Here are my simple tips in writing the abstract. Just follow this table, and walla your abstract is completed.
It is the simplest way so far and yet very structured (in my opinion)
Motivation
Problem
objective
Method
Result
significant
example:
Motivation
Recent studies show that tax compliance is closely related with tax return process. If the electronic tax system can provide an efficient and fast tax return process, the tax compliance rate will significantly be improved.
Problem
However, the existing tax systems were designed solely with tax functional requirement and lack of tax strategy and business considerations. Hence it become a passive transactional system that serve as the end-point tax payer data that finally lead to tax payer non-compliance.
objective
Therefore, this paper shall investigate how EA approach can be a potential solution in managing the income tax compliance rate issues in Malaysia.
Method
This study proposed to create a hybrid EA framework influenced by TOGAF, Ishikawa Diagram and MyGovEA.
Result
As a result, a ‘To-Be’ Architecture of Malaysian Tax Return Process is proposed based on five considerations obtained from ‘As-Is’ analysis earlier on.
significant
This paper concludes that the tax compliance rate can potential be improved if the tax agency able to align the strategy, business process and tax systems together
One of the most daunting but critical tasks for business owners is to balance the many sources of data that can help guide decision-making. Irrespective of the size of a company, understanding what matters to your long-term success, and what’s dragging down your growth, is essential.
For early-stage businesses, data may be scarce and expensive to attain, but businesses must make informed decisions. No one likes leaving money on the table, but worse is not knowing to change it.
Balancing Costs With Returns
Simple mistakes happen to every business owner. Because we’re constantly saturated with data, it’s hard to know what to pay attention to, or how to measure tradeoffs like payment-processing costs and cardholder behaviour.
For instance, if I’m an American Express cardholder, and business owners tell me all the time, “We don’t take AmEx; the processing fees are higher.” That seems like a straightforward cost-saving measure, except for potential AmEx customers you’re turning off or turning away. Any form of payment you don’t accept could be money walking out the door. The question is, how much?
Even if they buy from you anyway, AmEx cardholders spend statistically more when they use their preferred card. They’re more likely to pay a convenience premium, more likely to buy higher-margin “unlimited” plans and monthly subscriptions. With your attention focused on saving in processing costs, you might be sacrificing some of your most lucrative potential customers.
Know What to Measure, and Then Measure It
For a brief period, Kabbage paid for more seat licenses for our CRM than we had employees who talked to customers. The company was scaling so fast that different teams bought separate licenses or bought more for new hires, and no one had noticed. No one was able to check the vendor costs against what we were using. Only once we hired someone to go through the mountains of vendor data did we see how much we’d been overpaying. Consolidating just that set of CRM licenses saved us more than that individual’s salary.
There were other things we could have learned and money we could have saved if we had been regularly reviewing the data. We launched several time-consuming, tech-intensive partnerships that didn’t pay off for us, but at the time no one was analyzing the return on investment. We were too busy to sift through it with any precision. We have since moved on to some even more meaningful opportunities, but those earlier projects improved how we measure initiatives today.
I see young salon owners and restaurateurs who are determined to have a sparkling social media presence. They hire professional photographers, invest in splashy ads, spend hours replying to every review and comment with diligent cheer. They don’t have a clear idea of whether that platform is reliably bringing in new and repeat business. Knocking yourself out on something that doesn’t improve measurable outcomes is worse than useless: It’s wasteful.
If you could ask that earnest socially-focused entrepreneur if their efforts are paying off, you can ask the right questions about every part of your business. What data could tell you if the investment is paying off? Do you have it? Can you get it? Is someone reviewing it? Once you know, are you acting on it?
Too Much Input? Focus on Outcomes
You might not be ready to hire a data guy–at least not yet–and information is coming at you fast. So stick to your core concerns. Your high-level task is to monitor outcomes: the real-time health of your business.
Compare the distribution of your costs (where you’re spending time and money) over the distribution of your revenue (money coming in). Is it worth it to stay open on Saturdays? The data will tell you. Are a few clients always demanding your time but not building your bottom line? They’re not worth it. Let them go.
Every business is different and you know yours best. But when the data shows you distractions and diversions–big costs that aren’t improving outcomes–it’s time to invest in change.
Accepting the extra point on AmEx processing fees, reviewing vendor license contracts for savings, scaling back on social: These small choices might not seem like they would impact the long-term outcomes of your business, but they do. When you’re deluged with data stories and feedback, you must compare new information against your core goals, and then be willing to follow those findings to improve your business’s health. Data-driven insights can tell you what’s working toward your goals and what’s holding you back.
Phishing scams that infect a computer and potentially allow hackers to invade bank and other accounts are highly preventable — but it takes eternal vigilance on the part of computer users.
Even small business owners or employees who think they’re careful about clicking on links and attachments in emails — the tools phishing scammers use — can be tricked and find their computers have been invaded. They may also have given cyber thieves access to bank and other accounts. Cybercriminals have become increasingly crafty and sophisticated with emails that look realistic.
Owners need to educate and keep reminding staffers about the dangers of clicking on the wrong things.
Some tips to avoid getting caught in a phishing scam:
Be wary of any link or attachment.
Unless it’s clear from the context of an email that the link or attachment is OK — for example, your attorney has sent you the sales contract you expected in a Microsoft word document, or a staffer writes, “here’s the link to the website we discussed at our meeting this morning” — assume that clicking could get you in trouble. Be particularly suspicious of emails about package shipments, invoices or that ask for personal information, logins and passwords. An unexpected email from the IRS is a scam; the agency does not initiate contact with a taxpayer via email, phone calls, texts or social media.
Check the email address.
Even if the email comes from someone you know, double-check the address it’s from. Cybercriminals can take an email and make subtle changes — for example, replacing an “m” with an “r” and an “n” that you might not notice unless you look closely at it.
Confirm with the sender that they sent you a legitimate email.
If you get an unexpected email with a document or a link, check with the sender. But don’t click on “reply” or copy the email address — call or send a separate email, using an address you know is correct.
Consider restricting staffers’ use of personal email browsers on work PCs.
A staffer who clicks on a link or attachment in a personal email can infect the company machine or system. If staffers can’t read their email, it can reduce a company’s vulnerability.
Many CEOs live in fear that their companies will suffer a data breach. That’s for good reason: In 2019 the average breach of U.S. companies cost $73,000. And the cost of the attendant reputational damage with vendors and customers can be far greater.
It’s probably no surprise, then, that in a recent Inc. survey, senior executives said their two greatest worries on a wide-ranging list of technology-related developments were having sensitive data stolen and being the victim of a ransomware attack. Some respondents know the pain firsthand–8 per cent said their company has experienced a breach within the past two years, while 12 per cent say they’ve experienced one in the past five years. With that in mind, Inc. spoke with cybersecurity experts to find out the latest when it comes to company breaches.
The first thing they made clear is that the 12 per cent figure is probably low since there is likely an increasing number of breaches that companies aren’t aware of and don’t report. Something that might play into that: hackers’ new methods of choice.
More than half of all breaches last year were not performed using malware, according to a January report from cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike. That’s important because malware often is easily detectable. Increasingly, hackers are finding ways to access your company’s network using its existing systems, like logging on with an employees’ stolen credentials, says Shawn Henry, Crowdstrike chief security officer.
“More time undetected means more success for them,” Henry says, noting that the average adversary spent 95 days in an organization’s network before being detected, up from 85 days a year ago. “It’s similar to why you go for a colonoscopy, or you go to the dermatologist to be checked for unusual marks. It’s preventive maintenance. If something is there for months or years undetected, you’re in trouble.”
Gone phishing
Hackers can find their way into your system in several ways, with phishing scams being one of the most prevalent. These attacks are becoming more sophisticated, according to Joseph Steinberg, author of Cybersecurity for Dummies and a former Inc. columnist.
In some cases, a hacker might spoof the email address of an executive, send a note telling employees they’ve been laid off, and instruct them to log onto the network as soon as possible to fill out a form to receive their severance. The employees then click a link to their company’s network and, not realizing it’s a fake, enter their usernames and passwords. Suddenly, the hackers have a working set of login credentials–or many of them.
What’s more, now hackers are more often studying a company’s personnel and learning their manner of speaking by email before spoofing them, Steinberg says. They’ll glean personal information through the social media accounts of executives or their family members to find out, say, that they’re about to head off on vacation.
“Then they send a message to the CFO that sounds real and say, ‘I’m getting on my flight to Disneyland, so don’t bother calling me. Just take action.’ ” Suddenly, an employee is sending sensitive information–or even a wire payment–to a bad actor.
“Phishing 10 or 15 years ago was a shotgun,” Steinberg says. “I’m going to fire out hundreds of shells and hopefully some of them hit the target, whereas this is much more like a rifle. I’m trying to get this one person, but I’m hitting with a much more accurate and stronger attack.”
Shifting your mindset
Though it’s detectable once it’s in your system, malware is infiltrating more discreetly than ever before. Last year saw a trend away from the use of malware in email attachments–which many employees have learned to recognize as a red flag–and toward links instead, according to cybersecurity firm Proofpoint. “The increasing prevalence of cloud applications and storage means that we are all conditioned to click through links to view, share, and interact with a variety of content,” the company wrote in a December report.
Adversaries increasingly are using URL shorteners to make links in emails appear legitimate, the firm says. Hackers sometimes use URLs that are just one character different than the real thing, like a letter with a line under it, which is tough to spot in the hyperlinked text, according to Steinberg.
The best ways to combat hackers
So how to prevent against all this? While companies need to make sure they invest in cybersecurity measures, of course, the experts offer additional tips.
1. Make sure all employees are properly trained and educated.
Have procedures in place for everything, Steinberg says. “And those procedures don’t go away just because the CEO is getting on a flight to Miami,” he says.
2. Get help from your rivals.
Share information about attacks to competitors in your industry with the hopes that they’ll do the same, Henry advises. “It’s understanding that if they targeted my transportation company this week, they’re going to target your transportation company next week,” he says. “Let’s share this intelligence with you so that you can better protect yourselves.”
3. Never think you’re immune.
Perhaps most important is understanding that your company can become a target, no matter how small or how secure, Steinberg says. “When that mindset changes from, ‘Nobody would be interested in hacking me’ to ‘I’m sceptical about everything that comes to me because I know criminals are targeting me,’ it changes the way you react,” he says. “It changes the way you do lots of things so that these types of attacks become a lot less likely to succeed.”
Projection of the future state of Enterprise Architecture should be considered as compulsory and aligned to business needs. EA should be able to create lineage to each of the EA parts to get the business values and by developing the Future State EA, it can articulate the impact and value of the current state.
Organisations should develop a high-level implementation approach on how to derive the Future State EA and Gap Analysis through the following activities:
1) Gather insights and information from the relevant key stakeholders through Visioning Workshops to be used in developing Future State EA.
2) Analyse the Current State EA of IT landscape and conduct Gap Analysis by identifying areas that are not being addressed in the Current State of EA.
3) Assess and propose the medium-to-long term EA realization that includes work packages to transit towards the Future State EA which includes the detailed EA Plan with a 3-5 years’ timeframe to define the target for business, data, application, and technology architecture.
4) Develop Future State EA that complies with EA principles, standards and policies to support the transition architecture towards realising the Digital Strategy.
The Future State EA should be aligned with organisations’ business objectives and values. The current EA baseline needs to be reviewed and analyse as well as identifying the gaps for areas that are not being addressed in the Current State to realise the Future State EA by utilising the EA Gap Analysis Matrix as depicted in the diagram that helps to highlight opportunities that need to be grasped.
Figure 1: EA Gap Analysis Matrix
From the selection of principles, standards, policies and outcomes of gap analysis, the production of Architecture Views can help to represent Future State EA based on the EA Metamodel which is part of the EA Framework. The Architecture View and artefacts shall be stored in the Digital EA Repository which will include all the architecture domains (business, data, application and technology) and also examines all the relevant states of architecture (Current State, Transition and Target State EA).
A Transition Architecture shows the enterprise at an architecturally significant state between the Current State and Future State Architectures. The Transition Architectures are used to describe transitional Future State Architectures necessary for the effective realisation of the Future State Architecture.
The outcome of Gap Analysis and Future State EA is used to derive the Architecture Requirements that are crucial to be served as an input for the solutioning and implementation phases as part of the various Transformation Project initiatives. Organisations will be able to see the ‘future’ clearly when knowing exactly what success the enterprise architecture will bring to the business. The future state EA will bring organisations the improvement that they want to see.
original article by
Aaron Tan Dani
President of Singapore Computer Society EA-Chapter aarontan@scs.org.sg
In 2013, AHS Consulting founder Amna Shah started boosting her business’s presence on Facebook. She and her employees worked to build out a page with information about the Chattanooga, Tennessee-based company and posted new content multiple times a week. To attract potential customers, staffers crafted ads and paid to boost the exposure of posts.
Shah knew consumer-facing brands may be better suited for Facebook’s advertising and paid marketing, but assumed hers, too, could find an audience. Some existing customers interacted with the brand and likes piled up. But Shah says no one new from Chattanooga or the nearby Atlanta region seemed to be finding her consulting firm through the platform–only some individuals from India and China.
“Over time, we started to think these were fake profiles,” she says. “We got no new business out of Facebook, ever.” Halfway through 2018, the company stopped putting effort into Facebook marketing.
Shah is far from alone. In a November survey, Inc. asked CEOs and other high-ranking executives from fast-growing companies what they think about Facebook from a business perspective. Thirty-two per cent said they are now getting less for their marketing dollars with Facebook than they used to, while 27 per cent said they mistrust Facebook’s use of their business data. In follow-up interviews, several of the survey takers said they have slowed their use of Facebook marketing and advertising. A few, meanwhile, have pulled the plug altogether.
Shannon Hulbert, the CEO of Opus Interactive, a cloud-services provider in Hillsboro, Oregon, had been spending hundreds of dollars a month on Facebook advertising but said her company cut back dramatically in 2018. The following year Opus removed Facebook from its marketing budget entirely. The social network had stopped driving business, Hulbert says, as Opus had itself grown to cater to much larger businesses.
Moira Vetter, the founder and CEO of Modo Modo Agency in Atlanta, says a decade ago it felt like every business needed to be on Facebook and Twitter. Recently though, her creative agency–an Inc. 5000 honoree the past three years–has shifted its focus to producing content and promoting its work on Instagram and LinkedIn. “I feel that Facebook has run its course,” she says. “It’s not somewhere people in our industry are spending time. It’s become less and less of something I even think or talk about.”
Bubba Grimsley says he’d just cut off his Fairhope, Alabama-based company Liberty Rent’s Facebook presence in November, due to concerns about data privacy within his industry, which works with real-estate rentals and financing. “I don’t even know why we were doing it,” he says of the company’s Facebook efforts, which included paying to boost the exposure of its content. “I don’t think I was finding any customers.”
For years Facebook has poured energy into targeting and educating small businesses, growing a team of publicists and outreach employees. As of 2018, more than 140 million businesses globally used Facebook, at least 90 million of which were small and midsize businesses, according to the company. Veronica Twombly, the head of communications for Facebook Small Business, says SMBs are a “top priority” for the platform.
“We are trying to elevate our free and paid solutions to make sure these small- and medium-size businesses know all of the tools at their disposal to help grow their customers,” Twombly tells Inc. The company offers digital training for businesses and held more than 100 in-person training sessions in the United States in 2019.
Facebook in the past has acknowledged the growing cost of its advertising for business, even as user growth has slowed. Finance chief David Wehner said in an investor conference call that in the fourth quarter of 2017 alone, the average price per ad climbed 43 per cent, while the number of ad impressions served increased just 4 per cent. Still, Twombly says the company is continuing to see growth in monthly active advertisers.
Several of the executives who told Inc. they have stopped advertising on Facebook over the past year were from business-to-business companies, which often can find customers more reliably on LinkedIn or through other marketing channels. But others outside of the B2B realm have followed suit. One example is Jack Wight, the founder of an electronics reseller that advertised aggressively to individuals on Facebook in 2018 but pulled the plug on the effort the following year.
“We weren’t making any money on those people by the time we paid for the advertising,” says Wight, the chief executive of Buyback Boss, which is based in Tempe, Arizona. “The marketing cost was just higher than the other channels.”
Wight estimates his company spent about $20,000 on Facebook ads over a year, before giving up on Facebook about seven months ago. For 2020, his company is using a strategy of SEO and Adwords to find people who type in, for example, “sell my iPhone 10” on Google.
A Buyback Boss employee who had been handling the company’s Facebook presence and advertising now focus on search marketing. Wright says he’s open to resuming ad spending on Facebook–but only after he’s scaled the other marketing channels he’s found more effective.
“We put some money into it, we risked some money to experiment,” he says, “and it just didn’t work.”
Figure 1: EA Gap Analysis Matrix
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