MIS Chapter 3

The most successful solutions or methods for achieving a business objective are called:

Best practices.

Information systems can be used at the industry level to achieve strategic advantage by:

Building industrywide, IT-supported consortia and symposia

The interaction between information technology and organizations is influenced:

By many factors, including structure, politics, culture, and environment.

A(n) ________ is an activity for which a firm is a world-class leader.

Core competency

All of the following are competitive forces in Porter's model except:

Disruptive technologies.

Information systems enhance core competencies by:

Encouraging the sharing of knowledge across business units.

In environmental scanning, a firm may use information systems to:

Identify external events that may affect it.

In network economics, the value of a commercial software vendor's software products:

Increases as more people use them.

Why does Amazon need to worry about competitors in online shopping?

Internet technologies are universal, and therefore usable by all companies.

A firm can exercise greater control over its suppliers by having:

More suppliers.

All of the following are IT-enabled products and services providing competitive advantage except:

Nike's use of celebrities to market their products.

The parts of an organization's infrastructure, human resources, technology, and procurement that make the delivery of the firm's products or services possible are known as ________ activities.

Support

When a firm buys on the marketplace what it cannot make itself, the costs incurred are referred to as:

Transaction costs.

A virtual company:

Uses networks to link people, assets, and ideas.

The ________ model highlights the primary or support activities that add a margin of value to a firm's products or services where information systems can best be applied to achieve a competitive advantage.

Value chain

Walmart's continuous replenishment system is an example of a firm using information systems to:

Achieve low-cost leadership

Which of the following is not a major feature of organizations that impacts the use of information systems?

Agency costs

Which model is used to describe the interaction of external forces that affect an organization's strategy and ability to compete?

Competitive forces model

All of the following statements are true about information technology's impact on business firms except:

It helps firms expand in size.

Along with capital, ________ is the primary production input that the organization uses to create products and services.

Labor

The four major competitive strategies are:

Low-cost leadership, product differentiation, focus on market niche, and customer and supplier intimacy

Mintzberg classifies a large bureaucracy existing in a slowly changing environment that produces standard products and is dominated by centralized management as a(n) ________ bureaucracy.

Machine

The Internet increases the bargaining power of customers by:

Making information available to everyone

The ability to offer individually tailored products or services using the same production resources as bulk production is known as:

Mass customization.

According to the ________ definition of organizations, an organization is seen as a means by which capital and labor are transformed by the organization into outputs to the environment.

Microeconomic

Which of the following substitute products would be of most concern for a cable TV distributor?

On-demand Internet television

The divergent viewpoints about how resources, rewards, and punishments should be distributed, and the struggles resulting from these differences are known as organizational:

Politics.

Under Mintzberg's classification of organizational structure, knowledge-based organizations fall under the category of

Professional bureaucracies

Which of the following is a support activity in a firm's value chain

Technology

Which of the following technologies disrupted the traditional publishing industry?

World Wide Web