Midterm Flashcards
What are the four main components of IT?
Hardware + Software + Databases + Networks (+ procedures and people as a bonus)
What does FAIS stand for?
Functional area information system (aka a departmental information system)
What does ERP stand for?
Enterprise resource planning
What is enterprise resource planning?
Integrated technology across AOE, helping to manage comms and data sharing, while improving overall productivity and efficiency
What does TPS stand for?
Transaction processing system (processes transactions)
What does IOS stand for?
Interorganizational information systems
What is IT?
Information technology - the use of computer-based tools that helps us work with information and support information-processing needs
What is an IS?
Information system - collects, processes, stores, analyzes, and disseminates information for practical use
What is the difference between data, information, and knowledge?
Data are {things, events, activities, transactions} that have been recorded, classified and stored
Information is data that has been organized to convey meaning
Knowledge is the use of information to solve a specific problem
In a modern organization, how are information resources managed?
End-user computing - responsibility falls on both the end-user alongside the MIS
What is a business process?
Inputs > Resources > Outputs
Any related activities that create a products or service of value to an org
How can IT helps with business processes?
Execution of the process, capturing and processing data, and monitoring process performance
What is BPI vs. BPR vs. BPM?
BPI (business process improvement): incremental approach to improving operations
BPR (business process re-engineering): radical redesign of processes [“clean slate”]
BPM (business process management): managing the systems that support continuous BPI
What are the three business pressures present today?
Market pressures (globalization, changing nature of the workforce, powerful consumers)
Technology pressures (innovation, rate of obsolescence, information overload, Big Data)
Other pressures (societal, ethical, ESG)
What are the general components of Porter’s Competitive Five Forces Model?
Direct industry rivals
Bargaining power of suppliers
Bargaining power of buyers
Threat of new entrants
Threat of substitute products/services
What is a value chain?
A sequence of activities through which inputs are transformed into more valuable outputs
What are five strategies to improve competitive advantage?
Cost leadership (make it cheaper)
Differentiation (make it different)
Innovation (make it new)
Operational effectiveness (improve internal processes)
Customer orientation (“the customer is always right”)
What are the six characteristics of “excellent” IT alignment
- Viewing IT as the engine of innovation
- Customer service is extremely important
- Rotating professionals across departments and functions
- Providing clear, overarching goals to employees
- IT employees understand how the company functions
- Vibrant and inclusive company culture
Rank the following in terms of least difficult > most difficult to change or replace: software, data, hardware
Hardware > software > data
What are the features of high quality data?
Accuracy
Completeness
Timely
Consistent
Accessible
Relevant
Concise
Why is data so hard to manage?
- It increases exponentially over time
- Collection occurs across a variety of devices, methods, servers, locations, systems, formats, languages, etc.
- New types of data are being created all the time
- Data is subject to obsolescence and can have data rot (physical mediums)
- Changing legal requirements
What are the core concepts of master data management?
One source of truth, core data that spans enterprise systems, can be applied to multiple transactions
What is data archiving primarily driven by?
Legislation, ie. PIPEDA in Canada
What do databases minimize?
Redundancy, isolation, and inconsistency
What do databases maximize?
Security, integrity, independence
What is Big Data?
Structured + semi-structured + unstructured data that is: high velocity, high variety, and high volume
What are the problems with Big Data?
Sometimes comes from untrusted sources, is dirty, and it can change
Data Warehouse vs. Data Mart
Warehouses are more expensive, but both are read-only which reduces time to query; it is often organized by subject and uses OLAP (online analytical processing); it ONLY reflects history (cannot be changed)
What is explicit vs. tacit knowledge?
Explicit: can be documented and is easy to transfer and record
Tacit: is experiential, “secretive”, difficult to write down or transfer
What is the data heirarchy?
- A bit (0’s and 1’s)
- A byte (8 bits, a single character)
- A field (word, groups of words, images - logical groupings)
- A record (logical grouping of related fields)
- A table (data file, logical grouping of related records)
- A database (logical grouping of related files)
