QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
What are the effects of information systems on business and their relationship to globalization?
- ANS The provide competitive advantages for business, expedites the infill process and raise
the barrier to globalization.
Explain why information systems are so essential in business today. - ANS They can be the
foundation for new products, services and ways of conducting business that provide firms with
a strategic advantage.
Define information system and describe its management, organization, and technology
components. - ANS Any structured arrangement of hardware, communication networks,
people, software, data resources, policies and procedures that stores, transforms, retrieves and
disseminates information in an organization. Produces the information that organizations need
to make decisions, control operations, analyze problems, and create new products or services.
What are the Six strategic business objectives? - ANS Operational excellence, New products
services and business models, customer and supplier intimacy, improved decisions making,
competitive advantage, survival
Define data. - ANS Raw material for processing. Relates to facts, events and transactions.
Refers to unprocessed information.
Define information. - ANS Data that has been processed in such a way as to be meaningful to
the person who receives it.
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, What are the 3 activities used by information systems to produce information. Provide
examples. - ANS Input, process, output. A manufacturing process that takes raw materials as
inputs, applies a manufacturing process, and produces manufactured goods as output.
Define business process. - ANS A network of activities that generates value by transforming
inputs into outputs.
How can information systems help businesses to achieve competitive advantages? - ANS This
helps an organization focus on being the cost leader, or focus on differentiating its products or
services from those of the competition. Further, the organization can employ the cost of
differentiation strategy across an industry, or it can focus its strategy on an industry segment.
Define disruptive technologies. - ANS An innovation that creates a new market and value
network and eventually disrupts an existing market. Apple iPhone.
What are the organizational factors in planning a new system? - ANS Environment, culture,
structure, business processes, politics, management decisions.
What are Porter's 5 competitive forces? - ANS Bargaining power of the customer, threat of
substitutions, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of new entrants, Rivalry.
What are the four generic strategies for dealing with competitive forces? - ANS Focus,
Industry-wide, cost, differentiation.
Locking in - ANS makes a customer dependent on a sole vendor for products and services.
Locking out - ANS making it so no other vendor can service your product due to design.
Switching cost - ANS cost to replace what you have
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