Title | ADM1370 Exam Review |
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Author | Paolo Longo |
Course | Applications of Information Technology for Business |
Institution | University of Ottawa |
Pages | 44 |
File Size | 888.9 KB |
File Type | |
Total Downloads | 169 |
Total Views | 232 |
ADM1370 ExamReviewExam Info: 2 Hours All Modules and Chapters MCS, T/F, Short Answer Module 1Information Technology (IT) - Any computer based tool that people use to work with information and to support the information and information-processing needs of an organization Information System - Collects...
ADM1370 ExamReview
Exam Info: -
2 Hours All Modules and Chapters MCS, T/F, Short Answer
Module 1 Information Technology (IT) - Any computer based tool that people use to work with information and to support the information and information-processing needs of an organization Information System - Collects, processes, stores, analyzes, and disseminates information for a specific purpose The Informed User - A person knowledgeable about information systems and information technology - Informed User benefits: - Benefit more from your organizations IT applications - Enhance the quality of your organizations IT Applications with your input - Gain extensive knowledge on IT Applications and can provide recommendations - Keep updated in new information technologies and rapid development in existing technologies - Understand how IT can improve an organization's performance Managing Information Resources - Very expensive to acquire, operate and maintain - Have enormous strategic value to organizations as they are very heavily relied on - MIS functions have expanded and evolved greatly over time within organizations - Managing information systems is divided between the MIS department and the users - Factors Dividing the MIS department and users: - Size and nature of the organization - Amount and type of IT resources - Organizations attitudes toward computing - Attitudes of top management toward computing - Maturity level of the technology - Amount and nature of outsourced IT work - Countries where company operates - Generally, MIS department is responsible for corporate-level and shared resources - Users are responsible for departmental resources End User computing - All employees using computers in their work
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Two components: - End-user data entry, reporting and inquiry (users) - End-user development - Users develop usable systems such as spreadsheets or programs, using programming languages or other development tools
Traditional Functions of the MIS Department - Managing systems development and systems project management - As a user, you will have critical input into the systems development process - Managing computer operations, including the computer centre - Staffing, training, developing IS skills - Providing technical services - Infrastructure planning, development, and control - As a user, you will provide critical input about the IS infrastructure needs of your department New (consultative) functions of the MIS department - Initiating and designing specific strategic information systems - As a user, your info needs will often mandate the development of new strategic information systems - You will decide which strategic systems you need and provide input in developing these systems - Incorporating the internet and electronic commerce into the business - As a user, you will be primarily responsible for effectively using the internet and electronic commerce in your business. - Managing system integration, including the internet, intranets, and extranets - As a user, your business needs will determine how you want to use the internet, your corporate intranets, and extranets to accomplish your goals - Educating the non-MIS managers about IT - Your department will be primarily responsible for advising the MIS department on how best to educate and train your employees about IT - Educating the MIS staff about the business - Communication between the MIS department and the business units is a two-way street. You will be responsible for educating the MIS staff on your business, its needs, and its goals - Partnering with business unit executives - Essentially, you will be in a partnership with the MIS department. You will be responsible seeing that this partnership is successful - Managing outsourcing - Outsourcing is driven by business needs. MIS and your department will work to deal with technical issues such as communication bandwidth and security - Proactively using business and technical knowledge to seed innovative ideas about IT - Business needs often drive innovative ideas about how to effectively use information systems to accomplish your goals. - Creating business alliances with business partners
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MIS department acts as advisor on various issues, including hardware and software compatibility, implementing extranets, communications, and security MIS Systems Functional Area - Deals with the planning for and development, management, and use of information technology tools to help people perform all the tasks related to information processing and management. Data items - Elementary descriptions of things, events, activities, and transactions that are recorded, classified, and stored but are not organized to convey any specific meaning. - Data items can be numbers, letters, figures, sounds, and images. - Examples of data items are collections of numbers (3.11, 2.54) and characters (A, B, S) Information - Data that have been organized so that they have meaning and value to the recipient. - Example: A GPA by itself is a data item, but a student’s name coupled with his or her GPA is information - Recipient interprets the meaning and draws conclusions and implications from the info Knowledge - Consists of data and/or information that have been organized and processed to convey understanding, experience, accumulated learning, and expertise as they apply to a current business problem - Company gathers data, attaches the meaning to the data creating information, then uses expertise on how to manage the information. - Example: A school finds that people applying who have a 3.0 GPA have the most success, so the school implements a system to only interview students with over a 3.0 GPA. Computer Based information system - An information system that uses computer technology to perform some or all of its intended tasks. Information Technology Components - Basic components of computer-based information systems: - Hardware - Consists of devices such as the processor, monitor, keyboard, and printer. Together, these devices accept, process, and display data and information - Software - Is a program or collection of programs that enable the hardware to process data - Database - A collection of related files or tables containing data - Network - A connecting system that permits different computers to share resources - Procedures - Are the instructions for combining the above components to process information and generate the desired output - People - Individuals who use the hardware and software, interface with it, or use its output
How these components are integrated to form information systems - IT components of hardware software, networks and databases form the Information technology platform - IT personnel use these components to develop information systems, oversee security and risk, and manage data These activities cumulatively are called information technology services. - The IT components plus IT services compose the organization’s information technology infrastructure. - Above these stages is the various organizational information systems a company can have. Major Capabilities of Information Systems - Perform high-speed, high-volume numerical computations - Provide fast, accurate communication and collaboration within and among organizations - Store huge amount of information in an easy-to-access, yet small space - Allow quick and inexpensive access to vast amounts of information worldwide - Interpret vast amounts of data quickly and efficiently - Automate both semi-automatic business processes and manual tasks Application - A computer program designed to support a specific task or business process - Each functional area or department within a company uses dozens of application programs - Example: Company using an application to monitor employee turnover Departmental Information system - Collection of application programs in a single department (also known as a functional area information system (FAIS)). - Example: Collection of application programs in human resources is called the human resources information system. Types of Computer Based Information systems - Accounting and Finance - Determine best sources and uses of funds, and to perform audits to evaluate the controls at organizations using risk assessments of where such controls could fail. - Sales and Marketing - Conduct product, site, promotion, or price analysis - Manufacturing - Process customer orders, develop production schedules, control inventory levels, and monitor product quality. - Design and manufacture products - These processes are called computer-assisted design and computer-assisted manufacturing - Human resources - Manage the recruiting process, analyze and screen job applicants, and hire new employees.
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Help employees manage their careers, administer performance tests to employees, and monitor employee productivity - Rely on IT to manage compensation and benefits packages Enterprise Resource planning systems - Support entire organization - Designed to correct a lack of communication among the functional area ISs. - Tightly integrated the functional area ISs via a common database. - Enhance communications among the functional areas of an organization - Greatly increase organizational Productivity Transaction processing system - Supports entire organization - Supports the monitoring, collection, storage, and processing of data from the organization’s basic business transactions, each of which generates data. - A transaction is anything that changes the firm’s database - Collects data continuously, typically in real time as soon as the data are generated - PRovides input data for the corporate databases - Critical to the success of any enterprise because they support the core operations - Nearly all ERPs are also TPSs, but not all TPSs are ERP systems. Interorganizational Information systems (IOSs) - Information systems that connect two or more organizations - Support many interorganizational operations, of which supply chain management is best known Supply chain management system - The follow of materials, information, money, and services and suppliers of raw materials through factories and warehouses to the end customers - Shows physical flows, information flows, and financial flows Electronic commerce systems - Another type of interorganizational information system - Enable organizations to conduct transactions, called business-to-business (B2B) electronic commerce, and customers to conduct transactions with businesses, called business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic commerce. Knowledge Workers - Professional employees such as financial and marketing analysts, engineers, lawyers, and accountants. - Experts in a particular subject area - Create information and knowledge, which they integrate into the business - Act as advisors to middle managers and executives - Executives make decisions about the business from this Office automation systems (OASs) - Typically support the clerical staff, lower and middle managers, and knowledge workers - These employees use OASs to develop documents, schedule resources, and communicate - Functional area information systems summarize data and prepare reports, primarily for middle managers, but sometimes for lower level managers as well.
Business Intelligence Systems - Provide computer-based support for complex, nonroutine decisions, primarily for middle managers and knowledge workers - Systems are typically used with a data warehouse, and they enable users to perform their own data analysis Expert systems - Attempt to duplicate the work of human experts by applying reasoning capabilities, knowledge, and expertise within a specific domain. - Become valuable in many application areas, primarily but not exclusively areas involving decision making. Dashboards - A special form of IS that supports all managers of the organization. - They provide rapid access to timely information and direct access to structured information in the form of reports. - Dashboards that are tailored to the information needs of executives are called executive dashboards IT reduces the number of middle managers - IT makes managers more productive - Increases the number of employees who can report to a single manager - Ultimately decreases the number of managers and experts Social Computing - Type of IT that combines social behaviour and information systems to create value - Focused on improving collaboration and interaction among people and on encouraging user-generated content. - Social information is not anonymous - Makes socially produced information available to everyone - Users, rather than organizations, produce, control, use, and manage content via interactive communications and collaboration Web 1.0 - Creation of websites and commercialization of the web - Users typically had minimal interaction - Passively received information from those sites Web 2.0 - A loose collection of information technologies and applications, plus the websites that use them - Enrich the user experience by encouraging user participation, social interaction, and collaboration - Web locations that facilitate information sharing, user-centred design, and collaboration. - Harness collective intelligence (ex: Wikis), deliver functionality as services, rather than packaged software (web services) , and feature remixable applications and data (mashups) - Three major Web 2.0 sites - Social networking sites - Enterprise social networks
- Mashups Tagging - A tag is a keyword or term that describes a piece of information - A blog, picture, article, video clip - Users typically choose tags that are meaningful to them - Place information in multiple, overlapping associations rather than rigid categories Real Simple Syndication (RSS) - Web 2.0 feature that allows you to receive the information you want (customized info) when you want it, without having to surf thousands of websites - Allows anyone to syndicate his or her blog, or any other content, to anyone who has an interest in subscribing to it - When changes to content are made, subscribers are notified and detailed on what the changes and new ideas are Blogs - A personal website, open to the public, in which the site creator expresses his or her feelings or opinions via a series of chronological entries - Bloggers are people who create or maintain blogs - Provide useful information often before information becomes available in traditional media outlets - However, information can be inaccurate due to some bloggers cutting corners. - Transformed the ways in which people gather and consumer information Microblogs - Microblogging allows users to write short messages (Or capture an image or embedded video) and publish them - Messages can be submitted via text from mobile phones, Instant messaging, email, or over the web - Content of microblog differs from regular blog due to limited space per message - Example: Twitter Wikis - A website made up entirely of content posted by users - Have an edit link on each page that allows any user to add, change, or delete material, thus fostering easy collaboration. - Take advantage of the combined input of many individuals. - Wikis enable companies to collaborate with customers, suppliers, and other business partners on projects. - Also valuable in knowledge management Social Networking Websites Social Network - A social structure composed of individuals, groups, or organizations linked by values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, conflict, or trade. Social Networking - Any activity performed using social software tools or social networking features. - Allows convenient connections to those of similar interest Social Graph
- A map of all relevant links or connections among the networks members Social Capital - Number of connections a person has within and between social networks Enterprise Social Networks - Business oriented social networks - Can be public, such as LinkedIN - Owned and managed by an independent company - Companies have created in-house, private social networks for employees, business partners, and companies - Referred to as corporate social networks - Employees use these networks to create connections that allow them to establish virtual teams, collaborate, and increase employee retention. - Used for many processes, including: - Networking and community building, both internally and externally of the organization - Social Collaboration: Collaborative work and problem solving through wikis, blogs, and other platforms - Social Publishing: Employees and others creating, either individually or collaboratively, and posting content such as photos, documents, and videos in places such as Flickr, slideshare, and youtube - Social Views and feedback - Social intelligence and social analytics: monitoring, analyzing, and interpreting conversations, interactions, and associations among people, topics, and ideas to gain insights. Mashups - A website that takes different content from a number of other websites and mixes it together to create a new kind of content. - Ex: Google Maps - a user can add their data and display a map mashup on his or her website that plots crime scenes, cars for sale, or anything else. Social commerce - Delivery of electronic commerce activities and transactions through social computing. - Allows customers to participate actively in the marketing and selling of products and services in online marketplaces and communities. Benefits of Social Commerce Benefits to Customers - Better and faster vendor responses to complaints - Customers can assist other customers - Expectations can be met more fully and quickly - Easily search, link, chat, while staying on a social networks page Benefits to Businesses - Test new products and ideas quickly and inexpensively - Learn about customers - Identify problems quickly - Gain customer feedback
- Create effective marketing campaigns Risks of Social computing - Social computing websites may be user generated and are not edited or filtered. - Companies must be willing to accept negative reviews and feedback - Invasion of privacy - Violation of intellectual property and copyright 20/80 Rule of thumb - Minority of individuals (20%) contribute most of the content (80%) to blogs, wikis, social computing websites, etc. Social Shopping - A method of electronic commerce that takes away all of the key aspects of social networks and focuses them on shopping. Social Marketplaces - Act as online intermediaries that harness the power of social networks for introducing, buying, and selling products and services. - Kijiji, Facebook marketplace Collaborative consumption - An economic model based on sharing, swapping, trading, or renting products and services, enabling access over ownership. Social Advertising - Advertising formats that make use of the social context of the user viewing the ad. Social Intelligence - Monitoring, collection, and analysis of socially generated data, and the resultant strategic decisions, are combined APIs - Mechanism to get the applications to talk to each other
Module 2 – Excel Spreadsheet - A collection of text and numbers laid out in a rectangular grid - Often used in business for accounting, budgeting, financial analysis, inventory management and other functions - Computer model Microsoft excel - An electronic spreadsheet program that aids a multitude of problem-solving and decision-making processes through providing - Data management features - Automatic calculation functions - Presentation tools - Decision analysis functions
Basic Components of the Excel Interface - File tab - Consists of file operations commands such as opening, closing, saving, printing, and sharing files - The options and features available here are part of the “backstage view” - Tabs & Ribbon - Each tab corresponds to sets of features displayed horizontally as a ribbon - A ribbon consists of groupings and controls - Tabs are designed to be task oriented and consist of several logical groupings of controls that perform similar functions - Quick access toolbar - Contains controls / commands that are most commonly used. Additional controls can be added through Excel Options settings through the office Button - Select All button - Used to select all elements of the worksheet -...