Social Media and the LDS Church

I've been preparing a class lesson on social media, and given that I teach at Brigham Young University - Hawaii, I've been reflecting on how the LDS (Mormon) Church has used social media (i.e., blogs, social networks, wikis, etc.)  over the last few years.


I think it's safe to recognize that one of the founding events in the Church's push into the social media space occurred at BYU Hawaii. Elder M. Russell Ballard of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (one of the governing bodies of the church), was speaking at the BYU Hawaii December 2007 Commencement exercises. His talk was titled Using New Media to Support the Work of the Church. In the talk, Elder Ballard spoke of a conversation going on about the Church. At the time a combination of events, including the candidacy of Mitt Romney in the US presidential election, had generated a lot of interest in the church.  News stories, blogs, and other media outlets were publishing stories about the church at an unprecedented rate. Within this context, Elder Ballard issued the following invitation:

                           Now, to you who are graduating today, and all other faithful members of the Church, and as you graduate from this wonderful university, may I ask you to join the conversation by participating on the Internet, particularly the New Media, to share the gospel and explain in simple, clear terms the message of Restoration. Most of you already know that if you have access to the Internet you can start a blog in minutes and begin sharing what you know to be true. You can download videos from the Church and other appropriate sites, including Newsroom at LDS-dot-org, and send them to your friends. You can write to media sites on the Internet that report on the Church, and voice your views as to the accuracy of the reports. This, of course, requires that you, all members of the Church, understand the basic, fundamental principles of the gospel. 

We are living in a world saturated with all kinds of voices, because now, more than ever, we have a major responsibility as Latter-day Saints to define ourselves instead of letting others define us. Far too many people have a poor understanding of the Church because most of the information they hear about us is from the news media reports that are often driven by controversies. Too much attention to controversy has a negative impact on peoples' perceptions of what The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints really is.

 Following that talk, a number of member-driven initiatives arose around the web.  But in this post, I'd like to review what the official social media efforts of the church have included.

Social Networks

Facebook

On April 24, 2008, the Church established it's first official page on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/LDS).

The Church would go on to develop over thirty official Facebook pages publishing in areas of inspirational messages, news of the Church, family history support, church magazine articles, aids for sharing the gospel, Church history, and much more. These don't include the 100+ Facebook communities created to help people connect and collaborate around family history work in different regions around the world.

The latest addition to these Facebook pages is a set of pages created for the members of The First Presidency and The Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the two highest governing bodies of the church.  These general authority pages have been recently established (within the last few weeks) so it remains to be seen how actively they will be updated, hopefully frequently. 

Twitter

Although the Church's Facebook presence has been the most extensive, ongoing efforts are underway on additional platforms. The Church established an official Twitter profile https://twitter.com/LDSchurch. Over one dozen official Twitter accounts publish news of the Church, inspirational messages, technology updates, and media resources. 

Google+

The Church has a growing presence on Google+ including pages for official, inspirational messages from the Church, news media announcements, multimedia programming from the Mormon Channel, and missionary updates from mormon.org. Unique to the Google+ list of pages is a Church Employment page, which shares general job tips as well as links to Church employment opportunities. Also unique to the Google+ effort is the creation of a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints community, created / administered by the official Google+ LDS Church account.  There are probably more active communities of church members on Google+, but I find in interesting that they're experimenting with this as well.

LinkedIn

While we're on the subject of employment resources, the Church has also devoted a lot of resources to developing presence on LinkedIn. These sites help in recruiting individuals for church employment and providing career planning and job search tips.  The Church's official linkedin.com page shares updates that mirror the postings on the Google+ employment opportunities account. Various departments within the Church sponsor their own linkedin.com pages or groups.

YouTube

Next, we should probably review the official Church efforts on YouTube. The Church has a number of channels on YouTube, but the most popular is arguably the Mormon Channel, featuring content from www.mormonchannel.org. Other popular channels include the mormon.org channel, featuring videos from the I am a Mormon campaign, music from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and family history helps from FamilySearch 

Pinterest

One recent addition to the handful of large social networks, at least in English speaking nations, is Pinterest.  The Church has a modest official presence on Pinterest, populated largely with images from the lds.org Media Library and videos from the Mormon Channel on YouTube. I have also noticed that the LDS Church Facebook account has started to share poster graphics with linked invitations to "Pin this image to Pinterest." 

Perhaps more significantly on Pinterest, the recently called General Young Women's President, Bonnie Oscarson, has a significant presence on Pinterest, with over 2500 pins, 47 boards, and 6,800 followers. 

Mormon.org

Recently, the Church has begun to add a social component to the www.mormon.org missionary website as well. In addition to providing standard content and multimedia that parallels the topics featured in the Preach My Gospel missionary lessons, the mormon.org staff now invite all members to create social profiles on mormon.org at www.mormon.org/create. Members can post brief descriptive profile pages of themselves along with their personal answers to frequently asked questions about the church. Their profiles can be searched by investigators and their answers can be read on their profile pages.  Selected answers are also embedded in related content across the www.mormon.org website.

lds.org/youth

In addition to these efforts, it appears the Church may be considering the development of more social interaction features among church members as well. The www.lds.org/youth website includes social features in which users with an lds account can "like" content and share their experiences or thoughts about articles and have their comments directly published at www.lds.org/youth. 

Blogs

The Church does not have a large official presence on the blogosphere. The official Church Public Affairs site, maintains its own blog (http://www.mormonnewsroom.org/blog/), featuring noteworthy events / activities by church members, messages from Church leaders that may be of interested to watchers of the Church, and occasional commentary. Managing Director of Public Affairs for the Church, Michael Otterson, regularly contributes, in his official capacity, to the OnFaith blog at the Washington Post. Another blog exists at http://tech.lds.org/, featuring updates and commentary about issues relating to Church sponsored efforts with technology.  I will review the LDS Tech website in more detail tomorrow in a post discussing the Church's use of wikis, crowdsourcing, etc. 

An Introduction to Linear Programming

Motivation for Today's Class

During my previous MIS course on Wednesday, we had a discussion about business process modeling based on students' experience playing IBM's Innov8 game (http://www.ibm.com/innov8).  During that class, we reviewed the basics of Business Process Modeling Notation and discussed some ways business process improvement can build on emerging technologies in supply chain management, call center management, and traffic control.  In the Innov8 simulation game, students were asked to revise business models and then to allocate resources to various paths within that model (e.g., determine the number of expensive high-skill call-center employees versus less expensive low-skill call-center employees. I asked the students how they approached this resource allocation problem, and they said they just kept playing with the numbers in the simulator, making random guesses until they got the desired results.  

I told the students there was a more systematic way of addressing these kinds of problems and asked if any of them had learned about linear programming in their other classes. They had not. So I decided to give them a linear programming introduction tutorial today. 

I had prepared a number of slides with pictures and some example problems, along with a graphing calculator utility on my macbook. However, I had problems getting my laptop to work with the in-room projector.  Thankfully, I understood the material well enough to work through the problems on the board without my slides.  

Linear Programming

I first went to the article, "Linear Programming: Managing with Constraints" from the Marriott Magazine that the students had been assigned to review prior to coming to class. The article is part of a larger set of tutorials to introduce math tools to managers.  The article's author states that linear programming is "arguably the most widely used mathematical tool in business management." I tried to underscore this principle with my students hoping to motivate them to learn this topic for more than just their grade in an IS course. 

Happy Trails

The tutorial begins with a profile of a company Happy Trails that produces a classic trail mix. They're weighing the option to launch a second line of trail mix with a larger proportion of dried fruit than their classic mix.  They need to figure out if it would be profitable to offer the two lines of trail mix and, if so, what proportion of classic mix vs. fruitylicious mix they should produce to maximize their profit. 

I told the students that this and the other example problems we would be looking at today all had the same structure: we are trying to optimize one function while working within a given set of constraints. I said it was like trying to go buy ice cream at Foodland for what seems like $12 a quart when you only have two dollars in your pocket. You need to know what you can and can't do with the resources you have available. 

That's all linear programming is: identifying the equations for the lines (hence the term linear in linear programming) and optimizing (finding the maximum or minimum value depending on the context) of a separate function using the points where the constraint lines intersect / overlap.  

We first set up the variables we'll use in this problem. 

Setup

Let x equal the number of classic packages produced. 

Let y equal the number of fruitilicious packages produced. 

Identify Constraint Equations

In the happy trails example, the constraints we have are the maximum ounces of peanuts we can use to produce trail mix (8x + 4y <= 20,000), the maximum ounces of dried fruit we can use to produce trail mix (6x + 10y <= 30,000), and the fact that we cannot produce a negative packet of either type of trail mix ( x >= 0, y >= 0). We could manually graph each of these lines and then determine the intersection points.  And that's just what I did on the white board.  But, I wanted to help my students see their responsibility is to understand the equations, not to spend all their time performing arithmetic.  On next Wednesday, we'll discuss how to use functions like SOLVER in spreadsheet programs to address these problems.  

Today, I showed the students how they could use Wolfram Alpha to solve these inequality constraints.  By typing in the following into the Wolfram Alpha search box, the students can graph the shape made by overlapping these functions: 

8x + 4y <= 20000, 6x + 10y <= 30000, x >= 0, y >= 0

Adding the profit optimization function to the Wolfram Alpha query, we can generate the coordinates at which we can maximize profit. We know from the article that each bag of classic mix (x) generates $1.50 profit and each back of fruitylicious (y) generates $1.00 of profit. Therefore, P = 1.5x + 1.0y. We, thus, enter the following into the Wolfram Alpha search box: 

8x + 4y <= 20000, 6x + 10y <= 30000, x >= 0, y >= 0, P = 1.5x + 1.0y

Wolfram Alpha generates the following solution: 

We see here three solutions to our inequalities. It's a little hard to read with the Re or the Im preceding each of the P's, but this is just Wolfram Alpha's way of dealing with complex numbers (made up of real and imaginary components).  I'm not sure where in the linear programming algorithm, things turn into complex numbers, but we'll gloss over that in this introduction.  In comparing this output with the solution in the Marriott Magazine article, we can see in this output the numbers included in the solute: 

• On the first line, we see that P <= 3000.  3,000 is the value of P assuming we produce 0 classic mixes and 3,000 fruitilicious mixes. 

• On the second line, we see that P <= 3750. This is the value of P assuming we produce 2,500 classic mixes and no fruitilicious mixes.  

• On the third line, we see that P < 30000 / 7 ( approx 4285). This is the value of P assuming we produce 1428.6 classic mixes and and 2142 fruitiliciouls 

Therefore, our solution is that we should produce 1428.6 classic mixes and 2142 fruitilicious mixes. 

Additional Practice Problems

We worked through additional linear programming exercises from www.purplemath.com.  We also discussed some of the assumptions related to linear programming and it's uses, business principles related to pricing products, selling products at a loss, and disruptive innovation. 

Business Process Modeling - An Introduction

IS 330 Class Reflection
March 16, 2011

Today in my management information systems class, we discussed business process improvement. Most of the students in my class are new to the concepts of business processes, so today's class focused on understanding what processes are, the difference between as-is and to-be processes, ideas for improving business processes, managerial considerations related to automation, and the role of information systems in business process improvement.

I started out with a brief discussion of what a process is (typically a sequence of steps for getting something done). I invited students to share some of their basic processes. We talked about different routines for getting started in the morning, cooking, getting products out of a vending machine, etc.

To illustrate the concept of business process improvement, I shared two different processes for preparing oatmeal for my family breakfast. One process followed a "one-piece flow" model -- each bowl was prepared individually in the microwave.  With eight people in our family, making breakfast was a rather drawn out process.  The second process was a batch flow process with a large batch of oatmeal being prepared in a pot and either distributed to a waiting row of bowls or stored as work-in-process inventory in a plastic container in the fridge.  I haven't timed it, but I tend to like the batch process better, since I usually finish getting the batch of breakfast prepared before the children have finished coming into the kitchen in the morning.  With the one-piece flow model, I feel like I'm stuck preparing food even while the first children have already finished eating. There's less time to sit over breakfast as a family that way.

We moved on from that topic to identifying problems in business processes, focusing on inefficiencies and inconsistencies in the process. Inefficient processes are those that are not completed in a timely manner.  Excessive delays, impatient customers, long lines, and long hold times are all indicators of inefficient processes.  Inconsistent or unreliable processes are those that have variable results due to variations in the process.  In today's economy customers often expect a uniform product or service experience.  I don't expect a cheeseburger at McDonald's in Laie to taste any different from a cheeseburger at McDonald's in Honolulu. Inconsistent quality leaves customers guessing whether they'll receive appropriate service at any given time.

We can look to improve business processes by identifying bottlenecks / choke points, evaluating the order in which activities are carried out, and minimizing task switching.

We also discussed ways that information systems can help improve business processes. Simply automating processes can dramatically improve efficiency. In addition to automating repetitive portions of a process, computer software and hardware can also enforce a well-defined process by constraining the user behavior. Innovative uses of information systems frequently involve transforming or improving business processes in ways that improve the quality of the product / service along with improving the efficiency or reliability of a business process.

During our class discussion, we also gave some consideration to ethical issues regarding automation, trying to balance the benefits of increased efficiency (i.e., lower costs, more customers served) with the same or better levels of quality.  We drew on business scenarios at the Polynesian Cultural Center, Amazon.com, various manufacturing facilities, and fast-food restaurants, and BYU-Hawaii to bring context into this discussion.

Transformations and Trend Lines

I'm teaching a Management Information Systems course for business students this semester, and we're starting a discussion tomorrow about technology trends including the famous Moore's Law -- the observation by an Intel engineer that the number of transistors on a microcontroller chip was effectively doubling every 18 months.  I want my students to understand what that kind of a growth function means, so I put together a spreadsheet tutorial for them. In it, I walk them through a simple example of linear regression using the LINEST function with some linear data.  

I then have them use some data from Intel to plot out the nearly exponential trend in their transistor density growth.  I show them how to use the LN function to perform a natural log transformation on the exponential data to make it more linear so that we can use LINEST to calculate a linear model. I then compare the results of that linear model with the output of the LOGEST function. The emphasis here is to show that the slope of the linear model is the same as the natural log of the growth factor b in the equation y = a * b^x.  I then discuss how we can approximate the doubling rate by dividing 70 by the growth rate. In this example, the growth rate is about 34% per year, which results in a doubling every 2.05 years. 

UPDATE: The link I had previously somehow was missing a page of instructions. The revised materials are available at http://public.iwork.com/document/?a=p50683115&d=Transformations_and_TrendLines_Tutorial.pages