Information Systems Flashcards
What are the components of information systems? (4)
- Organisations, people, software, code or even just paper
- All handle information
- At least one must be digital (using computer hardware)
- At least two components, can be one or two-way
What are the 6 different types of information systems?
- Simple
- Complex
- Non-autonomous
- Autonomous
- Low Level
- High Level
Technology advancements have led to… (2)
- Digital transformation - increasingly digital world (things done faster, easier and more accurately)
- Digital creation - new information systems, doing new things
Innovations may help… (4)
- Achieve operational excellence
- Develop new products, services and business models
- Provide superb customer service
- Improve decision-making abilities
What is the mainframe era? (2)
- Give computer information, computer processes it to give a result
- Not interactive
What is the personal computer (PC) era?
- 2D screen, keyboard and mouse, operates on WIMP interface (windows, icons, menus and pointers)
What is the mobility era?
- Mobile devices, we are moving rapidly towards mobility and ubiquity era
What user experience technology era are we in now?
- Between PC and mobility
What is user experience (UX)?
- Describes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use and efficiency of a product
What are the 3 parts of usability?
- Effectiveness, does it do what it should do?
- Efficiency, how fast does it do what you want it to?
- Satisfaction, typically standardised questionnaires to put a number on how satisfied you are
What is interaction design (IxD)?
- Practice of designing interactive digital products, environments, systems and services
What are personas? (2)
- Suitable design tool to describe end users
- Personas are not real people
What is a personas experience goal?
- How the persona wants to feel using the product?
What is a personas end goal?
- Motivations for performing a task, their intended outcome
What is a personas life goal?
- Why the persona wants to accomplish end goals
What is a primary persona?
- Target for interface design, only one per interface
What is a secondary persona? (2)
- Mostly satisfied with interface for primary persona
- Small additional needs that don’t contradict primary persona
What is a supplemental persona? (2)
- Completely represented by a combination of primary or secondary personas
- No additional attention given
What is a customer persona? (2)
- Persona who buys the product
- Not necessarily end user, treated as secondary
What is a served persona?
- Directly affected by the use of a product but does not use it
What is a negative persona? (2)
- Persona product is not being built for
- Help communicate who is not the target product
What is a persona scenario?
- Concise, narrative descriptions of one or more personas using a product to achieve one or more specific goals
What components are involved in requirements analysis? (5)
- Gather detailed information
- Define systems requirements
- Prioritise requirements
- Develop user-interface dialogs
- Evaluate requirements with users
What are the reasons for information systems project failure? (8)
- Incomplete requirements
- Didn’t involve user
- Insufficient resources/schedules
- Unrealistic expectations
- Lack of managerial support
- Changing requirements
- Poor planning
- Didn’t need it any longer
What are the properties of good quality requirements? (2U’s, 1N, 3C’s)
- Understandable
- Non-prescriptive
- Correct
- Complete
- Consistent
- Unambiguous
What are stakeholders of an information system?
- People with an interest in a successful system implementation
What are the three primary groups of stakeholders?
- Users of the system
- Clients who pay for and own the system
- Technical staff who ensure system operation
What are functional requirements? (3)
- aka “core functionality”
- specify what the system should do
- features, functions, affordances, capabilities, business rules, processes
- can rephrase as “the system must do [x]”
What are non-functional requirements? (3)
- everything else
- specify how the systems should do something
- behaviour, constraints, usability, reliability, performance, security
- can rephrase as “the system will behave in [x] way”
What are the 5 parts of the requirements analysis context?
- Creating problem and vision statements
- Brainstorming
- Identifying persona expectations
- Constructing context scenarios
- Identifying requirements
What is a problem statement?
- Defines the purpose of the design initiative
What is a vision statement?
- Inversion of problem statement, serves as a high-level design objective or mandate
What are the 3 types of identifying requirements?
- Data Requirements
- Functional Requirements
- Other requirements
MoSCoW List Prioritisation (4)
- Must have this
- Should have this, if at all possible
- Could have this, if it does not affect anything else
- Won’t have this time, but would like in the near future
What is storyboarding about?
- Communicating ideas
What are the 3 S components of storyboarding?
- Setting (people involved, environment, task being accomplished)
- Sequence (what steps are involved, what leads someone to use this, what is the task being illustrated?)
- Satisfaction (what motivates people to use this system, what does it enable people to accomplish, what need does the system fill?)
What are the different methods to evaluate how good an information system is? (5)
- Survey & Focus Groups
- Feedback from Experts
- Comparative Experiments
- Participant Observation
- Simulation & Formal Models
What are the 8 factors to consider when choosing an evaluation method?
- Stages in the cycle at which the evaluation is carried out
- Style of evaluation (lab/field)
- Level of sub/objectivity
- Type of measurement (qual/quant)
- Information provided (high/low-level)
- Immediacy of response (real-time/recollection of events)
- Level of inference implied
- Resources required
What is involved in a laboratory-style evaluation? (6)
1st Step - designer evaluates UI
- specialised equipment for testing available
- undisturbed
- allows for well-controlled experiments
- substitute for dangerous or remote locations
- variations in manipulations possible
What is involved in a field-style evaluation? (6)
- within the users actual working environment
- observe system in action
- disturbance
- long-term studied possible
- bias: presence of observer and equipment
- needs support/disturbs real workflow
What is a quantitative measure? (6)
- usually numeric
- easily analysed
- rather objective
- most useful in comparing alternative designs
- test hypotheses
- confirms designs
What is a quantitative measure? (5)
- non-numeric
- difficult to analyse
- rather subjective
- generates hypotheses
- finds flaws
What is the design stage of the IS cycle? (4)
- only concept
- more experts, less users
- greatest pay-off (early error detection)
- rather qualitative measures
What is the implementation stage of the IS cycle? (4)
- artefact exists
- more users, less experts
- assures quality of product
- rather quantitative
What is the system usability scale (SUS)?
- standardised questionnaire designed to assess perceived usability (Brooke, 1996)
What are the characteristics of SUS scoring? (4)
- determine each item’s score contribution which ranges from 0 to 4
- positively worded (odd numbers) = position - 1
- negatively worded (even numbers) = 5 - position
- to get overall score, multiply sum by 2.5 to produce score from 0 to 100
What are the components of Heuristic Evaluation?
- Developed by Jakob Nielsen
- Helps find usability problems in a design
- Small set (3-5) of evaluations examine UI
- can be performed on working UI or sketches
- in general: it is important to show the state of the system
What are the 10 design heuristics?
- Visibility of system status
- Match between system and the real world
- User control and freedom
- Consistency and standards
- Error prevention
- Recognition rather than recall
- Flexibility and efficiency of use
- Aesthetic and minimalist design
- Help users recognise, diagnose and recover from error
- Help and documentation
What are the 4 steps of the evaluators’ process?
- Step through design several times
- Which principles?
- Nielsen’s “Heuristics”
- Use violations to redesign/fix problems
Why do you need multiple evaluators? (2)
- No evaluator finds everything
- Some find more than others
Comparison between heuristic and user testing (4)
- Heuristic often faster
- Heuristc results come pre-interpretated
- User more accurate
- Valuable to alternate methods
What are the 4 phases of Heuristic Evaluation?
- Pre-evaluation training
- Evaluation
- Severity Rating
- Debriefing
What is IDEO? (2)
- leading US design firm
- 3 special ingredients (teams, culture, methodology)
What are the components of IDEO process? (5)
- Creation of “Hot Teams”
- Brainstorming
- Rapid Prototyping
- Observing ad listening from customers
- Thinking of products in terms of verbs rather than nouns
What are the key components of IDEO brainstorming? (5)
- one conversation at a time
- quantity is key
- use visual aids early
- aggregation of ideas
- limit time to an hour
What are the 3 rules in IDEO’s culture?
- employees design their own working areas
- employees have interest and skills to work with a wide range of people
- no hierarchies
What are the common ingredients for process modelling? (4)
- Actors or agents
- Actions or tasks
- Arrows
- Checkpoints, questions, design points or gateways
What is business process model and notation (BPMN)? (3)
- Graphical notation for business processes
- Process models can be exported in a computer-readable format
- Balance between representation of complex processes and still being able to read
What are the 5 steps of the software development life cycle?
- Organisation recognises problem
- Project teams investigate/understand problem and solution requirements
- Solution specified in detail
- System that solves problem built
- System installed, used, maintained and enhanced to continue to provide intended benefits
What is agile development? (2)
- Guiding philosophy and set of guidelines to develop IS in unknown, rapidly changing environments
- “chaordic”, chaotic and ordered
What are the agile values for agile software development? (4)
- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
- Working software over comprehensive documentation
- Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
- Responding to change over following plan
What are the 3 main approaches to agile development?
- Unified Process (UP)
- Extreme Programming (XP)
- Scrum
What is data? (2)
- Raw alphanumeric values obtained through different acquisition methods
- Data in their simplest form
What is information? (2)
- Created when data is processed, organised or structured to provide context and meaning
- Essentially processed data
What is knowledge? (2)
- What we know
- Unique to each individual, accumulation of past experience and insight that shapes the lens in which we interpret
What are the 7 steps of the Data Science workflow?
- Identify and understand the problem
- Identify what data is needed
- Assemble data
- Inspect and clean data
- Model data
- Report results
- Go to step 1
What are 3 ways data can be stored?
- Structured Text Files
- Spreadsheets
- Databases
What are structured text files? (2)
- standardised formulas for storing tabular data in plain text files
- comma-separated values (.csv)
What are spreadsheets?
- Step up from Structured Text File
- More meta data
- Multiple sheets
- Lots of functionality
What are the 3 pros of spreadsheets?
- Free/cheap to use
- Easy to learn basic use
- Versatile
What are the 3 cons of spreadsheets?
- Easy to make formula errors
- Easy to make inconsistent changes in different rows or columns
- Hard to detect errors
What is a database? (2)
- Central store of data
- Special database management system (DBMS) manages access to the data and ensures its integrity
What is the DS process? (4)
- Import
- Tidy
- Understand (transform, visualise, model)
- Communicate
What is big data?
- Complex high-bandwidth data which is difficult to process with traditional tools, applications or methods
Where does data come from? (3)
- People to people
- People to machine
- Machine to machine
What are the 4 V’s of data?
- Volume
- Velocity
- Variety
- Veracity
What is volume of data? (2)
- Data at Rest
- Terabytes to exabytes of existing data to process
What is velocity of data? (2)
- Data in motion
- Streaming data, milliseconds to seconds to respond
What is variety of data? (2)
- Data in many forms
- Structured/unstructured, text, multimedia
What is veracity of data? (2)
- Data in doubt
- Uncertainty due to data inconsistency and incompleteness
What is artificial intelligence (AI)? (2)
- Machine doing tasks that would normally require intelligence if done by a human
- Autonomous systems
What is super intelligence?
- Any intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest
What is machine learning?
- Using statistical techniques for computer systems to learn from previous experiences as to improve their abilities in accomplishing tasks
What is supervised machine learning? (2)
- Data examples are provided with desired output
- Goal: “train” a model to predict outcome for unseen instances
What is unsupervised machine learning? (2)
- Data examples presented without annotation
- Goal: “bin” related examples into subsets to identify useful groups in data
What is information security? (2)
Focuses on protecting information assets from damage or harm
Covers both intentional and accidental events
What assets are to be protected in information security? (4)
Data files
Software
IT equipment
Infrastructure
Why do we need information security?
New technology has new vulnerabilities
More activities online
Crime follows the money
Information security is a second thought when developing IT
New and changing threats
What is information extortion?
Attacker steals information from a computer system and demands compensation for its nondisclosure - cyberextortion
What is internal scalability?
How capable are the operations of the business model to expand the customer base and sales in a short time and at low cost?
What is external scalability?
How beneficial is the business environment to expand the customer base and increasing sales?
How is scalability realised?
By having both internal and external scalability considered and managed within competitive environments
What is the utilitarian perspective in ethical decision-making?
What produces the greatest balance of good over harm?
What is the rights perspective in ethical decision-making?
What best protects and respects the moral rights of those affected?
What is the fairness perspective in ethical decision-making?
All equals should be treated equally
What is the common good perspective in ethical decision-making?
Life in community is a good in itself and our actions should contribute to that life
What is the virtue perspective in ethical decision making?
What is consistent with the virtues that provide for the full development of our humanity?
What are internal controls in an accounting information system?
Mechanisms that prevent and detect fraud and mistakes in a business process
How are information systems changing in accounting? (2)
More automation
More functionality
What is blockchain?
System in which a record of transactions made in bitcoin or another cryptocurrency are maintained across several computers that are linked in peer-to-peer network.
What is the internet of things (IoT)?
Devices and applications have far-reaching uses and benefits, some of which present novel opportunities.
What is the Metaverse Standards Forum?
Aims to drive open interoperability, which could make it easier for developers to build across platforms
