CIS 105 Universal Learner Mod 1-3

Which of these technologies are part of the Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends? (select all that apply) -AI Foundation -Intelligent Things -Email -Immersive Experience

-AI Foundation -Intelligent Things -Immersive Experience

Which of the following can play a role in altering the competitive landscape? (select all that apply) -Social and Demographic Changes -Government Deregulation or Intervention -Political Shock -Technology

All of the above

Which of the following has Zara used to build a technology-enabled business strategy? (select all that apply) -Software -Information Systems -Data -RFID Tags

All of the above

Which of these stages apply to Gartner's Hype Cycle? (select all that apply) -Peak of Inflated Expectations -Innovation Trigger -Plateau of Productivity -Trough of Disillusionment

All of the above

Which of these are considered to be the sources of switching costs? -Loyalty programs -Contractual commitments -Information and data -All of these

All of these

_________ is a cognitive bias where an individual relies too heavily on an initial piece of information while making decisions.

Anchoring

This term refers to intelligence as demonstrated by machines, in contrast to the natural intelligence displayed by humans and other animals.

Artificial intelligence

______ are far more scalable than ______ and ______, since they do not incur physical inventory costs.

Firms providing digital products and services; physical retailers; internet retailers

________ is an annual list that ranks 500 of the largest United States corporations by total revenue for their respective fiscal years.

Fortune 500 List

________ exist when a product or service becomes more valuable as more people use it.

Network effects

_________ refers to the idea that some products and services get more valuable as more people use them.

Network effects

The ______ problem exists when rivals watch a pioneer's efforts, learn from their successes and missteps, and then enter the market quickly with a comparable or superior product at a lower cost.

fast follower

Operational effectiveness is ______ but not ______ to yield sustainable dominance over the competition.

necessary; sufficient

Which of the following is a secondary component of the value chain?

Technology / Research and Development

What kind of an impact has technology had in the area of human resources?

Technology helps firms harness the untapped power of employees

The ________ is the tendency to ignore a dangerous or risky situation.

ostrich effect

ROI is a term used to represent the _________.

return on investment

A manager's ability to size up a firm's ________ and understand its ________ is one of the most valuable and yet most difficult skills to master.

strategic position; likelihood of sustainability

A ______ is a system of organizations, people, activities, information, and resources involved in moving a product or service from supplier to customer.

supply chain

The concept of the "Illusion of control" describes:

the tendency for people to behave as if they might have some control, when in fact they actually have none

The "planning fallacy" describes:

the tendency for people to overestimate their rate of work or underestimate how long it will take them to get things done

Experts working in the area of ______ work to make sure systems are easy to use, while people working in the area of ______ work to leverage technology to make firms more efficient.

user-interface design; process design

The set of activities through which a product or service is created and delivered to customers is known as a ________.

value chain

__________ refers to performing different activities from those of rivals, or the same activities in a different way.

Strategic positioning

Systems that think like humans are called ______. Systems that support humans without understanding human reasoning are called ______.

Strong AI; Weak AI

What can a theoretical or conceptual framework do?

Guide decision making

___________ exist when consumers incur an expense to move from one product or service to another.

Switching costs

Which of the following are ways to avoid the anchoring bias? (select all that apply) -Benchmark based on data and available evidence -Document decision-making process using spreadsheet -Start with an estimate, and then come up with corroborating evidence for that estimate -Consider alternatives

-Benchmark based on data and available evidence -Document decision-making process using spreadsheet -Consider alternatives

Technology can play a key role in creating and reinforcing assets for sustainable advantage by ________. (select all that apply) -Collecting useful data and establishing switching costs -Creating or enhancing a firm's scale advantage -Creating a network effect -Creating imitable products

-Collecting useful data and establishing switching costs -Creating or enhancing a firm's scale advantage -Creating a network effect

Which of the following statements are true? -Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider, owns several major hotel corporations -The world's most valuable retailer, China's Alibaba, also carries the world's largest product inventory -Facebook does not create media content -Uber, the world's largest taxi service, owns no vehicles for hire

-Facebook does not create media content -Uber, the world's largest taxi service, owns no vehicles for hire

Which of the following has allowed Zara to go from design to shelf in days instead of months? (select all that apply) -Just-in-time manufacturing -Outsourcing -Vertical-integration -Technology-orchestrated supplier coordination

-Just-in-time manufacturing -Vertical-integration -Technology-orchestrated supplier coordination

What are the components of the Porter Five Forces model?

-Power of suppliers -Rivalry among existing competitors -Power of buyers -Threat of substitute products or services -Potential new entrants

Which of the following statements about technology is true? -Technology alone is enough to provide sustainable competitive advantage to a firm -Technological improvements can often be copied by rivals, leading to a profit-eroding arms race -Technology plays a marginal role in creating strategic differences -Technological improvements are not important in strengthening a firm's strategic advantages

-Technological improvements can often be copied by rivals, leading to a profit-eroding arms race

The long-tail describes which of the following? (select all that apply) -The phenomenon whereby firms can make money by selling a near-limitless selection of less-popular products -The interaction between an external customer and an organization through various online or offline channels -The total demand for obscure items is often much larger than the total demand of the most popular items -Brick-and-mortar stores are location-independent

-The phenomenon whereby firms can make money by selling a near-limitless selection of less-popular products -The total demand for obscure items is often much larger than the total demand of the most popular items

Which of the following are ways to avoid the confirmation bias? (select all that apply) -Start with an estimate, and then come up with corroborating evidence for that estimate -Try to take a contrary viewpoint -Look for confirming evidence before seeking contrary evidence -Build models or spreadsheets that force us to benchmark other alternatives than the one we are leaning toward

-Try to take a contrary viewpoint -Build models or spreadsheets that force us to benchmark other alternatives than the one we are leaning toward

Some of the radical changes brought about by new technologies include: -the proliferation of telecommunications into the hands of a few -an increase in computing costs owing to the growth of licensed software -a decrease in the standards of corporate ethics -the stagnation of advertising -the creation of an unprecedented set of security and espionage threats

-the creation of an unprecedented set of security and espionage threats

Porters five forces includes _____________. (select all that apply) -technology -the intensity of rivalry among existing competitors -the bargaining power of buyers -the threat of new entrants

-the intensity of rivalry among existing competitors -the bargaining power of buyers -the threat of new entrants

Sustainable advantage comes from assets and business models that are __________. (select all that apply) -valuable -rare -substitutable -imitable

-valuable -rare

_______ is a term used to refer to data sets that are too large or complex for traditional data-processing application software to adequately deal with.

Big data

A system or object which can be viewed in terms of its inputs and outputs (or transfer characteristics), without having any knowledge of its internal workings is called a ___________

Black box

The ________ is a traditional unit of heat; it is defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.

British Thermal Unit (BTU)

The money outflow for mobile expense for Week 2 should go in which cell? (see chart)

C11

______ is a marketing term referring to the rate at which customers leave a product or service.

Churn

What is the method of making automatic predictions?

Collaborative filtering

We interpret, favor, and recall information that helps corroborate our pre-existing beliefs rather than contradict them. This effect gets even stronger for emotionally-charged issues. This is due to:

Confirmation Bias

While Amazon Prime competes with Netflix, Amazon also provides infrastructure services to Netflix through AWS. This is an example of ________.

Coopetition

Search Engine Marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), ________ (CRM), personalization systems, and a sensitivity to managing the delicate balance between gathering and leveraging data and respecting consumer privacy are all central components of the new marketing toolkit.

Customer Relationship Management

(T/F) Data is not a switching cost, and it does not play a critical role in differentiation.

False

(T/F) Firms enjoy scale economies when they are able to leverage the cost of an investment across decreasing units of production.

False

(T/F) Technology can be difficult to copy, and technology always offers sustainable competitive advantage

False

(T/F) Timing and technology alone can always yield sustainable competitive advantage.

False

The closing balance for June is off by a big value, what is the correct formula? (see chart)

H3+H10-H22

_______ is the network of devices, vehicles, and home appliances that contain electronics, software, actuators, and connectivity which allows these things to connect, interact, and exchange data.

IoT

________ is the study of algorithms and statistical models that computer systems use to progressively improve their performance on a specific task.

Machine learning (ML)

Can the rating of a car's property be 0 as in cell D11? (see chart)

No

Which of the following is a primary component of the value chain?

Operations

________ is when company hires another company to be responsible for an existing internal activity.

Outsourcing

______ is a cognitive bias where an individual places too much faith in their own knowledge and abilities.

Over-confidence

Analyzing ______ illuminates an industry's fundamental attractiveness, exposes the underlying drivers of average industry profitability, and provides insight into how profitability will evolve in the future.

Porter's Five Forces

__________ is a framework for examining a firm's competitive environment.

Porter's Five Forces

_______ is the process of finding, agreeing terms, and acquiring goods, services, or works from an external source, often via a tendering or competitive bidding process.

Procurement

The resource-based view of competitive advantage states that for a firm to maintain sustainable competitive advantage it must control a set of exploitable resources that have four critical characteristics. What are they?

Rareness, value, imperfect imitability, non-substitutability

_______ is a system of many tiny microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) such as sensors, robots, or other devices that can detect, for example, light, temperature, vibration, magnetism, or chemicals.

SmartDust

Factors such as weather, natural disaster's terrorism, labor strife, or political unrest can shut down a firm's operations. Which of the following is one of the measures taken by firms to hedge such risks?

Spreading productions facilities across the globe

________ allows a firm to consistently outperform its competitors.

Sustainable competitive advantage

_________ is a fast, automatic type of decision making. We tend to use heuritics in this type of decision making, and this can lead to cognitive biases.

System 1

________ is a slow, reflective type of decision making. We tend to use models and prototypes to help us avoid cognitive biases during this type of decision making.

System 2

Which of the following is one of Porter's five forces? -Total cost of ownership -Availability of competitors in the market -Strength of intellectual property laws -Threat of new entrants -Purchasing power parity of consumers

Threat of new entrants

(T/F) An imitation-resistant value chain is one that's tough for rivals to copy while gaining similar benefits.

True

(T/F) It is critical for managers to think about systems, rather than just technologies, when planning for and deploying technology-enabled solutions.

True

(T/F) New technologies have redefined our concepts of software and computing, crushed costs, and fueled data-driven decision making.

True

(T/F) The ability to serve large geographic areas through lower-cost inventory means Internet firms can provide access to the long-tail of products, potentially earning profits from less popular titles that are unprofitable for physical retailers to offer.

True

(T/F) The value chain can be used to map a firm's efficiency and to benchmark it against rivals, revealing opportunities to use technology to improve processes and procedures.

True

_________ is the set of activities that a company performs to produce value.

Value chain

________ is when a single firm owns several layers in its value chain.

Vertical Integration

Should the formula for calculating balance in Row 13 be same for every week? (see chart)

Yes

The closing balance for year 5 is very close in value to its opening balance. Is there a problem in the interest calculation formula? (see chart)

Yes, the formula should be =D9*F9

Technology that super-imposes content, such as images and animation on top of real world images is called ________.

augmented reality

Advertising can build ______, but brands are built through ______.

awareness; customer experience

The technology known as ________ is helping to fuel the current age of fast-growth technology entrepreneurship. This technology means that a start-up can rent the computing resources one previously had to buy at great expense.

cloud computing

As _________ gets both faster and cheaper, it gets "baked into" all sorts of products and shows up everywhere.

computing

Funding projects via online efforts such as Kickstarter are referred to by the term _______.

crowdsourcing

Removing an organization from a firm's distribution channel is called _____.

disintermediation

Businesses benefit from ________ when the cost of an investment can be spread across increasing units of production or in serving a growing customer base.

economies of scale

The patent system is often considered to be unfairly stacked against start-ups because:

high litigation costs coupled with a few months of litigation can sink an early stage firm

A decision situation where one party has more or better information than its counterparty is called an __________.

information asymmetry

Coordinating and enabling the flow of goods, people, information, and other resources among locations is known as _______.

logistics

The organizational activities that are required to produce goods or services are known as ________.

operations