Review Questions

Unit 1 - Introduction to BTM

What are the four critical dimensions of BTM? Why are they important to business?

The four critical dimensions of BTM are: business processes, organizations, data and information, and technology.

In order to effectively implement BTM, business processes must be efficient and effective.

Management processes more likely to succeed if supported by organizational structures and understanding of roles, responsibilities and decision rights.

Timely, valid information is a prerequisite for effective decision making. Must be delivered in a way that is comprehensible by non-specialists and actionable. Data must be: available, relevant, accurate and reliable

Effective technology can help connect all other dimensions. Appropriate technology makes processes easier to execute, facilitates timely information shareing, and enables consistent coordination between elements and layers of the organization. Done through:

• automation of manual tasks
• reporting
• analytics for decision making
• integration between management systems

Unit 2 - Business Processes, Information Systems, and Information

What are the differences between IS and IT?

• Information Systems not the same as Information Technology

  • Technologies are tools
  • Information Systems are the collection of tools, the people who use it, and the processes it supports

What are the basic components that make up an information system? Which component is most important and why?

• Basic components are: hardware, software, network, data, process and people.

  • Process: steps undertaken to carry out a specific business activity to achieve a desired goal
  • People: Individuals who are directly involved with the information system

• Most important component are the people. IT in and of itself is not useful unless the right people know how to use it and manage it effectively.

What is the relationship between software and information system?

• Software is the program or collection of programs that enable hardware to process data.

What does the term business process mean? What is a cross-functional business process?

• Collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific product (serve a particular goal) for customers.

• Often visualized as a flowchart of a sequence of activities.

• Cross-funtional business process is a process in which no single functional area is responsible for its completion. multiple functional areas collaborate to perform the function.

What is the relationship between value chain and business process?

• Value chain usually describes a major line of business. Usually decomposed into a few business processes

  • Processes usually contain a few subprocessess
  • Activities are the lowest level process

What is the value in analyzing and documenting a business process?

• Can help determine bottlenecks, eliminate duplicate activities, combine related activities and identify smooth-running processes
• To stay competitive, organizations must optimize and automate their business processes

What type of information systems is designed to support the operational processes?

• Information systems can improve an activity and improve dataflow among activities. For an example, GPS for drivers can improve operational processes for delivery businesses.

What is business process management (BPM)? What role does it play in allowing a company to differentiate itself?

• Business process management focuses on aligning all aspects of an organization with the wants and needs of clients.

• Promotes business effectiveness and efficiency, striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology.

• Attempts to improve processes continuously for competitive edge.

What roles do people play in information systems?

• IT in and of itself is not useful unless the right people know how to use it and manage it effectively.

Unit 3 - Business Intelligence and Analytics

What is business intelligence?

• Business intelligence provides decision makers with valuable information and knowledge by leveraging a variety of sources of data as well as structured and unstructured information
• Can be quantitative or qualitative.
• The set of strategies, processes, applications, data, technologies, and technical architectures which are used to support the collection, analysis, dissemination of business information
• Leverages software and services to transform data into actionable intelligence that informs organization's strategic and tactical business decisions
• Delivering relevant and reliable information to the right people at the right time with the goal of achieving better decisions faster

What role does business intelligence play within an organization?

• Data are business assets. Unused data are wasted business resources. Challenge is to make decisions in an environment that is data rich and information poor.
• Business Intelligence supports decision making by analysis business information. Provides information about past, monitors current operations and predicts and forecasts future trends.

What are the differences between data latency, analysis latency and decision latency?

• Data latency is the time needed to make transactional data ready for analysis
• Analysis is the time from which the analysis of data is completed
• Decision latency is the time for a human to comprehend the analysis and take appropriate action

What is a data warehouse? How does it differ from operational databases?

• Data warehouse stores a logical collection of information gathered from operational database which supports business analytics activities and decision-making tasks
• Primary purpose is to aggregate information throughout an organization into a single repository for decision making purposes
• Repository of historical data organized by subject
• Operation databases stores raw transactional data that has not been transformed into a common set of enterprise definitions

What is ETL?

• ETL is the process of which data from internal and external databases are extracted, transformed into information using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads the information into a data warehouse

What is Data Mart?

• Data mart - contains a subset of data warehouse extracted to be analyzed for specific business units
• A low-cost scaled down version of a data warehouse
• Can be implemented more quickly than data warehouses

What is the difference between slicing and dicing?

• OLAP: online analytical processing OR multidimensional analysis

• "slices and dices" data stored in a dimensional format

• drills down in the data to greater detail

• SLICING

  • Perform a selectrion on one dimension of a given cube

• DICING

  • Define a subcube by performing a selection of one or more dimensions
  • Reduce the number of member values of one ore more dimensions

What is data mining? How does it differ from data warehouse?

• Searching for valuable business information in a large data warehouse or data mart.

• Data mining is the process of searching and analyzing data to extract valuable information not offered by raw data alone.

  • Drill down - increase levels of detail
  • Drill up - increase summarization

• Performs two basic operations:

  • predicting trends and behaviours
  • identifying previously unknown patterns

What is data visualization? Why is data visualization important to business?

• Term that describes any effort to help people understand the significance of data by placing it in a visual context
• Presentation of data in a graphical format
• Patterns, trends, and correlations that might go undetected in text-based data can be exposed and recognized easier with data visualization software

Unit 5 - Database Concepts and Managing Data

What is the relationship between database and information systems?

• Databases are the collection of records about various business categories
• Information systems maintain and access the data in databases.

What are the problems of non-database systems?

• Cannot ensure no data redundancy

  • Duplicate data in multiple data files
  • Wastage of storage space and inefficient processing

• Data cannot be securely shared

• Data consistency & data integrity issues

  • Various copies of the data do not agree
  • Different representations of same piece of data in diff places

• Data isolation

  • Applications cannot access data associated with other applications

What is the relationship between database and DBMS?

• DBMS is the software/application that allows users and other applications to interact with a database.
• Software used to create, manage, maintain, and manipulate a database

What are the benefits of DBMS?

• Data Security

  • High security measures in place to deter mistakes and attacks

• Data Integrity

  • Data meet certain constraints, such as no alphabetic characters

• Data independence

  • Applications and data are not linked to each other, so tat all applications are able to access the same data

What are the characteristics or key features of a relational database?

• Each table must have a primary key that uniquely identifies each row

  • Composite primary key

    • primary key that consist of more than one field

  • Atomic primary key

    • a primary key that consist of only one field

• Collection of logically linked related tables

• Tables are linked by matching fields

• Primary Key and Foreign key are used to create logical relationships between tables

  • Foreign Key is an attribute in a child table that reference a primary key of parent table

Integrity Constraints

• Entity Integrity:

  • Primary key is a unique value and NOT NULL

• Referential Integrity:

  • Either null or a value that matches a primary key of parent table.

What is the main purpose of normalization in database?

• Reduce duplication of data.

What is the relationship between tables in a database and forms?

• Forms provide an interface for entering and displaying Data

What is the relationship between database queries and forms?

• SQL enables people to perform complicated searches using relatively simple statements
• Query by Example allows people to simply fill in a form to construct a sample or description of the data he or she wants

Unit 7 - Introduction to Enterprise Systems and Technologies

What are transaction processing systems (TPS)?

• transaction: any business event that generates data worth being captured and stored in a database

  • student registration, sales order processing, flight booking

• transaction processing system: supports the monitoring, collection, storage and processing of data generated by each of the organizations basic business transactions. the data is input to the organization's database

• Handle high volumes of data, avoid errors and provide a highly secure and stable environment

• Has to be protected from errors resulting from overlapping or concurrent updates

• must be protected against inconsistencies arising from system failures

• a transaction must be reversible

• an audit trail of transaction flow must be available

What are the major features of TPS?

• performance

  • system response time is critical in TPS. system performance is usually measured by the number of transactions they can process in a given period of time

• availability

  • the system must be available whenever it is needed. system availability is the percentage of time that a given system is active and working

• data integrity

  • refers to overall completeness, accuracy, and consistency of data. aims to prevent unintentional changes to information

• ease of use

  • the system should be simple for users to understand, protect them from data-entry errors as much as possible, and allow them to easily correct their errors

• modular growth

  • the system should be capable of growth at incremental costs, rather than requiring a complete replacement
  • it should be possible to add, replace or update hardware and software without shutting down the system

Describe the relationship between TPS, MIS and DSS.

TPS -> MIS -> DSS -> EIS -> ES

What is an audit trail in transaction processing systems?

• chronological log that provide a sequences of activities that have affected transactions

What is an ERP system? How does an ERP system enforce best practices in an organization?

• Enterprise Resource Planning.
• Adopts a business process view of the overall organization
• Integrates all departments and functions throughout an organization into a single information system so that employees can make enterprise-wide decisions by viewing enterprise-wide information on all business operations
• More managers see more data, leading to better information
• Combines all of an organization's operational data into one central core information system

What is the relationship between ERP and information silos?

• Information silo is isolated data stored in separate information systems.

  • Data redundancy

• By integrating departments and functions throughout an organization into a single information system, employees can make better decisions.

What are the costs and benefits of ERP systems?

Benefits

• Data sharing occurs in realtime
• Implements integrated processes that are industry best practices
• More managers see more data, better insight
• Information silo problem solved
• Better integration with supply chain partners

Costs & Challenges

• Challenges include:

  • Gap analysis

    • identify differences between business requirements and capabilities of chosen ERP system

  • Customization - companies may need to change existing business processes to fit the predefined business processes of the software

  • Data definition and ownership

  • Change management - underestimating the complexity of the transition or cutover and training required to implement a new ERP system

• The cost of an ERP system

  • depends on the size and complexity of the software package, which is a function of the size of the firm
  • include new hardware required to run the system
  • includes consultant and business analyst fees
  • includes the time required for implementation
  • includes training costs

What are the differences between cloud ERP and on-premise ERP?

Unit 8 - IT Architecture and Cloud Computing

What does Business-IT alignment mean?

• Closely associated to improve the business value of IT investments
• Integrates the information technology to the strategy, mission, and goals of the organization
• Caused because IT and business professionals unable to bridge gap between themselves because of differences in objectives, culture, and mutual ignorance for the other group's body of knowledge

What is Enterprise Architecture?

• The planning function between strategy formation and delivery

• Business Architecture – a blueprint of the enterprise that provides a common understanding of the organization and is used to align strategic objectives and tactical demands
• Application Architecture (Services) – the process of defining a structured solution that meets all of the technical and operational requirements
• Data/Information Architecture – composed fo models, policies, rules or standards that govern which data is collected and how it is stored, arranged, integrated and put to use in data systems and in organizations
• Technology Architecture – description of the structure and interaction of the platform services, and logical and physical technology components

Ensure that projects do not duplicate functionality or diverge from each other

Define cloud computing. How is it different from Internet?

• the use of resources and applications hosted remotely on the Internet
• Shift in how business consume technology. More about process and culture than technology
• Convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable network resources

What are the differences between IaaS, PaaS and SaaS?

• IaaS offers hardware and networking equipment (and services) on a pay-per-use basis. (Azure, EC2)
• SaaS offers software applications on a pay per use or on-demand basis.
• PaaS offers hardware, networking, and software tools for application development on a pay per use basis

Identify the key benefits of cloud computing.

• Cost Savings: for data storage, software and client computers

• Pay for Capabilities/Features as Needed - no large capital outlay. Virtually no hardware or fixed costs.

• Scalable/Elastic - add new users, resources easily

• Staff Savings - the workload of internal IT staff is eased or eliminated

• Lower maintenance costs- latest versions / updates instantly available

• Relative advantage over buying (TCO) total cost of ownership

  • increasingly restrictive end-user licenses

• Reduce "wasted" use, maximize capacity utilization

Discuss the concerns and risks associated with cloud computing.

• Data security - susceptible to hacking

  • multiple firms' data in one central and vulnerable location

• Software upgrade – customers potentially give up control over software versions or changing requirements

• Vendor lock-in - switching costs ("holdup" costs)

  • risk of the SaaS company going out of business

• Bandwidth Costs - high speed internet connectivity required

• Legal issues - is jurisdiction where the data are used, hosted, or both?

What are the differences between public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud?

Unit 9 - IS Development and Project Management

What is SDLC? What are the seven phases in system development?

• The overall process for developing information systems from planning and analysis through implementation and maintenance.

• Seven phases:

  1. Planning
  2. Analysis
  3. Design
  4. Development
  5. Testing
  6. Implementation
  7. Maintenance

Briefly explain the various types of feasibility study. Why is feasibility study important in system development?

• Technical feasibility

  • Does our current technology support proposed solution?
  • Do we have technical competence to build the system?
  • Can we support and maintain system when it is in use?

• Legal and Regulatory Feasibility

  • What restrictions introduced by company law, Government and standard organizations

• Organizational Feasibility

  • Organization capable accepting the change involved in managing information and adopting new processes?

• Social Feasibility

  • Are employees willing to accept changes in work conditions?

• Economic Feasibility

  • Can we afford the system?

What are the major differences between systems analysis and systems design?

Systems Analysis

• End users and IT specialists work together to understand and document the business requirements for the system.

  • Define the system to be developed in more detail

• Major deliverable of this phase of the System Requirement Document

System Design

• Translate the business requirements into detailed functions of the system -> System Specification
• Determine hardware, software and telecommunications equipment required to run the system -> Technical Architecture
• Decide the use off-the-shelf software or develop a new system -> Make or Buy Decision

Why would an organization consider building its own software application if it is cheaper to buy one?

• An in-house software is customizable to fit the organization's existing business processes

What are the four different implementation or system conversion strategies?

• Direct cutover

  • Old system is cutoff and new system is turned on

• Pilot conversion

  • Introduce system in one functional area or location

• Phased conversion

  • Introduce components of the new system

• Parallel conversion

  • The old and new systems operate simultaneously for a period of time

What is scope creep? How does it affect project management?

• uncontrolled change or continuous growth in a project's growth

  • poor change control, weak project manager or poor communication between parties
  • scope creep is a risk in most projects. it often results in cost overrun

What are the major problems of traditional Waterfall methodology in system development?

• Inflexible and time intensiveness. Other methodologies that are more agile (i.e. more flexible, less time intensive) to facilitate inevitable changing requirements

Unit 10 - Information Security, Privacy and Ethics

What do ethics have to do with information systems?

• privacy - involving collecting, storing, and disseminating personal information about individuals

  • steps on privacy rights - the right to be left alone and to be free of unreasonable personal intrusion
  • it is about how personal information is collected and shared

What is information privacy? What is the difference between Opt-in and Opt-out model?

• opt-in model - prohibits an organization from collecting any personal information unless the customer specifically authorizes it
• out-out - permits the company to collect personal information until the customer specifically requests that the data not be collected

What is information security?

• consists of the processes and policies designed to protect and organization's information and information system from unauthorized access
• must be protected to maintain a company's competitive advantage

What are the differences between threats and vulnerability?

• vulnerability - the possibility that the system will be harmed by a threat

• two types of threats:

  • unintentional threats
  • deliberate threats

• greatest threat are insiders, victims of social engineering, mistakes and ignorance