IS Exam Study Guide

Why is MIS the most important class in the business school? (Ch 1) - Key Elements: management + use, information systems, strategies - Goal: managing IS to achieve business strategies - Job Security (requires skills and ability to adapt, favors people w/ strong non-routine cognitive skills) - Message: develop strong non-routine cognitive skills (abstract reasoning, systems thinking, collab, ability to experiment) - Digital Revolution - Information age: production distribution, control of information is the primary driver of the economy - Digital Revolution: the conversion from mechanical/analog devices to digital devices - Future business professionals must be able to assess, evaluate, and apply emerging information technology to business Componenents of IS (hardware, software, data, procedures, people) - Hardware: computer side, actors | Software: computer side, instructions | Data: bridge | Procedures: human side, instructions | People: human side, actors - Automation moves work from human to computer | increasing difficulty of change - most important component is YOU | cognitive skills determine quality of thinking, ability to conceive info from data - IT vs IS - IT: products, methods, inventions, and standards used for producing info (can buy) - IS: assembly of hardware, software, data, procedures, and people that produce info (cannot buy) - Data : recorded facts and/or figured - Accurate, timely, relevant, barely sufficient worth its cost - Information : processed (by summing, ordering, averaging, comparing, etc.) data to provide value to its users - Non-routine vs routine skills - Non-routine: collaboration, abstract thinking, systems thinking, ability to experiment Industry Structure (Ch. 2) - IS exists to support businesses achieve strategies, competitive strategy then determines organizational goals/objectives, strat determines value chains (business processes), business processes determine design of IS, strategy determines IS - Organizational Strategy : industry structure, competitive strategy, value chain, business processes, information systems - Porter Five Forces: - Competitive forces: threat of substitutions, threat of new entrants, rivalry - Bargaining Power forces: bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of customers - Industry wide: lowest cost across industry (cost), better product/service across (differentiation) - Focus: lowest cost within an industry segment (cost), better product/service within an industry segment (differentiation) - Competitive Strategy + Value Chain - business select a cost-leader strategy would structure around low cost processes, business that select differentiation strat structure around costly process and add value - Value: what customer willing to pay | Difference between value and cost = margin - VC: value creating activities = primary (creating, marketing, delivering) and support (activities that allow primary activities to occur) activities - Business Process Generates Value - Business process: network of activities that generate value by transforming inputs into outputs - Cost of BP = cost of inputs + cost of activities - Margin = value - cost - Streamlining BP increases value (business process design) but not easy to do, requires people to work in new ways - How Does IS Create Competitive Advantage - Product implementation: create new product/service | enhance existing products | differentiates products - Process implementation: locks in customers | locks in suppliers | raises barriers to market entry | establish alliances | increase profit margin by decreasing cost/errors Business Intelligence System (Ch. 3) - BI: information system that process operational + data to identify patterns, relationships, and trends for business professionals and other knowledge workers - Conponenets: hardware, software (BI application), data, procedures, people - Alteratives for publishing: email/collaboration tool (static, manual, low), web server (static/dynamic, alert/RSS, low static, high dynamic), sharepoint (static/dynamic, akert/RSS, workflow, low static, high dynamic), BI server (dynamic, alert/RSS, subscription, high) - Users: predict/identify change in purchasing patters (amazon customers purchased this and also bought), entertainment (Netflix anaylyzes watching, listening), predictive law enforcement (analyze data: location, date, type of crime, etc) - Primary Activities : Data acquisition (obtaining, cleaning, organizing, relating, cataloging source data) | BI analysis (creating BI, reporting, data mining, big data, acknowledgement management) | Publish results (delivering BI to knowledge workers, push publishing delivers BI w/o request, pull publishing requires user to request BI results) | Data warehouse/marts (operaional data not ideal bc secuirty, control, and structure. Functions of DW: extracts data from operational, internal and external database, cleanse data, organize, relate DW, catalog w/ metadata. Data mart (addresses particular component or functional area of business) = subset of data warehouse - Reporting Applications - Recently Frequently Money (RFM): analyze and rank customers according to purchasing patterns - Scores: sort customer purchase records by data of most recent purchase, divide into quintiles, Score of 5 to 1 5 is best, Process repeated for frequently/money - Outline Analytical Processing (OLAP): provides ability to sum, count, average groups of data, dynamic, dimension = characteristic of measure (purchase date), measure = data item of interest to be summed or averaged (total sales, average sales) - Big Data : huge volume - petebyte and larger, rapid velocity - generated rapidly, great variety = structured data, free-form text, log files, graphics, audio, video - Knowledge Management : create value from intellectual capital + sharing knowledge, preserving organizational memory caputring/storing lessons and best practice of key employees - Benefits: improve process quality, increase team strength, GOAL: enable employees to sue organizations collective knowledge Hardware, Software, Mobile Systems (Ch. 4) - Hardware: CPU, Ram, Storage(non-volatile: hard drive, solid state, flash, CD; volatile: cache & memory; measured in GB) - Computer Data: represented by bits that are grouped into 8-bit chunks known as a byte - Disruptive hardware technologies: self driving cars, digital reality, 3D printing, cryptocurrencies - Virtualization: process by which one physical computer hosts many different virtual computers within it - Native applications and web applications - Open Source: No license fee: Libre office, Firefox, Apache, Ubuntu, Android - Native applications: written to use a particular operating system Data Base Processing (Ch. 5) - Database: organize & keep track of thinks, keep track of multiple themes; single theme use spreadsheet, multiple use database - Primary Key: column that identifies a unique row in a table - Foreign Key: a column that refers back to a primary key of a different table, represents a relationship - Data Integrity Issues: incorrect of inconsistent information, users lose confidence in information, system gets a poor reputation - SQL Structured query language: international standard, used by nearly all DBMS - Multiuser processing problem: lost-update problem, ticketmaster seat reserver - ERD (Entity Relationship Diagram)Entities, attributes, identifier - Normalization: converting poorly structured tables into two or more well-structured tables - Users Role: users are final judges, users review of data model is crucial for the business The Cloud (Ch. 6) - Cloud: elastic leasing of pooled computer resources over the internet - Elastic: leased computing resources, dynamically increased/decreased programmatically where organizations only pay for resource - Pooled: many organizations share same physical hardware through virtualization - Over the internet: servers not stored locally, no need to hire - Cloud computing era: 2008-current, cheap processors, virtualization technology, internet based standards - Cloud doesn't make sense: law or standard industry practice require physical control or possession of data, financial or health care - 3 types of cloud services: SaaS (employees/customers), PaaS (application developers/testers), IaaS (network architects) - Content delivery network(CDN): stores user data in many different geographical locations and makes data available on demand Quiz 1 1. You run Salt Lake's most successful diamond and jewelry store. One morning, you hear the news that overnight, one of the mines that your gems are harvested from has been detonated with C4. According to Porter's 5 Forces model, which threat is your jewelry store facing? Power of suppliers 2. McDonald's chooses a division of labor where their staff is inexperienced and must be trained before they can serve the general public. Thus, they do not have to pay high salaries to their workers. What kind of strategy has McDonald's successfully employed? Cost Leadership