Q.

1 In todays life, Individuals rely on information systems, generally Internet-based,

for conducting much of their personal lives: for socializing, study, shopping, banking,
and entertainment. Information technology refers to anything related to computing
technology, such as networking, hardware, software, the Internet, or the people that
work with these technologies. How do you differentiate between information system
and information technology? Explain using an example.
Ans Information systems (IS) and information technology (IT) are often considered
synonymous. In reality, information technology is a subset of information systems. The
perception that these terms can be used interchangeably can cause confusion for individuals
interested in pursuing a technology-related career. Although both these fields deal with
computers, they have distinct characteristics and specific career paths that require different
education and training.
Information Systems
Information systems is an umbrella term for the systems, people and processes designed to
create, store, manipulate, distribute and disseminate information. The field of information
systems bridges business and computer science. One of the reasons people may not
distinguish between IS and IT is that they assume all information systems are computerbased systems. An information system, however, can be as simple as a pencil and a piece of
paper. Separate, the objects are just tools. Used together, they create a system for recording
information. Although information systems are heavily reliant on computers and other
technology-based tools, the term predates computers and can include non-technological
systems.
Information Technology
Information technology falls under the IS umbrella but deals with the technology involved in
the systems themselves. Information technology can be defined as the study, design,
implementation, support or management of computer-based information systems.
IT typically includes hardware, software, databases and networks. Information technology
often governs the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of digitized information,
or data, generated through the disciplines of computing and telecommunications.
Information technology focuses on managing technology and improving its utilization to
advance the overall business goals.
Information systems and information technology are growing fields that offer a variety of job
options and long-term professional growth. Although these fields are related, individuals who
are interested in a technology-related career should understand the differences in order to
select educational programs that will prepare them for a career that best matches their skills,
interests and goals.
Example: Business Application: Businesses have been using information systems for
example in form of manual books of accounts to modern TALLY. The mode of
communication has also gone under big change, for example, from a letter to email.
Information technology has helped drive efficiency across organization with improved
productivity and precision manufacturing.
The Bottom Line

Information technology has shown exponential growth in the last decade, leading to more
sophisticated information systems. Todays information technology has tremendously
improved quality of life. Modern medicine has benefited the most with better information
system using the latest information technology.
Information systems have been known to mankind in one form or the other as a resource for
decision making. However, with the advent of information technology information systems
have become sophisticated, and their usage proliferated across all walks of life. Information
technology has helped managed large amount of data into useful and valuable information.

Q.2 Explain decision making with MIS using Travelling salesman problem
Ans. DECISION-MAKING CONCEPT:
A decision is choice out of several alternatives (options) made by the decision maker to
achieve some objective s in a given situation. Business decisions are those, which are made
in the process of conducting business to achieve its objective in a given environment.
Managerial decision-making is a control point for every managerial activity may be planning,
organizing, staffing, directing, controlling and communicating. Decision-making is the art of
reasoned and judicious choice out of many alternatives. Once decision is taken, it implies
commitment of resources.
The business managers have to take variety of decision. Some are routine and others are
long-term implementation decision. Thus managerial decisions are grouped as:
(a) Strategic decision
(b) Tactical decision
(c) Operation decision
1. Strategic Decision: these are known as major decision influence whole or major part of
the organization. Such decisions contribute directly to the achievement of common goals of
the organization; have long range effect upon the organization.
Generally, strategic decision is unstructured and thus, a manager has to apply his business
judgment, evaluation and intuition into the definition of the problem. These decisions are
based on partial knowledge of the environmental factors which are uncertain and dynamic,
therefore such decision are taken at the higher level of management.
2. Tactical Decision: tactical decision relate to the implementation of strategic decisions,
directed towards developing divisional plans, structuring workflows, establishing distribution
channels, acquisition of resources such as men, materials and money. These decisions are
taken at the middle level of management.
3. Operational Decision: operational decisions relate to day-to-day operations of the
enterprise having a short-term horizon and are always repeated. These decisions are based

on facts regarding the events and do not require much of business judgments. Operational
decisions are taken at lower level of management.
The business decision-making is sequential in nature. In business, the decisions are not
isolated events. Each of them has a relation to some other decision or situation. The
decision may appear as a snap decision but it is made only after long chain of
developments and a series of related earlier decisions.
The decision-making process is a complex process in the higher hierarchy of management.
The complexity is the result of many factors such as inter-relationship among the experts of
decision-makers, a job responsibility, and a question of feasibility, the codes of morals and
ethics and a probable impact on business.
The travelling salesman problem (TSP) asks the following question: Given a list of cities
and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits
each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard problem
in combinatorial optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer
science.

Solution of a travelling salesman problem

TSP is a special case of the travelling purchaser problem and the Vehicle routing problem.
In the theory of computational complexity, the decision version of the TSP (where, given a
length L, the task is to decide whether the graph has any tour shorter than L) belongs to the
class of NP-complete problems. Thus, it is possible that the worst-case running time for any
algorithm for the TSP increases superpolynomially (perhaps, specifically, exponentially) with
the number of cities.
The TSP has several applications even in its purest formulation, such as planning, logistics,
and the manufacture of microchips. Slightly modified, it appears as a sub-problem in many
areas, such as DNA sequencing. In these applications, the concept city represents, for
example, customers, soldering points, or DNA fragments, and the
concept distance represents travelling times or cost, or a similarity measure between DNA
fragments. The TSP also appears in astronomy, as astronomers observing many sources
will want to minimise the time spent slewing the telescope between the sources. In many

applications, additional constraints such as limited resources or time windows may be

imposed.

Q.3 How to use information system to support competitive strategy? Explain with an
example for each strategy.
Ans. The promise of Information system is that they enable the competitive strategy of
commercial firms. The competitive strategy of a commercial firm is it long term competitive
position, such as of being a low-cost player or a differentiator which the firms adopts. A firms
strategy is the set of activities it engages in as part of its long term strategic goals.
Competitive
Strategy
1. Create
barriers to
entry for
competition

2. Reduce
bargaining
power of
suppliers

Use of Information Systems

Examples

To create barriers to entry of new

competition, firms may lock-in existing
customers with loyalty programmes and
free access accounts created with
information systems. Data from such
loyalty programmes can also be used to
identify customer tastes and patterns of
buying to further provide them with
goods and services.
The bargaining power of suppliers is
reduced by creating customised logistics
channels with suppliers that enables an
exclusive access, thus increasing costs
for suppliers if they want to seek other
customers.

Yatra.com is an online travel

portal that enables
customers to buy airline and
railway tickets from its site. It
maintains a loyalty
programme by providing
discount coupons to
customers who purchase
frequently.
Deutsche Post DHL has
information systems to link all
its partners in its logistics
chain. This not only creates
barriers to entry to
competition, but also
prevents its suppliers from
seeking other partners.
By creating an online facility
for buying tickets, the Indian
Railways has reduced the
need for its customers to
seek alternatives.
The ICICI Bank initiated a
network of ATMs across the
country to reduce cost of
banking for clients.
The United Parcel Service
created special information
systems that kept track of
parcels as they were
shipped.

3.Reduce
bargaining
power of
buyers

The bargaining power of buyers is

reduced by providing low cost, bundled
services from a single source that is
highly customised to their needs.

4.Provide low
cost products

Transaction costs are reduced by having

information systems that increase the
volume and speed of transactions.

5.Provide
niche
products

A differentiation strategy is possible by

reaching out to new markets and
customers using the internet.

Q.4 Decision making is a daily activity for any human being. In the decision making
process, we choose one course of action from a few possible alternatives. In the
process of decision making, we may use many tools, techniques and perceptions.
Describe Herbert Simon model on Decision making.
Ans. Herbert Simon made key contributions to enhance our understanding of the decisionmaking process. In fact, he pioneered the field of decision support systems. According to
(Simon 1960) and his later work with (Newell 1972), decision-making is a process with
distinct stages. He suggested for the first time the decision-making model of human beings.
His model of decision-making has three stages:
1. Intelligence which deals with the problem identification and the data collection on
the problem.
2. Design which deals with the generation of alternative solutions to the problem at
hand.
3. Choice which is selecting the 'best' solution from amongst the alternative solutions
using some criterion.

Intelligence Phase:
This is the first step towards the decision-making process. In this step the decisionmaker identifies/detects the problem or opportunity. A problem in the managerial
context is detecting anything that is not according to the plan, rule or standard. An
example of problem is the detection of sudden very high attrition for the present
month by a HR manager among workers. Opportunity seeking on the other hand is
the identification of a promising circumstance that might lead to better results. An
example of identification of opportunity is-a marketing manager gets to know that two
of his competitors will shut down operations (demand being constant) for some
reason in the next three months, this means that he will be able to sell more in the
market.
Thus, we see that either in the case of a problem or for the purpose of opportunity
seeking the decision-making process is initiated and the first stage is the clear
understanding of the stimulus that triggers this process. So if a problem/opportunity
triggers this process then the first stage deals with the complete understanding of the
problem/opportunity. Intelligence phase of decision-making process involves:
a.
b.

Problem Searching
Problem Formulation

Problem Searching: For searching the problem, the reality or actual is compared to
some standards. Differences are measured & the differences are evaluated to
determine whether there is any problem or not.
Problem Formulation: When the problem is identified, there is always a risk of
solving the wrong problem. In problem formulation, establishing relations with some
problem solved earlier or an analogy proves quite useful.
Design Phase:
Design is the process of designing solution outlines for the problem. Alternative
solutions are designed to solve the same problem. Each alternative solution is
evaluated after gathering data about the solution. The evaluation is done on the basic
of criteria to identify the positive and negative aspects of each solution. Quantitative
tools and models are used to arrive at these solutions. At this stage the solutions are
only outlines of actual solutions and are meant for analysis of their suitability alone. A
lot of creativity and innovation is required to design solutions.

Choice Phase:
It is the stage in which the possible solutions are compared against one another to
find out the most suitable solution. The 'best' solution may be identified using
quantitative tools like decision tree analysis or qualitative tools like the six thinking
hats technique, force field analysis, etc.
This is not as easy as it sounds because each solution presents a scenario and the
problem itself may have multiple objectives making the choice process a very difficult
one. Also uncertainty about the outcomes and scenarios make the choice of a single
solution difficult

Q.5 Write short notes on

a. Data administration
b. Managing concurrency
c. Reduced data redundancy
d. Recovery from crashes
e. Data access
Ans. A. Data administration
Data administration entails deciding who can create, read, update, or delete data. Many
organisations have strict controls over who can create or delete data fields or tables. This is
determined by the needs of the organisation and the roles defined for database
administrators and users. Read access is usually provided to those who need to only see
and use the data, but not modify or change it in any way. Update access is also carefully
restricted to those who have rights and privileges to do so.
B. Managing concurrency
A serious challenge for modern data bases, especially those used for ecommerce
applications is that of managing concurrency. Data is often maintained on many servers,
distributed across a wide geography. Currency entails ensuring that changes or updates to a
particular element in a table are reflected across all distributed servers where users access
the data.
C. Reduced data redundancy
One goal of databases is to reduce data redundancy. It refers to the duplication of data in
different tables. Reduced data redundancy ensures that minimal storage is used for the data.
With the rapid increase in data overtime, conserving space is an important management
challenge.
D. Recovery from crashes
Databases are crucial to the internal working of an organisation; they are both a resource
and asset. With the high level of transaction happening within the IS of organisation, it is
imperative that the data is secured against failure. Modern database systems provide a
sophisticated system of backup, mirroring and recovery that allows rapid recovery from
crashed servers.

E. Data access
Data stored in databases must be accessible efficiently. Very large databases, such as those
maintained by e-Bay, have to be managed in a way that when users search within them their
results should be available within a matter of seconds. Furthermore, the response from the
database has to be presented to the users in a manner that is easy to read and understand.

Q.6 Write short notes on

a. Role of workplace monitoring
b. Power over users
Ans. A. Role of workplace monitoring
History of the industrial evolution, workplace monitoring has remained one of the throughout
the most contentious and prevalent management practices. This practice is of maintaining a
vigil on the workers activities in an organisation, particularly in a commercial firm, with the
objective of ensuring higher productivity. When the workers are monitored in their workplace,
they are required to conform to certain work norms, such as how fast or efficiently they work
and how they behave with co-workers. And, the objective of workplace monitoring is to
discipline them to conform to these norms.
Supervision in factories of the industrial era involved closely watching workers as to how
they went about their work, how many units they produced, how they interacted with coworkers, how efficiently they used their time, and other details. The supervisors used the
data they collected from their observations to reward workers who performed well and to
discipline those who did not perform.

B. Power over users

Every organisation that uses information systems also hires information
systems professionals who are responsible for ensuring that the systems are managed and
run properly. In modern organisations, the role of such professionals has increased
considerable owing to the heavy dependency of the organisations on information systems.
Due to the important role the systems professionals play, they come to have power others in
the organisation.
An individual is said to have power over a person when individual can influence the thinking
or behaviour of that person. For the information systems professionals, this power is the
ability to make IT users listens to and agrees to what they say. For example, if a user wants
to send an email with an attachment file, he may ask the systems professional how to do
this. The professional may answer that the file can only be attached in a zipped format.