Q 1.Elaborate strategic Information Architecture. What are major competitive strategy concepts that can be fulfilled using Management Information Systems?
Strategic information architecture: the collection of strategic information systems that supports or shapes the competitive position and strategies of a business enterprise. So a strategic information system can be any kind of information system (e.g., TPS, MIS, and DSS) that leverages information technology to help an organization gain a competitive advantage, reduce a competitive disadvantage, or meet other strategic enterprise objectives. Five basic competitive strategies.
• Cost Leadership Strategy. Becoming a low-cost producer of products and services in the industry or finding ways to help suppliers or customers reduce their costs or increase the costs of competitors.
• Differentiation Strategy. Developing ways to differentiate a firm’s products and services from those of its competitors or reduce the differentiation advantages of competitors. This strategy may allow a firm to focus its products or services to give it an advantage in particular segments or niches of a market.
• Innovation Strategy. Finding new ways of doing business. This strategy may involve developing unique products and services or entering unique markets or market niches.
• Growth Strategies. Significantly expanding a company’s capacity to produce goods and services, expanding into global markets, diversifying into new products and services, or integrating into related products and services.
• Alliance Strategies. Establishing new business linkages and alliances with customers, suppliers, competitors, consultants, and other companies. These linkages may include mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, formation of virtual companies, or other marketing, manufacturing, or distribution agreements between a business and its trading partners.
Q 2.Explain opportunities and challenges that face business managers in managing information system and technologies?
Major challenges
· managing the strategic shift
· managing organizational cultural change
· developing new processes to support the shift
· developing new IT systems to support the new processes
· training employees
Major IT challenges
- creating a scalable infrastructure
- developing or acquiring the necessary systems to support the new processes
- integrating old and new systems
- updating IT employee skill sets
Conclusion
IT is a critical component of strategic planning
Q 3.Differentiate between (i) Hierarchical (ii) Network and (iii) Relational database structures. Explain strengths and limitations of each structure.
(i) Was a natural model for the databases used for the structured, routine types of transaction processing characteristic of many business operations in the early years of data processing and computing? Data for these operations can easily be represented by groups of records in a hierarchical relationship. However, as time progressed, there were many cases in which information was needed about records that did not have hierarchical relationships.
(ii) Became popular for these types of business operations. Like the hierarchical structure, the network model was unable to handle ad hoc requests for information easily because its relationships must be specified in advance, which pointed to the need for the relational model.
(iii) Enable an end user to receive information easily in response to ad hoc requests. That’s because not all of the relationships among the data elements in a relationally organized database need to be specified when the database is created. Database management software (such as Oracle 11g, DB2, Access, and Approach) creates new tables of data relationships by using parts of the data from several tables. Thus, relational databases are easier for programmers to work with and easier to maintain than the hierarchical and network models
Q 4. How do the different roles of system software and application software affect you as a business end user? How do you see this changing in the future?
The system software acts as an interface between the computer hardware and the
Application software. The end user will interact mainly with application software. In the
Future this type of interface will become even easier to use as it moves towards natural
Interfaces.
Q5.Explaintheseconcepts:
A. Virtual Company
Also called a virtual corporation or virtual organization, is an organization that uses information technology to link independent people, assets, and ideas.
B. Mainframe Systems.
This category comprises large, fast, and powerful computer systems. Processing speeds range up to billions of instructions per second. Primary memory may consist of hundreds or thousands of gigabytes. Usage considerations include cost, space, air-conditioning, and uninterrupted power supplies. They are used for computationally tense applications such as managing airline reservation systems or financial transactions in banking institutions.
C. Cloud Computing.
Cloud computing provides hardware and software as a service over the Internet.
D. Data Marts
Subset of a data warehouse focusing on a single topic, customer, product, etc.
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