SYS210 Final Revision 2021-2022 Spring

(2, 5, 6 and 7)
Learning Outcomes and Questions

Chapter 2 Learning outcomes

Explain why competitive advantages are temporary along with the four key areas
of a SWOT analysis.
A competitive advantage is a feature of a product or service on which customers
place a greater value than they do on similar offerings from competitors.
Competitive advantages provide the same product or service either at a lower
price or with additional value that can fetch premium prices. Unfortunately,
competitive advantages are typically temporary because competitors often
quickly seek ways to duplicate them. In turn, organizations must develop a
strategy based on a new competitive advantage. Ways that companies duplicate
competitive advantages include acquiring the new technology, copying business
processes, and hiring away employees.
A SWOT analysis
opportunities, and threats to identify significant influences that work for or
against business strategies. Strengths and weaknesses originate inside an
organization, or internally. Opportunities and threats originate outside an
organization, or externally, and cannot always be anticipated or controlled

environment in which a company operates, to assess the potential for profitability

in an industry.
Buyer power is the ability of buyers to affect the price they must pay for an
item.
Supplier power
supplies (including materials, labor, and services).
 Threat of substitute products or services is high when there are many
alternatives to a product or service and low when there are few alternatives from
which to choose.
Threat of new entrants is high when it is easy for new competitors to enter a
market and low when there are significant entry barriers to entering a market.
Rivalry among existing competitors is high when competition is fierce in a
market and low when competition is more complacent.

Organizations typically follow one of Porte

entering a new market: (1) broad cost leadership, (2) broad differentiation, and
(3) focused strategy.
Broad strategies reach a large market segment.
Focused strategies target a niche market and concentrate on either cost
leadership or differentiation.

To identify competitive advantages, Michael Porter created value chain analysis,

which views a firm as a series of business processes, each of which adds value to
the product or service. The goal of value chain analysis is to identify processes in
which the firm can add value for the customer and create a competitive
advantage for itself, with a cost advantage or product differentiation. The value
primary value activities and
support value activities.
Primary value activities acquire raw materials and manufacture, deliver, market,
sell, and provide after-sales services.
Support value activities, along the top of the value chain in the figure, include
firm infrastructure, human resource management, technology development, and
procurement. Not surprisingly, these support the primary value activities.

Chapter 2 Review Questions

1. What is the relationship between a business strategy and stakeholders?

Stakeholders must believe in and support the business strategy to ensure its
success. If a company creates a business strategy that employees or shareholders
do not value it is doomed to failure. Having support of all stakeholders when
setting goals and strategies for the business is crucial for survival
.
2. Who are the top three most important stakeholders in a business?
The answer to this question varies depending on the stakeholder. Shareholders
do not always care about employees and employees do not always care about
shareholders. Of course, in an ideal environment every stakeholder would have
the same goals, but this is rarely the case in business. Clearly employees are the
number one stakeholder because without employees there is no business. Clearly
customers are the number one stakeholder because without customers there is
no business. Obviously, you can make this statement for every stakeholder
hence the dilemma with defining who are the three most important
.
3. When would you use a SWOT analysis to help you make business decisions?
The question should be when you would not use a SWOT since this tool is

time you would not want to gain the insight of a SWOT analysis in business
.
4.

environment in which a company operates to assess the potential for profitability

in an industry. Its purpose is to combat these competitive forces by identifying
opportunities, competitive advantages, and competitive intelligence. If the forces
are strong, they increase competition; if the forces are weak, they decrease
competition.

5. How could a company use loyalty programs to influence buyer power?

Companies can also reduce buyer power with loyalty programs, which reward
customers based on their spending. The airline industry is famous for its frequent-
flyer programs, for instance. Because of the rewards travelers receive (free airline
tickets, upgrades, or hotel stays), they are more likely to be loyal to or give most
of their business to a single company. Keeping track of the activities and accounts
of many thousands or millions of customers covered by loyalty programs is not
practical without large-scale business systems, however. Loyalty programs are
thus a good example of using MIS to reduce buyer power.

6. How could a company use switching costs to lock in customers and

suppliers?
One way to reduce buyer power is by manipulating switching costs, costs that
make customers reluctant to switch to another product or service. Switching costs
include financial as well as intangible values. The cost of switching doctors, for
instance, includes the powerful intangible components of having to build
relationships with the new doctor and nurses, as well as transferring all your
medical history. With MIS, however, patients can store their medical records on
DVDs or thumb drives, allowing easy transferability. The Internet also lets patients
review websites for physician referrals, which takes some of the fear out of trying
someone new.

company want to
follow only one?
Porter has identified three generic business strategies for entering a new market:
(1) broad cost leadership
(2) broad differentiation
(3) focused strategy.
Broad strategies reach a large market segment, while focused strategies target a
niche or unique market with either cost leadership or differentiation. Trying to be
all things to all people is a recipe for disaster, since doing so makes it difficult to
project a consistent image to the entire marketplace. For this reason, Porter
suggests adopting only one of the three generic strategies.

satisfaction?
To identify these competitive advantages, Michael Porter created value chain
analysis, which views a firm as a series of business processes that each add value
to the product or service. Value chain analysis is a useful tool for determining how
to create the greatest possible value for customers. The goal of value chain
analysis is to identify processes in which the firm can add value for the customer
and create a competitive advantage for itself, with a cost advantage or product

primary value activities, and support value activities. When performing a value
chain analysis, a firm could survey customers about the extent to which they
believe each activity adds value to the product or service. This step generates
responses the firm can measure to describe how each activity adds (or reduces)
value. Then the competitive advantage decision for the firm is whether to (1)
target high value-adding activities to further enhance their value, (2) target low
value adding activities to increase their value, or (3) perform some combination of
the two.

Chapter 5 Learning outcomes

Explain information ethics and its associated issues.

Information ethics govern the ethical and moral issues arising from the
development and use of information technologies as well as the creation,
collection, duplication, distribution, and processing of information itself (with or
without the aid of computer technologies). Ethical dilemmas in this area usually
arise not as simple, clear-cut situations but as clashes among competing goals,
responsibilities, and loyalties. Inevitably, there will be more than one socially
acceptable or correct decision.

Describe information security and the difference between hackers and viruses.
Information security is a broad term encompassing the protection of information
from accidental or intentional misuse by persons inside or outside an
organization. Information security is perhaps the most fundamental and critical of
all the technologies/disciplines an organization must have squarely in place to
execute its business strategy. Without solid security processes and procedures,
none of the other technologies can develop business advantages. Understanding
how to secure information systems is critical to keeping downtime to a minimum
and uptime to a maximum. Hackers and viruses are two of the hottest issues
currently facing information security. Hackers are experts in technology who use
their knowledge to break into computers and computer networks, either for
profit or simply for the challenge. A virus is software written with malicious intent
to cause annoyance or damage

Chapter 5 Review questions

1. What are ethics and why are they important to a company?

As it becomes easier for people to copy everything from words and data to music
and video, the ethical issues surrounding copyright infringement and the violation
of intellectual property rights are consuming the EBusiness world. Technology
poses new challenges for our ethics the principles and standards that guide our
behavior toward other people.

2. What is the correlation between privacy and confidentiality?

Privacy is the right to be left alone when you want to be, to have control over
your personal possessions, and not to be observed without your consent. Privacy
is related to confidentiality, which is the assurance that messages and
information remain available only to those authorized to view them. Each time
employees make a decision about a privacy issue, the outcome could sink the
company.

3. What is the difference between pirated software and counterfeit software?

Pirated software is the unauthorized use, duplication, distribution, or sale of
copyrighted software. Counterfeit software is software that is manufactured to
look like the real thing and sold as such.

4. What are the reasons a company experiences downtime?

Downtime can occur for many number of reasons from fires, floods, tornados,
sinks overflowing, and mice easting the power wires.

5. What are the costs associated with downtime?

Costs from downtime include revenue losses, damaged reputation, and poor
performance.

6. What is the relationship between adware and spyware?

Adware is software that, while purporting to serve some useful function and
often fulfilling that function, also allows Internet advertisers to display
advertisements without the consent of the computer user. Spyware is a special
class of adware that collects data about the user and transmits it over the

7. What are the positive and negative effects associated with monitoring
employees?
The best path for an organization planning to engage in employee monitoring is
open communication including an employee monitoring policy stating explicitly
how, when, and where the company monitors its employees.
8. What is the relationship between hackers and viruses?
Hackers are experts in technology who use their knowledge to break into
computers and computer networks, either for profit or just motivated by the
challenge. Hackers spread viruses.

Chapter 6 Learning outcomes

Explain the four primary traits that determine the value of information.
Information is data converted into a meaningful and useful context. Information
can tell an organization how its current operations are performing and help it
estimate and strategize about how future operations might perform. It is
important to understand the different levels, formats, and granularities of
information along with the four primary traits that help determine the value of
information, which include
(1) information type: transactional and analytical.
(2) information timeliness.
(3) information quality.
(4) information governance.

Describe a database, a database management system, and the relational database

model.
A database maintains information about various types of objects (inventory),
events (transactions), people (employees), and places (warehouses). A database
management system (DBMS) creates, reads, updates, and deletes data in a
database while controlling access and security. A DBMS provides methodologies
for creating, updating, storing, and retrieving data in a database. In addition, a
DBMS provides facilities for controlling data access and security, allowing data
sharing and enforcing data integrity. The relational database model allows users
to create, read, update, and delete data in a relational database.

Identify the business advantages of a relational database.

Many business managers are familiar with Excel and other spreadsheet programs
they can use to store business data. Although spreadsheets are excellent for
supporting some data analysis, they offer limited functionality in terms of
security, accessibility, and flexibility and can rarely scale to support business
growth. From a business perspective, relational databases offer many advantages
over using a text document or a spreadsheet, including increased flexibility,
increased scalability and performance, reduced information redundancy,
increased information integrity (quality), and increased information security.

Explain the business benefits of a data-driven website.

A data-driven website is an interactive website kept constantly updated and
relevant to the needs of its customers using a database. Data-driven capabilities
are especially useful when the website offers a great deal of information,
products, or services because visitors are frequently annoyed if they are buried
under an avalanche of information when searching a website. Many companies
use the web to make some of the information in their internal databases available
to customers and business partners.

Explain why an organization would want to integrate its databases.

An integration allows separate systems to communicate directly with each other.
An organization can choose from two integration methods. The first is to create
forward and backward integrations that link processes (and their underlying
databases) in the value chain.
A forward integration takes information entered into a given system and sends it
automatically to all downstream systems and processes.
A backward integration takes information entered into a given system and sends
it automatically to all upstream systems and processes

Chapter 6 Review questions

How does a database turn data elements
1.
into information?
A database stores the information in logical tables connectedby keys
allowing information to be organized into structures that can be
analyzed.

Why does a business need to be concerned with the quality of its data?
2.

help make better decisions

Without high-quality data, no matter how good the business is,
managers will make inaccurate and incorrect decisions.
Why would a company care about the timeliness of its data?
3.

With data that is out-of-date the company will make incorrect

 decisions.
What are the five characteristics common to high-quality information?
4.

The five characteristics for high-quality information includeaccurate,

complete, consistent, timely, and unique.
What is data governance and its importance to a company?
5.

Data governance refers to the overall management of the

availability, usability, integrity, and security of company data.A
company that supports a data governance program has a defined a
policy that specifies who is accountable for variousportions or
aspects of the data, including its accuracy, accessibility,
consistency, timeliness, and completeness.

6. What are the four primary traits that help determine the value of information?
The four primary traits of the value of information include
information type, information timeliness, information quality,and
information governance.
7.What is the difference between an entity and an attribute?
An entity stores information about a person, place, thing,
transaction, or event. An attribute includes the data elements
associated with an entity.

8.What are the advantages of a relational database?

A relational database stores information in the form of logically related two-
dimensional tables allowing forincreased scalability, decreased data
redundancy, andincreased flexibility, integrity, and security.

9. What are the advantages of a data-driven website?

A data-driven website is an interactive website kept constantly updated and

relevant to the needs of its customers using a database. Data-driven websites
are easy to manage content, easy to store large amounts of data, and easy to
eliminate human errors.

Chapter 7 Learning outcomes

Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data

marts in an organization.
A data warehouse is a logical collection of information, gathered
from many different operational databases, that supports business
analysis and decision making. The primary value of a data
warehouse is to combine information, more specifically,
strategic information, throughout an organization into a single
repository in such a way that the people who need that
information can make decisions and undertake business analysis.

Identify the advantages of using business intelligence to support

managerial decision making.
Many organizations today find it next to impossible to understand
their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their biggest

being inaccessible to all but the MIS department. Organizational

data includes far more than simple structured data elements in a
database; the set of data also includes unstructured data such as
voice mail, customer phone calls, text messages, video clips,
along with numerous new forms of data, such as tweets from
Twitter. Managers today find themselves in the position of being
data-rich and information poor, and they need to implement
business intelligence systems to solve this challenge

Chapter 7 Review questions

1. What is a data warehouse and why would a business want to

implement one?
A data warehouse is a logical collection of information, gathered
from many operational databases, that supports business analysis
activities and decision-making tasks.

2. How does ETL help transfer data in and out of the data
warehouse?
ETL is a process that extracts the data from different source
systems, then transforms the data (like applying calculations,
concatenations, etc.) and finally loads the data into the Data
Warehouse system. Full form of ETL is Extract, Transform and
Load

3. What is the purpose of information cleansing (or scrubbing)?

Information cleansing is a process that weeds out and fixes or
discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete information.

4. What are the causes of dirty data?

Dirty data can be caused by a number of factors including duplicate
records, incomplete or outdated data.

5. What is business intelligence and how can it help a company

achieve success?
is information collected from multiple sources such as suppliers,
customers, competitors, partners, and industries that analyzes
patterns, trends, and relationships for strategic decision making.
Businesses can use it to determine how processes, trends, and future
conditions will affect their performance

6. What is the difference between business intelligence and data?

The main difference between Data Warehouse and Business
Intelligence is that the data warehouse is a central location that is
used to store consolidated data from multiple data sources, whereas
business intelligence is a set of strategies and technologies to
analyze and visualize data to make business decisions.

7. Why would a marketing department want a data mart instead of

just accessing the entire data warehouse?
data mart contains a subset of data warehouse information. Data
warehouses have more of an organizational focus whereas data
marts have more of a functional focus. It makes it easier for workers
and customers to access the information

8. Why would a business be data rich but information poor?

Every organization produces data every day. But many companies
fail to harvest that data and turn it into useful information.