Essay Questions

Porter's Five Forces Model and the four strategies in dealing with these forces:

Five competitive forces shape fate of firm: 1. Traditional competitors 2. New market entrants 3. Substitute products and services 4. Customers 5. Suppliers

2. New products, services, and business models

o A business model describes how a company produces, delivers, and sells a product or service to create wealth. o Apple Inc. transformed an old business model of music distribution based on its own iPod technology platform.

What are the six important business objectives of information system investment (and their descriptions/definitions/practical application of each)?

1. Competitive Advantage 2. Operational Excellence 3. New products, services, and business models 4. customer and supplier intimacy 5. Improved Decision Making 6. Survival

Discuss at least three key technology trends that raise ethical issues. Give an example of an ethical or moral impact connected to each one.

1. Data storage costs rapidly decline: Organizations can easily maintain detailed databases on individuals. 2. Data analysis advances Companies can analyze vast quantities of data gathered on individuals to develop detailed profiles of individual behavior. 3. Mobile device growth Impact Individual cell phones may be tracked without user consent or knowledge.

Identify and describe five of the current trends in contemporary software platforms.

1. Growing use of Linux and open-source software — Open-source software is produced and maintained by a global community of programmers and is downloadable for free. Linux is a powerful, resilient open-source operating system that can run on multiple hardware platforms and is used widely to run Web servers. 2. Software for the web HTML(5) — page description language for specifying how text, graphics, video, and sound are placed on a Web page and for creating dynamic links to other Web pages and objects. HTML5 is the next evolution of HTML which simplifies embedding multimedia in the browser. 3. Software outsourcing — Companies are purchasing custom software applications from outside sources, including application software packages, by outsourcing. 4. Cloud-Based Software Services and Tools — Cloud-based software and the data it uses are hosted on powerful servers in massive data centers, and can be accessed with an Internet connection and standard Web browser. Salesforce.com (SaaS) 5. Mashups and apps — Mashups are programs created by combining two or more existing Internet applications. Apps are small programs developed for mobiles and handhelds, turning them into more robust computing tools.

What are the five steps in conducting an ethical analysis? FCSOC

1. Identify and describe the facts clearly. Find out who did what to whom, and where, when, and how. In many instances, you will be surprised at the errors in the initially reported facts, and often you will find that simply getting the facts straight helps define the solution. It also helps to get the opposing parties involved in an ethical dilemma to agree on the facts. 2. Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved. Ethical, social, and political issues always reference higher values. The parties to a dispute all claim to be pursuing higher values (e.g., freedom, privacy, protection of property, and the free enterprise system). Typically, an ethical issue involves a dilemma: two diametrically opposed courses of action that support worthwhile values. For example, the chapter-opening case study illustrates two competing values: the need to improve access to digital content and the need to respect the property rights of the owners of that content. 3. Identify the stakeholders. Every ethical, social, and political issue has stakeholders: players in the game who have an interest in the outcome, who have invested in the situation, and usually who have vocal opinions. Find out the identity of these groups and what they want. This will be useful later when designing a solution. 4. Identify the options that you can reasonably take. You may find that none of the options satisfy all the interests involved, but that some options do a better job than others. Sometimes arriving at a good or ethical solution may not always be a balancing of consequences to stakeholders. 5. Identify the potential consequences of your options. Some options may be ethically correct but disastrous from other points of view. Other options may work in one instance but not in other similar instances. Always ask yourself, "What if I choose this option consistently over time?

Four generic strategies for dealing with competitive forces, enabled by using IT:

1. Low-cost leadership 2. Product differentiation 3. Market niche 4. Customer and supplier intimacy

Identify and describe three basic operations used to extract useful sets of data from a relational database.

1. The select operation creates a subset consisting of all records (rows) in the table that meets stated criteria. 2. The join operation combines relational tables to provide the user with more information than is available in individual tables. 3. The project operation creates a subset consisting of columns in a table, permitting the user to create new tables that contain only the information required.

Identify and discuss the major types of information systems that serve the main management groups within a business. What are the relationships among these systems?

1. Transaction processing systems, such as payroll or order processing, track the flow of the daily routine transactions that are necessary to conduct business. 2. management information systems (MIS) provide the management control level with reports and access to the organization's current performance and historical records. Most MIS reports condense information from TPS and are not highly analytical. 3. Decision-support systems (DSS) support management decisions when these decisions are unique, rapidly changing, and not specified easily in advance. They have more advanced analytical models and data analysis capabilities than MIS and often draw on information from external as well as internal sources. 4. executive support systems (ESS) support senior management by providing data of greatest importance to senior management decision makers, often in the form of graphs and charts delivered via portals. They have limited analytical capabilities but can draw on sophisticated graphics software and many sources of internal and external information. The various types of systems in the organization exchange data with one another. TPS are a major source of data for other systems, especially MIS and DSS. ESSs primarily receive data from lower-level systems.

List at least two ways that a business's data can become redundant or inconsistent.

Data redundancy is the presence of duplicate data in multiple data files so that the same data are stored in more than one place or location. -occurs when different groups in an organization independently collect the same piece of data and store it independently of each other. ------------------------------------------- Data inconsistency is the presence of different values for same attribute when the same data are stored in multiple locations. - Data redundancy wastes storage resources and also leads to data inconsistency - Two different names for the same attribute

Define IS.

IS is a set of interrelated components that collect, process, store, and distribute information to support decision making in an organization. Three activities in an information system produce the information that organizations need to make decisions, control operations, analyze problems, and create new products or services.

Three major concerns of system builders and users are disaster, security, and human error. Of the three, which do you think is most difficult to deal with? Why?

Security. Someone will always be able to code to hack. Disaster, you can plan for, diasters. Human error, if you hire well you shouldn't have that often.

What are the three IS activities that produce info?

These activities are input, processing, and output - Input captures or collects raw data from within the organization or from its external environment. - Processing converts this raw input into a meaningful form. - Output transfers the processed information to the people who will use it or to the activities for which it will be used.

5. Competitive advantage

o Doing things better than your competitor o When firms achieve one or more of these business objectives—operational excellence; new products, services, and business models; customer/supplier intimacy; and improved decision making—chances are they have already achieved a competitive advantage. o Apple, Walmart, UPS

1. Operational excellence

o Improvement of efficiency to attain higher profitability o Information systems, technology an important tool in achieving greater efficiency and productivity o Walmart's Retail Link system links suppliers to stores for superior replenishment system

6. Survival

o Information technologies as necessity of business o Citibank introduced ATMs and all other banks followed o Sometimes driven by industry-level changes

3. Customer and supplier intimacy

o When a business really knows its customers, the customers responds by purchasing more. This raises revenues and profits. o The more a business engages its suppliers, the better the suppliers can provide vital inputs. This lowers costs. o The Mandarin Oriental in Manhattan uses IS technology to keep track of guests' preferences to achieve customer intimacy

4. Improved decision making

o the right information at the right time to make an informed decision o Verizon tracks customer complaints, network performance for each locality served, and line outages or storm-damaged lines. Using this information, managers can immediately allocate repair resources to affected areas, inform consumers of repair efforts, and restore service fast.