Ch 2 - Managing the MIS Function

69) Interaction jobs are those jobs which:

A) require close coordination and collaboration.

37) ________ systems integrate and share information from suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and logistics companies.

B) Supply chain management

39) Which of the following can typically access a company's intranet?

B) The firm's employees

17) The efficiency of a business firm depends to a large extent on how well its internal and interorganizational business processes are designed and coordinated.

17-True

55) An ESS is designed to incorporate data about external events, but it also draws summarized information from internal MIS and DSS.

55-False

56) An ESS is designed primarily to solve specific problems.

56-False

57) Information supplied by an enterprise system is structured around cross-functional business processes.

57-True

58) SCM systems are more externally oriented than enterprise systems.

58-True

59) Enterprise systems do not utilize order transaction data.

59-False

60) A KMS and a CRM system are both types of enterprise applications.

60-True

84) Nearly all of the research on the business benefits of collaboration is anecdotal.

84-True

85) The primary goal of social business is to deepen interactions with employees and customers.

85-True

98) Systems analysts are the principal liaisons between the information systems group and the rest of the organization.

98-True

99) End users are playing an increasing role in the design and development of information systems.

99-True

42) The use of digital technology and the Internet to execute the major business processes in the enterprise is called:

B) e-business.

31) An ESS is an information system that supports the:

A) long-range planning activities of senior management.

30) DSS and MIS are also referred to as ________ systems.

B) business intelligence

72) Each of the following is required for successful collaboration, except:

B) strong hierarchy.

10) Which of the following is not a true statement with respect to business processes?

C) The efficiency of a business firm is not related to its business processes.

29) Which of the following systems would you use to forecast the return on investment if you used new suppliers with better delivery track records?

D) DSS

7) Key forces in a business' immediate environment include:

A) regulations.

74) Second Life is an example of a(n):

A) virtual world.

63) Describe at least two benefits of using enterprise systems.

Answer: Enterprise systems integrate the firm's key business processes in sales, production, finance, logistics, and human resources into a single software system so that information can flow throughout the organization, improving coordination, efficiency, and decision making. These systems help create a more uniform organization in which everyone uses similar processes and information, and measures their work in terms of organization-wide performance standards. The coordination of the firm's key business processes allows the firm to respond more rapidly to customer demands.

67) How have the technologies associated with e-business impacted government?

Answer: Governments on all levels are using Internet technology to deliver information and services to citizens, employees, and businesses with which they work. The term e-government refers to the application of the Internet and networking technologies to enable government and public sector agencies' relationships with citizens, businesses, and other arms of government digitally. In addition to improving delivery of government services, e-government can make government operations more efficient and empower citizens by giving them easier access to information and the ability to network digitally with other citizens. For example, citizens in some states can renew their driver's licenses or apply for unemployment benefits online, and the Internet has become a powerful tool for instantly mobilizing interest groups for political action and fund-raising.

89) How does a firm with collaborative business culture and business processes differ from a "command-and-control" firm?

Answer: In command-and-control organizations, the top leaders determine all the really important matters and then order lower-level employees to execute senior management plans. The job of middle management is to pass messages back and forth up and down the hierarchy. Command-and-control firms require lower-level employees to carry out orders without asking too many questions, with no responsibility to improve processes, and with no rewards for teamwork or team performance. If workgroups need help from another work group, that is something for the bosses to figure out. Employees never communicate horizontally, always vertically, so management can control the process. A collaborative business culture and business processes are very different. Senior managers are responsible for achieving results but rely on teams of employees to achieve and implement the results. Policies, products, designs, processes, and systems are much more dependent on teams at all levels of the organization to devise, to create, and to build. Teams are rewarded for their performance, and individuals are rewarded for their performance in a team. The function of middle managers is to build the teams, coordinate their work, and monitor their performance. The business culture and business processes are more social. In a collaborative culture, senior management establishes collaboration and teamwork as vital to the organization, and it actually implements collaboration for the senior ranks of the business as well.

68) From your reading of the chapter-opening case study discussing Sanofi Pasteur's use of enterprise social networking, which of the following statements best expresses Sanofi Pasteur's experience?

B) Sanofi Pasteur's primary motivation was to give employees more opportunities to experiment and innovate on their own.

6) The three principal levels of hierarchies within a business organization are:

B) senior management, middle management, and operational management.

96) Which of the following would be primarily responsible for enterprise-wide governance and usage of information to maximize the value of an organization's data?

D) CDO

26) Which of the following systems supports making decisions that are unique, rapidly changing, and not easily specified in advance?

D) DSS

34) Which of the following systems is designed to support organization-wide process coordination and integration?

D) Enterprise applications

94) Policies that determine which information technology will be used, when, and how, are provided by:

D) IT standards services.

4) Which of the following is an interorganizational business process?

D) Ordering raw materials

9) Which of the following is an example of a key force in a firm's broader, less immediate environment?

D) Socioeconomic trends

76) What analytical framework discussed in the chapter helps understand and evaluate the benefits and uses of collaboration tools?

D) Time/space matrix

1) Suppliers, customers, invoices and payments, products and services, and ________ are the five basic components with which businesses must deal.

D) employees

27) Which of the following systems would you use to determine the five suppliers with the worst record in delivering goods on time?

C) MIS

81) SVF uses which of the following collaboration tools?

C) Microsoft SharePoint Online

33) Which of the following statements about the National Football League's use of RFID technology is not true?

C) NFL teams use the data generated by the system to analyze fan behavior.

77) Adobe Connect is an example of which of the following types of collaboration tools?

C) Online meeting

8) Engineers and scientists are examples of:

C) knowledge workers.

2) Producing a bill of materials is a responsibility of the ________ function.

C) manufacturing and production

75) The goal of social commerce applications is to:

C) share opinions about purchasing products or services.

79) Instant messaging, videoconferencing, and shared screens are all examples of ________ collaboration tools.

C) synchronous

91) The principal liaison between the information systems groups and the rest of the organization is a(n):

C) systems analyst.

23) A human resources system that summarizes the total moving, house-hunting, and home financing costs for employees in all company divisions is an example of which of the following?

D) MIS

95) Which of the following would a CSO not be responsible for?

D) Providing physical security

46) SCM systems are considered to be a(n) ________ because they automate the flow of information across company boundaries.

D) interorganizational system

24) The term management information systems refers to a specific category of information systems serving:

D) middle management functions.

38) A ________ provides information to coordinate all of the business processes that deal with customers in sales, marketing, and service to optimize revenue, customer satisfaction, and customer retention.

E) CRM system

78) Which of the following Google tools allows people to engage in group video chat?

E) Google Hangouts

21) A(n) ________ performs and records the daily activities of a firm necessary to conduct business.

D) transaction processing system

73) A wiki is a type of collaborative:

D) website.

97) Which of the following is not a service typically provided by an information systems department?

E) Human resources services

25) Which of the following systems is designed to summarize and report on the company's basic operations?

E) MIS

22) Which type of system would you use to change a production schedule if a key supplier was late in delivering goods?

E) SCM system

93) Development and support services for a firm's business systems are provided by:

E) application software services.

35) A(n) ________ collects data from various key business processes and stores the data in a single comprehensive data repository, usable by many parts of the business.

E) enterprise system

3) Identifying potential customers for the businesses' products or services is an activity associated with the ________ function.

E) sales and marketing

14) Senior management is responsible for ensuring the financial performance of the firm.

14-True

15) A business is a formal organization created to sell services or products at a profit.

15-True

16) Every business process is tied to one specific functional area.

16-False

53) A DSS often uses information from external sources.

53-True

54) An ESS is designed to serve the middle management of the organization.

54-False

13) Business processes that impede organizational responsiveness are a source of competitive strength for a company.

13-False

12) Operational-level manufacturing systems provide transaction-level information that enable monitoring of the daily activities of a business.

12-True

11) Business organizations are hierarchies consisting of three principal levels.

11-True

47) The principal purpose of a TPS is to answer routine questions and track the flow of transactions through an organization.

47-True

48) A TPS helps managers monitor the firm's relations with the external environment.

48-True

49) A payroll system is a typical example of an MIS.

49-False

50) An MIS typically uses data supplied by a TPS.

50-Flase

51) An MIS generally is not flexible and has little analytical capability.

51-True

52) Most MIS's use sophisticated mathematical models or statistical techniques.

52-False

62) Eternal Friend, a family-owned manufacturer of pet caskets, has grown exponentially over the last few years. However, they are having difficulty in preparing for future growth. The only information system used at Eternal Friend is an antiquated accounting system. The company has one manufacturing plant located in Arkansas, and three warehouses, in Arkansas, Delaware, and California. The Eternal Friend sales force is national, and Eternal Friend purchases most of its raw materials from a single overseas supplier. You have been hired to recommend the information systems Eternal Friend should implement in order to maintain their competitive edge. However, there is not enough money for a full scale, cross-functional enterprise application, and you will need to limit the first step to a single management level. What will you choose, and why?

A TPS, as this is the basis of business systems and used to keep day-to-day operations running smoothly. A TPS will help to keep production costs low while maintaining quality, and can be used for communicating with other possible vendors. The TPS could later be used to feed MIS and other higher-level systems when they are installed.

90) Which of the following is most likely to have direct responsibility for ensuring that his or her company complies with existing data privacy laws?

A) CPO

41) Which of the following refers to the purchase or sale of goods and services over the Internet?

A) E-commerce

32) Which of the following systems would you use to determine which trends in your supplier's industry will affect your firm the most during the next five years?

A) ESS

44) You have been hired by Inspiration Inc. to help improve its financial performance. Inspiration Inc. is a business communications consulting firm that services many clients in different industries throughout the world. The firm provides its clients with customized written recommendations about how to best use the client's existing resources to improve the client's internal communications. The company has approximately 100 consultants, all of whom are located in its central headquarters in Chicago. Which of the following systems would you recommend to improve Inspiration Inc.'s business processes and improve its financial performance?

A) Extranet, to enable quick collaboration via the Internet, minimize the time spent communicating with the client, and minimize the amount of paperwork needed

80) ________ technology allows a videoconference participant to give the appearance of being present at a location other than his or her true physical location.

A) Telepresence

70) In a business environment, the focus of collaboration is to:

A) accomplish the task at hand.

5) Employees that assist with administrative work at all levels of the firm are called:

A) data workers.

86) You are consulting on software purchases for a translation agency whose headquarters is in New Jersey, but which works with translators located globally. Headquarters needs to share documents with groups of translators working on the same documents, who also need to communicate with each other, in real time if possible, as many people are working in different time zones. (1) What is your process for determining the most appropriate collaboration software? (2) In this particular case, what features will you be looking for?

Answer: (1) The first step is to determine what the challenges facing the company are and to place these needs in the time/space matrix—does collaboration need to be synchronous or asynchronous; does it need to be remote or colocated? Once the firm's location in the matrix is determined, you can look for vendor products that fill these needs and analyze the products' cost, features, benefits, risks, training, and implementation issues. A selection of the top contenders can be presented to the company. (2) In this case, we will be looking for products that allow remote interactions that are both synchronous and asynchronous. Difficulty: 3: Challenging

66) What is a digital dashboard, and why are they becoming an increasingly popular tool?

Answer: A digital dashboard displays graphical information and charts of key performance indicators on a single screen. They are becoming increasingly popular because they provide comprehensive and accurate information for decision making that helps managers quickly spot areas that need attention.

100) The role of the information systems department in a company is solely to support the needs of other groups as determined by senior managers. Explain why you agree or disagree with this statement.

Answer: Answers will vary, but should include an understanding of the role this department plays in creating new products and services and coordinating organizational change. An example answer is: I disagree with this statement. While a major function of the information systems department is to install, run, and manage the technology infrastructure, another role that it should play is to inform the company about new technologies, suggest capabilities the firm could have based on new or existing technologies, and helping the firm manage business processes and change.

87) Identify and describe at least four business benefits of collaboration. Which do you feel is the most important and why?

Answer: Business benefits from collaboration are (1) productivity; (2) quality; (3) innovation; (4) customer service; and (5) financial performance. Collaboration helps productivity because people working together on a task can complete the task more quickly. It helps quality because people working together will be more able to correct each other's mistakes. It helps innovation because people working in groups come up with more ideas than those working in isolation. It helps customer service because teams can solve customer complaints more quickly together rather than working in isolation. And as a result of all of these benefits, collaboration helps finance, because collaborative firms have superior sales, sales growth, and financial performance. Student evaluations will vary: for example, the most important of the benefits might be: innovation, because new products, services, and means of production are at the heart of being able to outperform your competitors.

18) What is the connection between organizations, information systems, and business processes?

Answer: Business processes are how work is actually performed, step by step, in an organization. An organization can be seen as a collection of business processes. Information systems are used to help the organization execute its business processes. In some cases, an information system might hinder a business process, making it more complex than necessary, or it might greatly improve a business process, moving essential information seamlessly between parts of the organization and different business processes.

20) Why do businesses invest in information systems?

Answer: Businesses invest in information systems as a way to cope with and manage their internal production functions and cope with the demands of key actors in their environments. Specifically, firms invest in information systems to achieve operational excellence (productivity, efficiency, agility); to develop new products and services; to attain customer intimacy and service (continuous marketing, sales, and service; customization and personalization); to improve decision making (accuracy and speed); to achieve competitive advantage; and to ensure survival.

19) Define and give an example of a cross-functional business process within a firm.

Answer: Cross-functional processes are those that require input, cooperation, or coordination between the major business functions in an organization. For instance, when a salesman takes an order, the major business functions of planning, production, inventory control, shipping, accounting, and customer relations will all be involved before the order is completed. What at first appears to be a simple process, fulfilling an order, turns out to be a very complicated series of business processes that require the close coordination of major functional groups in a firm.

64) How can a good CRM system increase profits for a company?

Answer: Customer relationship management uses information systems to coordinate all of the business processes surrounding the firm's interactions with its customers. The systems consolidate customer information from multiple sources—telephone, email, wireless devices, traditional sales and marketing systems, and the web—so that the firm can obtain a unified view of a customer. Understanding the customer allows a firm to increase the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.

88) Why are "conversations" relevant to social business?

Answer: Customers, suppliers, employees, managers, and even oversight agencies continually have conversations about firms, often without the knowledge of the firm or its key actors (employees and managers). Supporters of social business assert that if firms could tune into these conversations, they will strengthen their bonds with consumers, suppliers, and employees, increasing their emotional involvement in the firm.

61) Identify the different types of systems used for the different levels of management in a business.

Answer: The types of information systems used for different levels of management are transaction processing systems (TPS), management information systems (MIS), decision-support systems (DSS), and executive support systems (ESS). TPS, such as payroll or order processing, track the flow of the daily routine transactions that are necessary to conduct business. They are used by operational managers to manage day-to-day operations. MIS summarize and report on the company's basic operations using data supplied by TPS. They provide middle managers with reports on the organization's current performance and are not highly analytical. DSS also support middle management decisions when these decisions are unique, rapidly changing, and not specified easily in advance. They use advanced analytical models and data analysis capabilities and often draw on information from external as well as internal sources. ESS support senior management by providing data of greatest importance to senior management decision makers. ESS provide a generalized computing and communications capacity that can be applied to a changing array of problems. ESS present graphs and data from many sources through an interface that is easy for senior managers to use, often a portal.

65) The automotive tire supply company you work for, Tires4U, has noticed that one of its brands of tires is not selling nearly as well as anticipated at most of its locations. For each of the four main types of information systems found in a business, identify a query that might help understand this development. Of the four types of systems, which do you think will be the most helpful and why?

Answer: You might query operational level TPS to make sure that the product is actually getting to the stores and being restocked. You could query MIS to see average sales levels according to geography, location, and other factors to see if there are any specific factors affecting the sales. You might query ESS to see if the same tires are being sold by competitors and what these prices are. You might use DSS to see what factors could increase sales. Assuming that the tires are being properly stocked at the stores, the most important system to query is the MIS for summaries of sales records to help pinpoint any other factors, sales and marketing to assure that promotion and pricing is accurate.

43) You work for a highly successful advertiser that is about to expand nationally. Of utmost importance will be finding a way to store and disseminate its clients' frequently updated branding and style guides throughout the organization. The guides include multiple image files and text documents. What system will best serve these needs?

B) An extranet with KMS capabilities

71) Which of the following statements is not true about collaboration in a business setting?

B) Collaboration is a many-to-many activity as opposed to a one-to-one or one-to-many activity.

36) What is the most important benefit of an enterprise application?

B) Enabling business functions and departments to share information

83) Jive is an example of which of the following?

B) Enterprise social networking tool

45) Which of the following types of systems could be used to enable different firms to work collaboratively on a product?

B) Extranet

82) As discussed in the chapter case, what is the primary reason why Spacebook failed?

B) It was designed and developed without taking the organization's culture into consideration.

92) A ________ is a senior manager who oversees the use of IT in the firm.

C) CIO

28) Which of the following systems is especially suited to situations in which the procedure for arriving at a solution may not be fully predefined in advance?

C) DSS

40) You manage the Information Systems department at a small startup Internet advertiser. You need to set up an inexpensive system that allows customers to see real-time statistics, such as views and click-throughs, about their current display ads. Which type of system will most efficiently provide a solution?

C) Extranet