MIS exam #2

dense wave division multiplexing (DWDM)

A technology that increases the transmission capacity (and hence speed) of fiber-optic cable. Transmissions using fiber are accomplished by transmitting light inside "glass" cables. In DWDM, the light inside fiber is split into different wavelengths in a way similar to how a prism splits light into different colors.

imitation-resistant value chain

A way of doing business that competitors struggle to replicate and that frequently involves technology in a key enabling role.

----- is a randomized group of experiments used to collect data and compare performance among two options studied.

A/B testing

---- puts users in control so that they can create custom reports on an as-needed basis by selecting fields, ranges, summary conditions, and other parameters

Ad hoc reporting tools

network effects

Also known as Metcalfe's Law, or network externalities. When the value of a product or service increases as its number of users expands.

Allowing third-party sellers to list their products on Amazon is controversial. Why would Amazon allow products sold by others to appear on its site?

Amazon's brand is reinforced as a first-choice shopping destination, selection attracts consumers, although products are sold by third parties, Amazon gains valuable data on things such as customer browsing habits and sales, a network effect competitive advantage is created where more buyers attract more sellers giving Amazon an advantage over any rival attempting to create a similar marketplace (correct answer is ALL OF THE ABOVE)

How did Apple trump Google to become the dominant mapping platform on iOS?

Apple's control of iOS gave it control of the distribution channel to reach its users, kicking Google out as the default mapping app and capturing the majority of user engagement.

Private

As in "to go private" or "take a firm private." Buying up a publicly traded firm's shares. Usually done when a firm has suffered financially and when a turn-around strategy will first yield losses that would further erode share price. Firms (often called private equity, buyout, LBO, or leveraged buyout firms) that take another company private hope to improve results so that the company can be sold to another firm or they can reissue shares on public markets.

Straddling

Attempts to occupy more than one position, while failing to match the benefits of a more efficient, singularly focused rival.

A(n) ______ is the symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with the product or service.

Brand

---- refers to the process of combining aspects of reporting, data exploration, ad hoc queries, and sophisticated data modeling and analysis.

Business intelligence

The firm's period between paying suppliers for products and collecting funds from customers who purchase these products is referred to as the ----

Cash conversion cycle

Exists when a firm's potential partners see that firm as a threat

Channel conflict

----- is a classification of software that monitors trends among customers and uses this data to personalize an individual customer's experience

Collaborative filtering

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Correct answer: offer several advantages, including increased scalability, reliability, and security.

AWS is acting as an entrepreneurship catalyst, enabling startups to host and scale their efforts without the added cost associated with buying and maintaining large quantities of computing hardware.

Correct answer: true

An--- refers to a heads-up display of critical indicators that allow managers to get a graphical glance at key performance metrics

Dashboard

Firms that collect and resell data are known as:

Data aggregators

Most transactional databases are not set up to be simultaneously accessed for reporting and analysis. As a consequence:

Data is not efficiently transformed into information

---- is the process of using computers to identify hidden patterns in and build models from large data sets

Data mining

Sara's store staff gain as much is three hours in prime selling time to assist customers at stores. Which of Zara's practice is instrumental in these times savings?

Distribution centers ironing clothes in advance and packing them on hangers with security and price tags affixed

Zara's production costs could rise at higher rates than its competitors because many of the firm's costs are tied to the _____.

Euro

In retail in general and fashion in particular having——— is considered the kiss of death

Excess inventory

channel conflict

Exists when a firm's potential partners see that firm as a threat. This threat could come because it offers competing products or services via alternative channels or because the firm works closely with especially threatening competitors.

fast follower problem

Exists when savvy rivals watch a pioneer's efforts, learn from their successes and missteps, then enter the market quickly with a comparable or superior product at a lower cost before the first mover can dominate.

——- is a nonprofit organization that shares audit information on contract manufacturers among members of the apparel industry and other industries

Fair Factories Clearinghouse

According to Michael Porter the reason many firms suffer margin-eroding competition is because they have to find themselves according to strategic positioning rather than operational effectiveness

False

Amazon Web Services came out of Amazon's desire to make money from the firm's excess computing capacity

False

Amazon will not have to worry about government antitrust concerns in eBook publishing since there are so many real-world bookstores, both chains and independents.

False

Amazon's success strategy is based on the focus on its quarterly results

False

Elaborate customer surveys help Zara designers predict fashion trends months into the future and design products accordingly

False

One of the reasons Amazon has struggled to achieve profitability is because the firm has a negative cash conversion cycle

False

The use of Kiva robots has also allowed Amazon to radically reduce headcount, saving the firm additional money by cutting its workforce

False

Zara saves money by simplifying pricing. An item sold in Bangkok is likely to cost the same as a similar item sold in Barcelona.

False

Zara's dominance in the fashion industry is due to its horizontally integrated structure accompanied by a globally disbursed production model

False

The ——- problem exists when rivals watch a pioneers 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

In database systems, a ---- refers to a list of data

File

In database systems, a table is also known as a ---

File

---- are model-building techniques where computers examine many potential solutions to a problem, iteratively modifying various mathematical models, and comparing the mutated models to search for a best alternative function.

Genetic algorithms

Which of the following is a source of bargaining power of buyers?

Greater choice of products

Personal digital assistant are

Hand held computing devices meant largely for mobile use outside an office setting

Zara staff members regularly collect data from customers added stores. This data is used to

Inform designers on customer preferences and staff on store sales results

Data becomes _____ when it is presented in a context so that it can answer a question or support decision making.

Information

Which of the following statements is true?

It is not uncommon for a big retailer like amazon to be able to hold products for a month or longer without having to pay for them

Which of the following is true of amazon?

Its cloud computing business is one of the largest players in that category

Zara hold a competitive advantage over its rivals in spite of

Keeping large portions of its production process in house

Which of the following is considered one of the three pillars critical to Amazon's business success?

Large selection

What is Walmart's motivation for sharing data with its supply partners?

Lowering prices of products

If a customer pays a retailer in cash, he is likely to remain a mystery to the retailer because his name is not attached to the money. Retailers can tie the customer to cash transactions and track the customer's activity if they can convince the customer to use a _____.

Loyalty card

_______ law is said to be at play with the value of a product or service increases as its number users expands

Metcalfe's

The e-commerce strategy that blends online and offline sales is called----

Omnichannel

---- is the method of querying and reporting that takes data from standard relational databases, calculates and summarizes the data, and then stores the data in a special database called a data cube

Online analytical processing

strategic positioning

Performing different tasks than rivals, or the same tasks in a different way.

High-end fashion house Prada's experiment of implementing the latest technology in its flagship store failed because:

Prada managers were enamored with technology and failed to consider implications across all comp

In database systems, a row is also known as a ---

Record

Which of the following is not considered an advantage of Hadoop?

Relational structure

Why do firms need to create separate data repositories for their reporting and analytics work?

Running analytics against transactional data can bog down a TPS

Inventory Turns

Sometimes referred to as inventory turnover, stock turns, or stock turnover. It is the number of times inventory is sold or used during a given period. A higher figure means that a firm is selling products quickly.

Factors such as weather, natural disaster, 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

A firms financial performance that consistently outperforms its industry's peers is known as——-

Sustainable competitive advantage

__________ exist when customers in current expense to move from one product or service to another.

Switching costs

Many firms have developed in deployed innovative information systems only to see these systems go unused by Key staff members. How has Sara helped ensure its systems will you be used by staff?

System use drives store success and as much as 70% of salaries are tied to sales performance

Zara's IT expenditure is low by fashion industry standards and is also highly effective. Which of the following makes this possible?

Targeting technology investment at points in the value chain where it has the most significant impact

Switching costs

The cost a consumer incurs when moving from one product to another. It can involve actual money spent (e.g., buying a new product) as well as investments in time, any data loss, and so forth.

Which of the following conditions is essential for data mining to work?

The events in the data should reflect current and future trends

Inventory turnover ratio is:

The ratio of a company's annual sales to its inventory

Value Chain

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

Resource based view of competitive advantage

The strategic thinking approach suggesting that if a firm is to maintain sustainable competitive advantage, it must control an exploitable resource, or set of resources, that have four critical characteristics. These resources must be (1) valuable, (2) rare, (3) imperfectly imitable, and (4) nonsubstitutable.

brand

The symbolic embodiment of all the information connected with a product or service.

Which of the following is true of Amazon?

The three pillars of Amazon's business are a large selection, convenience, and lower prices

Which of the following is one of the porters five forces?

Threat of new entrants

Amazon as a company is susceptible to channel conflicts but less so if it can deliver suppliers a greater revenue than all other channels combined

True

An information system consist of hardware software data procedures and the people who interact with and are impacted by the system

True

Cisco's acquisition of Pur digital markers of the flip video camera line was largely considered a flop because comparable technology soon became a feature in other popular consumer electronics products

True

Commodities are products or services that vary across multiple vendors

True

Many firms choose not to implement operational components of ERP software and instead elect to create their own proprietary solutions in part because they see their uniqueness in certain operations areas as Key to creating difficult to imitate competitive advantages

True

The Fair Factories Clearinghouse is subject to network effects

True

While so many managers focus on what's changing in tech-fueled industries, Bezos feels that building strategy based on factors that are NOT going to change is critically important.

True

In an industry where nearly every major player outsources its manufacturing to low-cost countries, Zara is highly———keeping huge swaths of its production processes in house

Vertically integrated

Leveraging customers to promote a product or service is known as __________.

Viral marketing

Which of the following is not highlighted as a source of switching cost?

Viral marketing

economies of scale

When costs can be spread across increasing units of production or in serving multiple customers. Businesses that have favorable economies of scale (like many Internet firms) are sometimes referred to as being highly scalable.

Which of the following is true of Amazon's warehousing process?

When stacking shelves in its warehouses, Amazon ensures that no two similar products sit next to each other

How does Zara differ from its competitors in converting ideas into products?

Zara concepts appear in stores in fifteen days on average compared to rivals who receive new styles once or twice a season.

commodity

a basic good that can be interchanged with nearly identical offerings by others-think milk, coal, orange juice, or to a lesser extent, windows PCs and Android phones. The more the commoditized an offering, the greater the likelihood that competition will be based on price

augmented reality

a technology that superimposes content, such as images and animation, on top of real-world images

A value chain is a set of ——-

activities through which a product or service is created and delivered to customers

scale advantages

advantages related to size

Moving first pays off when time lead is used to create:

critical resources for competitive advantage.

According to Porter, strategy is fundamentally about being ———

different

in a database system a --- defines the data that a table can hold

field

sustainable competitive advantage

financial performance that consistently outperforms industry averages

Knowledge is defined as:

insight derived from experience and expertise

viral marketing

leveraging consumers to promote a product or service

Which of the following represents one of the primary components of the value chain?

outbound logistics

Operational Effectiveness

performing the same tasks better than rivals perform them

Consumers buying commodities are highly _______ since they have so many similar choices.

price-focused

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 these characteristics?

rareness, value, imperfect imitability, non substitutability

Dynamic pricing

refers to pricing that shifts over time based on conditions associated with product suppl and demand

Set of activities through which a product or service is created and delivered to customers is known as

value chain