Monday 20 March 2017

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY AND MANAGEMENT

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Section A:
Part One:
Multiple Choices:
1. Computer crime is defined by:
a. AITP
b. SWAT
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
2. Prototyping is sometimes called:
a. ASD
b. RSD
c. RAD
d. None of the above
3. Virtual reality is also called:
a. Computer-simulated reality
b. Neurons
c. Software robots
d. Telepresence
4. A trackball is a stationary device related to the:
a. Keyboard
b. Joystick
c. Mouse
d. All of the above
5. Hand-held microcomputer devices known as:
a. Personal digital assistance
b. Super computers
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
6. KMS stands for:
a. Knowledge memory systems
b. Knowledge making system
c. Knowledge management systems
d. None of the above
7. A basic system component of information systems is:
a. Memory
b. Processing
c. Storage
d. All of the above
8. How many characters uses the MICR system?
a. 15 characters
b. 18 characters
c. 24 characters
d. 14 characters
9. EBCDIC stands for:
a. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code
b. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Instruction Code
c. Extended Binary Coded Data Interchange Code
d. Electronic Binary Coded Data Interchange Code
10. The smallest element of data is called:
a. Byte
b. Bit
c. Giga byte
d. None of the above
Part Two:
1. Write a note on ‘Cache Memory’.
2. What do know about ‘Assembler’?
3. Write a note on ‘Optical Character Recognition’.
4.Explain the term ‘Electronic commerce’.

Section B: Caselets
Caselet 1
It began as a trading site for nerds, the newly jobless, home-bound housewives, and bored retirees to sell subprime goods: collectibles and attic trash. But eBay quickly grew into a teeming marketplace of 30 million, with its own laws and norms, such as a feedback system in which buyers and sellers rate each other on each transaction. When that wasn’t quite enough, eBay formed its own police force to patrol the listings for fraud and kick out offenders. The company even has something akin to a bank: Its Paypal payment-processing unit allows buyers to make electronic payments to eBay sellers who can’t afford a merchant credit card account. “eBay is creating a second, virtual economy,” says W. Brian Arthur, an economist at think tank Santa Fe Institute. “It’s opening up a whole new medium of exchange.” eBay’s powerful vortex is drawing diverse products and players into its profitable economy, driving its sellers into the heart of traditional retailing, a $2 trillion market. Among eBay’s 12 million daily listings are products from giants such as Sears Roebuck, Home Depot, Walt Disney, and even IBM. More than a quarter of the offerings are listed at fixed prices. The result, says Bernard H. Tenenbaum, president of a retail buyout firm, is “They‘re coming right for the mainstream of the retail business.” So what started out as a pure consumer auction market-place is now also becoming a big time business-to-consumer and even business-to-business bazaar that is earning record profits for eBay’s stockholders. And as the eBay economy expands, CEO Meg Whitman and her team may find that managing it could get a lot tougher, especially because eBay’s millions of passionate and clamorous users demand a voice in all major decisions. This process is clear in one of eBay’s most cherished institutions: the voice of the Customer program. Every couple of months, the executives of eBay bring in as many as a dozen sellers and buyers, especially its high selling “Power Sellers,” to ask them questions about how they work and what else eBay needs to do. And at least twice a week, it holds hour-long teleconferences to poll users on almost every new feature or policy, no matter how small. The result is that users feel like owners, and they take the initiative to expand the eBay economy – often beyond management’s wildest dreams. Stung by an aerospace down-turn, for instance, machine-tool shop Reliable Tools Inc., tried listing a few items on eBay in late 1998. Some were huge, hulking chunks of metal, such as a $7,000 2,300-pound milling machine. Yet they sold like ice cream in August. Since then, says Reliable’s auction manager, Richard Smith, the company’s eBay business has “turned into a monster.” Now the Irwindale (California) shop’s $1 million in monthly eBay sales constitutes 75% of its overall business. Pioneers such as Reliable promoted eBay to set up an industrial products marketplace in January that’s on track to top $500 million in gross sales this year.Then there is eBay Motors. When eBay manager Simon Rothman first recognized a market for cars on cars on eBay in early 1999, he quickly realized that such high-ticket items would require a different strategy than simply opening a new category. To jump-start its supply of cars and customers, eBay immediately bought a collector-car auction company, Kruse International, for $150 million in stock, and later did a deal to include listings from online classifieds site, AutoTrader.com. Rothman also arranged insurance and warranty plans, an escrow service, and shipping and inspection services.This approach worked wonder. Sales of cars and car parts, at a $5 billion-plus annual clip, are eBay's single largest market. That has catapulted eBay in front of No. 1 U.S. auto dealer AutoNation in number of used cars sold. About half of the sellers are brick-and-mortar dealers who now have a much larger audience than their local area. “eBay is by far one of my better sources for buyers,” says Bradley Bonifacius, Internet sales director at Dean Stallings Ford in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And for now, the big corporations, which still account for under 5 percent of eBay’s gross sales, seem to be bringing in more customers then they steal. Motorola Inc., for example, helped kick off a new wholesale business for eBay last year, selling excess and returned cell phones in large lots. Thanks to the initiative of established companies such as Motorola, eBay’s wholesale business jumped ninefold, to $23 million, in the first quarter.As businesses on eBay grow larger, they spur the creation of even more businesses. A new army of merchants, for example, is making a business out of selling on eBay for other people. From almost none a couple of years ago, these so called Trading Assistants now number nearly 23,000. This kind of organic growth makes it exceedingly though to predict how far the eBay economy can go. Whitman professes not to know. “We don’t actually control this,” she admits. “We are not building this company by ourselves. We have a unique partner – million of people.”
Questions:
1. Why has eBay become such a successful and diverse online marketplace? Visit the eBay website to help you answer, and check out their many trading categories, specialty sites, international sites, and other features.
2. Why do you think eBay has become the largest online/offline seller of used cars, and the largest online seller of certain other products, like computers and photographic equipment?

Caselet 2
It’s no secret that somewhere in a back room in the typical Fortune 500 company, there’s a team of analytical wizards running sophisticated data mining queries that mine for gems such as data about about the company’s best customers – those top 20 percent of clients that produce 80 percent of the company’s profits. These jewels can be a business’s most valuable intellectual property, which makes them very valuable to competitors. What’s to prevent that data set from walking out the door or falling into the wrong hands? Sometimes, not much. Many companies lack the internal controls to prevent that information from leaking. The problem is that such data is as hard to protect as it is to find. Owens & Minor Inc., a $4 billion medical supplies distributor, counts some of the nation’s largest health care organizations among its customers. In late 1996, it started mining data internally using business intelligence software from Business Objects SA. “From the beginning, we were aware of security issues around this strategic information about our operations,” says Don Stoller, senior director of information systems at Owens & Minor. “For example, a sales executive in Dallas should only have access to analyses from his region.” It is always possible that someone who has legitimate access will abuse that trust, but companies can minimize that potential by strictly limiting access to only those who need it. thus, Owens & Minor uses role-level security functions that clearly define who has access to which data. “This meant we had to build a separate security table in our Oracle database,” says Stoller. A few years later, when the company wanted to open its systems to suppliers and customers, security became even more important. In 1998, Owens & Minor moved quickly to take advantage of Web-intelligence software from Business Objects that’s designed to Web-enable business intelligence systems. The result was Wisdom, an extranet Web portal that lets Owens & Minor’s suppliers and customers access their own transactional data and generate sophisticated analyses and reports from it.“It business-to-business transactions, security is key,” says Stoller. “We had to make absolutely sure that Jhonson & Jhonson, for example, could not see any 3M’s information. This meant we had to set up specific customer and supplier security tables, and we had to maintain new, secured database views using the Oracle DBMS and Business Objects.”Wisdom was such a success that Owens & Minor decided to go into the intelligence business with the launch of wisdom2 in the spring of 2000. “We capture data out of a hospital’s materials management system and load it into our data warehouse,” Stoller explains. A hospital can then make full use of its business-intelligence software to mine and analyze purchasing data. Owens & Minor receives a licensing and maintenance fee for the services.Layers of security and encryption require a considerable amount of overhead data for systems administration. Both Stoller and Michael Rasmussen, an analyst at Giga Information Group, say that’s the main reason security concerns about business intelligence are often swept under the carpet. The issues of authentication (identifying the user) and authorization (what things the user is allowed to do) must be addressed, usually across different applications, Rasmussen says, adding, “Systems administration can be a real nightmare.”“We are going through some of this,” says David Merager, director of Web services and corporate applications at Vivendi Universal Games Inc. (www.vugames.com). “Our business intelligence needs more security attention.” Business intelligence reports come from two systems: an Oracle-based for budgets on a Microsoft SQL Server database. The heart of the business intelligence system consists of Microsoft’s OLAP application and software from Comshare Inc. that provides the Web-based front end for the analytics. “Our budget teams use these reports to do real-time analyses,” says Merager. Rodger Sayles, manager of data warehousing at Vivendi Universal, says one way to secure such a system is to assign roles to all users within the Microsoft application. Roles determine precisely what a user is allowed to see and do and are usually managed within a directory. If your computing architecture is amenable to a single, centralized directory that supports roles, this may be an attractive solution. “The problem is that once you have over 40 distinct roles, you run into performance issues, and we have identified about 70 user roles,” Sayles explains. He says there’s way around this difficulty. “I think we are going to use a combination of Web portals and user roles. A user would sign on through a particular Web portal, which would effectively place the user in a role category. This reduces the overhead burden on the application,” says Sayles.

Questions:
1. Why have developments in IT helped to increase the value of the data resources of many companies?
2. How can companies use IT to meet the challenges of data resources security?


Section C: Applied Theory
1. What potential security problems do you see in the increasing use of intranets and extranets in business? What might be done to solve such problems? Give several examples.
2. Suppose you are a manager being asked to develop e-business and e-commerce applications to gain a competitive advantage in an important market for your company. What reservations might you have about doing so? Why?

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