits: The video meeting and webinar will greatly benefit both educators as well as students, as they will be able to communicate in real time through HD video feature and high quality voice features of Goodle. If any student is not available to join the meeting, then benefit can be obtained from ‘view only attendee’ feature of Goodle, whereby recording of video meeting can be saved to view later.
The feature of voice recognition will benefit educators, as they will able to keep track of class participation by students. Any students who are not contributing, can be encouraged further. Additionally, in group projects, students can also benefit from this feature.
The feature of group creation for future use will save time for teachers, who want to engage into video meeting session with all students. Likewise, while working on group projects, this feature will be highly beneficial for students as well. For instance, if five people are chosen to form a group for working on project, then they can create group on Goodle to communicate and collaborate about the project progress. The same is beneficial for students who want to get engage in group studies and want to collaborate with each other.
Along with group chats and video meetings, private chats and meetings can also be arranged and information sharing is highly secure. The documents sharing is highly easy and data can be stored for later use. Finally, online lecture delivery is made easy by offering the feature of gaining access to white board, which allows the educators to mimic physical class room settings.
Determinant Gap Map
The determinant gap map for innovative services of Goodle can be seen n figure 1. The two key differentiating attributes which are being used to assess the gap in existing market are; shared learning and video quality. The selection is based on the notion that consumers are highly concerned about quality of video in meetings with multiple audiences (Horvath, Thomessen and Sziebig, 2018). Likewise, the aspect of shared learning is important to be promoted through virtual meetings, webinars and chat rooms. It can be seen that three gaps are identified through exploration of market. The chosen gap that will be covered by Goodle is located where both video quality and shared learning will be high. The selection of this gap is based on the notion that there are multiple available substitutes and end users only need a solution that can offer both attributes.
Activity 3
Describe the importance of the testing phase
With globalized market orientation, competition is getting intense and survival of businesses is assured through availability of high quality, differentiated and usable products to customers (da Luz et al., 2018). Through reflection of historical instances of innovation, it has been revealed that any well planned innovative product can also have some issues, which could cause negative impression of the product among consumers (Kim and Mazumdar, 2016). In order to avoid failure of innovative product/service, it is important to test the product prior to its launch in the target market (Li, Peng and Cui, 2017). It has been highlighted by Zhang, Cao and Doll (2019) that key aim of product use testing is to identify any flaws and issues with the product, which can be addressed before product launch and thus better version of product is offered to the potential customers.
Additionally, testing phase might help to identify the reaction of customers for different features and attributes of the product. The decision of feature retention or elimination might be made as result of product testing. The feedback from customers can be obtained through beta testing and thus usability as well as success prospects of the product can be improved followed by testing (Visnjic, Wiengarten and Neely, 2016). Moreover, as aligned with the views of Wowak et al. (2016) if any flawed products or services are introduced to end users without testing their benefits and usability, then customers might lose their trust from specific product or service provider. In this case, it can become difficult to restore the trust of customers, even after improving the features and attributes of the specific product. Therefore, it is highly important to assure that product use testing is performed prior to formal launch of product, such that any flawed products are not handed over to consumers and trust of customers is not lost.
Describe suitable user group (or groups) to test your product/ Service?
The education providers within Australia who have already purchased subscription of Goodle for sharing learning resources with students will mainly be the suitable user group to the test new service features of Goodle. However, prior to performing the testing of service, some criteria will be used to select the education providers who are most suitable for testing, as it assures success of testing (Santos et al.,2017). For instance, the education providers must be using Goodle for more than one year and has substantial experience with existing features and services of Goodle that any differential service can be assessed by them with effectiveness.
Additionally, the education providers must deliver their consent to be the part of testing group. They should be in need of new features of Goodle. If any education provider shows little concern with video meeting features and are not willing to use shared learning features for their students, then they will not be chosen as user group for testing the new services of Goodle. The total of three clients will be chosen to form the user group for testing and they will be required to engage in continuous conversation with the company’s representatives. The continuity of feedback will be demanded from the target user group.
Describe the type of product use test (or tests) that would be suitable to test your product/ Service
In order to test the effectiveness of innovative services of Goodle, both alpha as well as beta testing will be performed. The reasons for implying both testing methods is based on the notion that alpha testing can help in early detection of any bugs in video meeting and chat room features of the Goodle, while beta testing enables recognition of consumer reaction (Najafi-Tavani et al., 2018). For instance, quality of video is one concern and it is expected that quality might be affected when number of individuals in video meeting will increase. In order to check this aspect, in-house testing will serve the purpose, where video meetings will be organized within the organization through encouragement of voluntary contribution of organizational members. In case of any issue with video quality, the process can be re-assessed and changes in architecture, cloud networks or data distribution can be made to further enhance the quality of video. The same can be done to assess the usability and quality of chat rooms service. It is likely that process of alpha testing will be performed repeatedly, until the desired level of quality can be reached. The quality of video is just one example of the benefits which will be tested.
On the other hand, beta testing will also be performed as second phase of testing, followed by completion of alpha testing. The beta testing will be carried out with more refined and improved services, as result of alpha testing. In order to perform beta testing, Goodle will collaborate with its three clients, who are using Goodle services for distribution of learning material with students. These clients will be provided with early version of Goodle on free trial of one week. The representative product development team of Goodle will continually engage with clients to help them using the new services and they will be encouraged to provide feedback on regular basis. The feedback of these clients will serve as the way to assess that whether new services deliver intended benefits to client. Any discrepancy will be used as referral for further improving the services.
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References
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