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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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