Chapter 6 – Databases and Data Warehouses

Q1. List, describe, and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information.

-Accuracy is essential to ensure that the names, values or currency are entered correctly i.e. - spelling of complicated surnames?

-Completeness values must not be missing i.e. is the postcode recorded when writing an address down?

-Consistency the aggregate or summary of information should be easily comparable with the detailed information that is provided i.e. do all total fields equal the true total of individual fields?

-Uniqueness each value of transaction, entity and event must only be entered once in the information i.e. are there any duplicate customers?

-Timeless the information must be current with respect to the business requirements i.e. is information updated weekly, daily or hourly?

Q2. Define the relationship between a database and a database management systems

A database stores and maintains information about various types of objects, events, people as well as places. 

A database management system (DMS) is the computer program that is used to manage and query a database and all its information

Q3. Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.
 Advantages include:

• Increased flexibility
• Increased scalability and performance
• Reduced information redundancy
• Increased information integrity (or quality)
• Increased information security

Q4. Define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model.
 

A relational database is a type of database that stores information in the form of logically related two-dimensional tables, without manipulation. Represents the relationship between the entities in the database.

• Entity – is a person, place, transaction or thing which information is stored. A table is a collection of similar entities
• Attributes – known as fields or columns that are characteristics or properties of an entity class
• Primary key – is either one field or a group of fields that uniquely identifies a given entity in a table
• Foreign key – is a primary key of one table that appears as an attribute in another table and acts to provide a logical relationship between the two tables.

Q5. Describe the benefits of a data-driven website.
 
A data-driven website is an interactive website that is constantly kept updated providing the relevant informational needs of the customers through the use of the database. When the site offers large amounts of information, products or services the sites are especially useful.
The advantages of a data driven website include:

• Development
• Content management
• Future expandability
• Minimising human error
• Cutting production cost
• More efficient
• Improved stability

Q6. Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organization.

Data Warehouse is a logical collection of information that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks. The information is gathered from many different operational databases. The sole purpose is to aggregate information throughout an organization in a way that employees can easily make decisions and undertake business analysis activities.

Data Marts contains a subset of data warehouse information. Data marts have more focused information subsets specific to the needs of a given business unit.

Chapter 5 – Enterprise Architecture

Q1. What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

-Information Architecture depicts where and how important information is maintained and secured within an organization. Three primary areas include: backup and recovery, disaster recovery and information security.

-Information Infrastructure supports the organizations goals through the hardware, software and telecommunications equipment. The five characteristics that make up a solid infrastructure includes: flexibility, scalability, reliability, availability and performance.

Q2. List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

• Flexibility – businesses must be flexible to meet business changes when the company is growing and performing
• Scalability – how well a system can adapt to increasing demands. Factors include: market, industry and economic factors.
• Reliability – ensures all systems are providing accurate information and functioning correctly
• Availability – often depicts when a system can be accessed by its users
• Performance – is a depiction of how well a system performs a certain process or transaction in a particular amount of time

Q3. Describe the business value in deploying service oriented architecture

Service orientated architecture (SOA) is a business driven IT architectural approach that supports integrating a business as linked, repeatable tasks or services. It enables businesses to increase flexibility of their processes by allowing the IT system to adapt quickly to the changes.

The key technical concepts of SOA include services, interoperability and loose coupling.

Q4. What is an event?

An event is an electronic message that indicated if something has occurred. By detecting threats and opportunities, events alert those individuals or organizations that can act on the information given and best handle the situation accordingly.

Q5. What is a service?

A service is more like a software product yet it describes a valuable business task. They provide much needed solutions for business problems, with ways of implementation automating aspects of technical services within the organization. They appeal to a broad audience and must be reusable to ensure an impact upon productivity occurs.

Q6. What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

-Virtualisation: is a framework for dividing the resources of a computer into multiple execution environments. It is a common way to increase physical resources to maximise hardware investments.

Through virtualisation differing processes, people and technology can work together to meet service levels through increased efficiency.

-Grid Computing: is an aggregation of geographically dispersed computing, storage and network resources which are coordinated to deliver higher performance and improved quality of service.

It allows for organizations to optimize computing and data resources, share across networks large capacity workloads. Must be resilient, flexible and integrated to meet modern demands of society.

Chapter 4 – Ethics and Information Security

Q1. Explain the ethical issues surrounding information technology.

Ethical issues are the principles and standards that guide our behaviour towards other people. Ones privacy and confidentiality becomes an informational issue shared upon networks. Intellectual property, copyright, fair use doctrine, pirated software and counterfeit software raise ethical issues regarding this informational technology.

Q2. Describe a situation involving technology that is ethical but illegal

When purchasing a software package the individual copies the software. One copy you use and the other is kept as a ‘back up’ package. This is not unethical, as you are not using the copy inappropriately, however it is still illegal.

Q3. Describe and explain one of the computer use policies that a company might employ

An ethical computer use policy contains general principles to guide computer use behaviour. During work hours, certain work has priority. For example if an employee goes on the internet to play computer games or on social networking sites such as Facebook.

Q4. What are the 5 main technology security risks?

• Human error – occurs by humans
• Natural Disasters – earthquakes, floods
• Technical Failure – hardware failures, crashes and software bugs
• Deliberate acts – malicious, sabotage
• Management failure – insufficient training, wrong procedures
  
  
  Q5. Outline one way to reduce each risk
  • Ensure you have a strong and secure password
  • Monitor activities
  • Make sure all information and data has a backup
  • Engage in firewalls and tighter security for confidential information and data
  • Authentication
  
  Q6. What is a disaster recovery plan, what strategies might a firm employ?
  
  
  It is a detailed process for recovering information or an IT system in the event of a catastrophic disaster such as a flood or a fire. Strategies to implement are as follows:
  • Location of the back up information, usually on offsite facilities
  • ‘Hot Site’: where an organization can move to immediately after a disaster occurs and resume business. It is a separate, fully equipped facility
  • Communication Plans
  • Regular recovery testing
  • Well documented procedures
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Chapter 3 – Network Applications and eCommerce

Q1. What is an IP Address? What is its main function?

A TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/ Internet Protocol) is a basic protocol or language used as a common communication. A protocol is a specific set of rules allowing data and information to be freely moved around the internet. All computers on the Internet have unique IP addresses, being either public or private. 

There are four TCP/IP protocol layers and they include; application, transport, internet and network.


Q2. What is Web 2.0, how does it differ from 1.0?

Web 2.0 is commonly known as the ‘Live Web’ and allows its users build their own contents for interaction. Features that are common to Web 2.0 include social networking, blogging, tagging, wiki sites and podcasts.

Web 2.0 differs from 1.0 as it is interactive, 1.0 was not.

Q3. What is Web 3.0?

Commonly known as the ‘semantic web’ it is an evolving extension of the World Wide Web. It depicts content not only in natural language, but data formats that can be used by software agents.

It encompasses one or more of the following:

• Transforming the web into a database
• An evolutionary path to artificial intelligence
• Search for information using different medias
• Evolution toward 3D

Q4. What is eBusiness, how does it differ from ecommerce?

e-business – consists of conducting business activities on the internet. Such business activities are that similar to a normal business not online, with activities including buying, serving and selling to customers and working with business partners.

e-Commerce – the buying and selling of goods and services on the internet. It refers to online transactions

Difference being e-Commerce also refers to online exchanges of information (i.e. - you can view banking accounts)

Q5. What is pure and partial ecommerce?

Pure ecommerce – allows doe the product, process as well as the delivery agent to all be in a digital format.

Partial ecommerce – allows for the product, process as well as the delivery to be physical or digital depending on the circumstance.

 

Q6. List and describe the various eBusiness models?

B2B (Business-to-business) applies to business’ buying from and selling to each other via the Internet.

 B2C (Business-to-consumer) is when any business sells its products or services to its consumers over the Internet.





C2B (Consumer-to-business) is when the consumer sells a product or service to a business over the Internet.

C2C (Consumer-to-consumer) this applies to the particular sites that primarily offer goods and services to assist consumers interacting with each other, via the Internet.

Q7. List and describe the major B2B models?

The major B2B models include online access to data (including expected shipping date, delivery date and shipping status) which is provided either by the seller or the third party.

Electronic Marketplaces represent a new wave in B2B e-Business models.

Q8. Outline 2 opportunities and 2 challenges faced by companies doing business online?
 

Opportunities:

• Increased Consumer Loyalty
• Decreased consumer cost
• Increased Global cost

Challenges:

• Protecting consumers
• Providing security
• Adhering to taxation rules

Chapter 2 – Strategic Decision Making

Q1. Define TPS & DSS, and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantages

-Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) serves at the operational level within a business and are not specific to a single function. Common examples include pay rolls, sales receipts and credit decisions. TPS is part of the Analysts in the organisational levels.

Both Batch Processing and Online Processing enable TPS to communicate to their customers the quality of the business. In society today, TPS have integrated the internet enabling internet transaction processing to occur.

-Decision Support Systems (DSS) aids to supporting managers and their issues of resolving complex problems in both unstructured and semi structured natures.

Q2. Describe the three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems.

-Sensitivity Analysis studies the impact of change in variables that one model has on another model.

- What-if Analysis checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the solution being put forth
-Goal-seeking Analysis finds the inputs needed to achieve a specific organisational goal

 

Q3. Describe business processes and their importance to an organisation.

 

Firstly, a business process is a standard set of activities that accomplish a specific task within the business. Business processes transform specific sets of inputs to outputs through processes, people and tools. Organisations are only as effective as their business processes hence why it needs to be productive and efficient to ensure the business is profitable.

Q4. Compare business process improvement and business process re-engineering.

-Business Process Improvement is a model which tries to make performance improvements by measuring as well as understanding current processes within a business. Process is continuous.

-Business Process Re Engineering for this model to be used, the current process must not work, is irrelevant and/ or is broken. It is an analysis and therefore redesign of workflow according to failed business practices.

 

Q5. Describe the importance of business process modelling (or mapping) and business process models.

-Business Process Modelling is the activity of creating a detailed flowchart or process map of a work process in a structured sequence showing inputs, tasks and activities.

-Business Process Models a graphic description of a process showing the sequence of process tasks, which is developed for a specific purpose from a selected viewpoint.

The importance of both is as follows:

• Expose process details in a gradual manner
• Encourage conciseness and accuracy
• Focus attention on the process model interfaces