Chapter One: Business Driven Technology Review Questions

What is the relationship between data, information, business intelligence, and knowledge?

By utilizing data, information, business intelligence, and knowledge together, these can help decrease misunderstandings. These four core drivers of the information age are the building blocks of business systems and are used to make decisions and solve problems to achieve business success.

How does systems thinking support business operations?

Ensuring the input, process, and output of goods and services work across all of the departments of a company is where systems add tremendous value to overall business productivity. Systems thinking is a way of monitoring the entire system by viewing multiple inputs being processed or transformed to produce outputs while continuously gathering feedback on each part. Systems thinking provides us with an end-to-end view of how operations work together to create a product or service.

Identify the different types of human-generated data.

Input data Click-stream data Gaming data

What is the difference between price and cost?

Price is the amount charged by a seller or manufacturer or service provider for the goods or services they deliver to their customer. The price of a product includes the profit of the seller. Cost is the expense incurred by the seller in delivering the product or service to the buyer. Profit = Price - Cost

How does a business use data to improve decision making?

Successful managers compile, analyze, and comprehend massive amounts of data daily, which helps them make more successful business decisions.

What are the six common departments of a company and what are they responsible for?

1. Accounting: Records, measures, and reports monetary transactions. 2. Finance: Tracks strategic financial issues including money, banking, credit, investments, and assets. 3. Human Resources: maintains policies, plans, and procedures for the effective management of employees. 4. Marketing: Supports sales by planning, pricing, and promoting goods or services. 5. Operations Management: manages the process of converting or transforming resources into goods or services 6. Sales: performs the function of selling goods or services.

What are the core drivers of the information age?

1. Data 2. Information 3. Business Intelligence 4. Knowledge

What value can a company gain by analyzing additional variables such as the stock market or gas prices?

A variable is a data characteristic that stands for a value that changes or varies over time. Changing variables allows managers to create hypothetical scenarios to study future possibilities. Analyzing additional variables such as the stock market or gas prices may give the company information in whether to increase or decrease prices for their products to continue to make a profit.

What is data?

Data are raw facts that describe the characteristics of an even or object. Types of data --> structured data, machine-generated data, human-generated data, unstructured data

What is the difference between data and big data?

Data are raw facts that describe the characteristics of an event or an event or object. Structured data has a defined length, type, and format and includes numbers, dates, or strings such as Customer Address. Structured data is typically stored in a traditional system such as a relational database or spreadsheet and accounts for about 20 percent of the data that surrounds us. Unstructured data is not defined and does not follow a specified format and is typically free-form text such as emails, Twitter tweets, and text messages. Unstructured data accounts for about 80 percent of the data that surrounds us. Big data is a collection of large complex data sets, including structured and unstructured data, which cannot be analyzed using traditional database methods and tools.

When discussing MIS, it is important to understand the difference between data and information. If you were building a system to track inventory around a classroom, identify what would be data and what would be information.

Data might include chair manufacturer, chair color, and chair size. Information might include number of chairs required for students in each class, average number of chairs needed to be replaced each semester.

Why is data important?

In the information age, successful managers compile, analyze, and comprehend massive amounts of data daily, which helps them make more successful business decisions. When lacking data, managers often found themselves making business decisions about how many products to make, how much material to order, or how many employees to hire based on intuitions or gut feelings.

What is one of the most important assets in an organization?

Information is one of the most important assets in an organization, and the primary way that people get information is through information technology.

What i MIS and what role does it play in an organization?

MIS is a business function, like accounting and human resources, which moves information about people, products, and processes across the company to facilitate decision making and problem solving -MIS incorporates systems to help companies operate cross-functionally -It is the key to breaking down information silos by allowing information to flow across the organization -It can be an important enabler of business success and innovation -It's also a toll that is most valuable when it leverages the talents of people who know how to use and manage it effectively.

How can a manager turn data into information?

Managers can turn data into information by using reports --> a document containing data organized in a table, matrix, or graphical format allowing users to easily comprehend information.

Create two questions - one that uses predictive analytics to answer a business question and one that uses a behavioral analytics question to answer a business question.

Predictive analytics: How much will sales be next year, next quarter, next week? Behavioral analytics: How many customers will upgrade to the next generation cell phone?

What would happen to a manager that only focuses on total sales, not total profit?

Profit = Total Sales - Total Costs. If a manager only focuses on total sales, he/she is only focusing on half of the equation to ensure the company is profitable. The company can have a total sales of $10,000 for one month, which sounds pretty good.... but if total cost for that same month exceeds total sales, then the company is not making a profit and instead is losing money. A manager has to focus on total profit, which in turn means total sales AND total cost, so that he/she can ensure that their company is making money and not losing money.

Identify the different types of machine-generated data.

Sensor data Point-of-sale data Web log data

Why is it important for a company to operate cross-functionally?

When a company does not operate cross-functionally, the business units may risk operating as an information silo (when on business unit is unable to freely communicate with other business units). Information silos exist because management dos not believe there to be enough benefit from sharing information across business units and because information might not be useful to personnel in other business units. Although each department has its own focus and data, none can work independently if the company is to operate as a whole.

Without the ability to analyze data, how would a manager run a business?

Without the ability to analyze data, a manager would run a business based on intuition or gut feelings. In the information age, successful managers compile, analyze, and comprehend massive amounts of data daily, which helps them make more successful business decisions.