1
Q
What are data, information, knowledge and wisdom?
A
The information hierarchy:
- Data: A single piece of data or character giving no meaning alone.
- Information: When more pieces of data are combined
- Knowledge: When information is applied to a decision or action we have knowledge.
- Wisdom: Wisdom is using knowledge for the greater good. Ethics, right and wrong.
2
Q
How do organizations use information?
A
Communication, process support and decision making
3
Q
What is the difference between IT and IS?
A
People. Information technology does not involve people, which IS does.
4
Q
What can IS facilitate?
A
Process improvement
Automation
Control
Information flow
5
Q
Define a system and its components
A
When you have different components that combined achieve a goal, by transforming inputs to outputs. Requires: - Components - Goal - Inputs - A boundary - Feedback
6
Q
What are the 6 critical elements in an information system?
A
Data
Hardware
Software
Procedures: Instructions for proper use of the IS
Communication media: Set of rules enabling computers to communicate with eachother.
People
7
Q
Define IS
A
“Any organized combination of people, hardware, software, communication networks, and data resources that collect, transform, and disseminate information in an organization (Bélanger, Van Slyke, & Crossler 2019).”
8
Q
Define project, program and portfolio
A
- A project is a temporary combination of effort to create some unique result.
- A program is several projects closely related designed to accomplish a common goal but performed individually.
- A portfolio is a large number of projects and programs. Not necessarily related.
9
Q
What are the 3 categories used to classify projects?
A
- Compliance: Projects that must be performed by law typically
- Operational: Projects supporting current day to day operations
- Strategic: Projects aimed at granting competitive advantage.
10
Q
What is business project management?
A
The process of managing a project so it is finished:
- On time
- Within budget
- With the agreed scope.
11
Q
Describe the project triangle.
A
Cost, time and scope determine the quality of the project.
- Project management would typically involve trade-offs between the factors.
Higher speed= higher costs
Bigger scope = longer time frame/higher costs.
12
Q
What are the 4 phases of the project management life cycle?
A
Definition
Planning
Execution
Closing
13
Q
What is included in the project definition phase?
A
- Project charter
- Scope statement
- Responsibility matrix
14
Q
What is included in the project planning phase?
A
Estimations of costs, resources, risks and schedules:
Involves:
- Work break down structure: Breaking tasks down into as small tasks as possible and making estimates for them.
- The WBS would typically be sequenced and made to a Gantt Chart
- Developing a communication plan: Dictates how, when and what information is to be spread among shareholders.
- Risk management plan: A list of potential risks and their likelihood of ocurring, and lastly risk responses.
The risk management plan involves a risk response matrix.
15
Q
What are the 4 types of risk response related to a risk management plan connected to business project management?
A
Can be put into a risk response matrix
- Mitigate: Reduce likelihood and potential impact.
- Avoid: Changing project plan to eliminate the risk.
- Transfer: Insurance for instance.
- Accept
- Exploit: If the effect is positive try to make it happen.
16
Q
What is included in the project execution phase?
A
Here the work is done. It involves:
- Management of team
- Tracking progress
- Making quality control
- Monitoring costs, schedules, resources and risks
17
Q
What is included in the project closing phase?
A
- Handover of deliverables and documentation.
- Potential training of employees
- Evalutation of project, learning what works and not, for future projects.
18
Q
What are the different roles in a project team?
A
- Manager
- Team members
- Sponsor
- Stakeholders
19
Q
What is an IS strategy?
A
How information systems can support decision, production or processes
20
Q
What are the 5 steps of strategic business planning and how are they related?
A
- Strategic business planning
- Information systems assesment
- Information systems vision
- Information systems architecture
- Strategic initiatives identification
The first 3 are related
4 and 5 are based on 3.
21
Q
Describe the strategy triangle
A
Consists of business strategy, organizational strategy, and IS strategy.
They all affect eachother.
IS and organizational strategy should support business strategy
22
Q
What frameworks are used to describe the business strategy?
A
- Porters generic strategies
- The hypercompetition model: Agility as competitive advantage
- Accelerated competition: Disruption approach
- Social business strategy: Communicating with stakeholders to get competitive advantage.
23
Q
What frameworks are used to analyse organizational strategy?
A
- Leavitts business diamond, consisting of Structure, Task, Information and control, People. All affecting eachother
- The managerial levers: Suggests to foster the best combination of organization, control and culture variables.
24
Q
What is used to analyse IS strategy?
A
The IS strategy matrix, consisting of: - Hardware - Software -Networking - Data Considers, where, what and who.
25
How do you identify strategic IS initiatives?
With analysis by using frameworks such as:
- Value chain
- 5 Forces
- Virtual value chain
- IS SWOT analysis
- D'Avenis' 7s
26
How can strategic initiatives be evaluated?
1. Considering how they relate to the critical succes factors of the firm
2. Priority matrix
27
What is a process?
"a series of actions, changes or functions bringing about a result"
28
What is business process management?
A management discipline that treats processes as an assets to be valued, designed and exploited in their own way.
29
What are the 4 ways of process improvement?
- Effectiveness: The extent to which expected outputs are obtained as expected
- Efficiency: The average time it takes to complete the process
- Internal control: The extent to which the used data and info cannot be changed by error or illegally
- Compliance(overholdelse): The extent to which the process follows regulatory or statutory(lov) obligations of the org.
30
What are the differences between radical and incremental changes?
Incremental: Evolving step by step
Radical: Big bang change.
31
Define and describe the 3 levels of change related to process management
- Automate (first order change): Using technology to perform a process more efficiently, often replacing human labor with IT.
- Informate (second order change): Using tech to better inform people which can change how they perform processes. Changing how people perform might be more difficult to implement systems due to resistance to change.
- Transform (3rd order change): Requires fundamental change of processes. BPR is an example of 3rd order change. This is the most difficult level of change when implementing information systems.
32
What is Business process reengineering?
Fundamental rethinking of processes
33
Explain the connection between the IS Strategy Triangle and BPM.
Processes should be reflecting the 3 aspects of the strategy triangle, and what the company tries to achieve.
34
What are the 2 perspectives on processes?
The functional(silo) perspective: reduce integration and invites to suboptimization. Might foster communication gaps and lost information.
The cross functional perspective: Facilitates cross functional communication, optimizing processes.
35
What are the 3 types of business processes?
Management processes
Core/operational processes
Support processes
36
What is an ERP system?
Enterprise resource planning system:
- A cross functional information system consisting of an integrated suite of software modules supporting the basic internal processes.
- Costly and time consuming to introduce.
37
What is an enterprise system, and name the 4 used in this course
- A set of IS tools used to enable information flow between and within processes across an organization
- Ensures integration and coordination across functions
```
The 4 in the course are:
Enterprise resource planning system
Supply chain management
Customer relationship management
Knowledge management
```
38
Describe a supply chain management system (SCM)
```
A system that helps organizations manage the supply chain. Involves collaboration between partners both upstream and downstream.
There are 3 flows in a supply chain:
- Material/product flow
- Information flow
- Capital/financial flow
```
39
Describe customer relationship management (CRM)
Used to store data about customers. It has 3 components:
- Operational
- Collaborative
- Analytical
40
What is IT governance?
A tool for aligning business and IT initiative throughout a company
41
How would an ERP system support the strategy and how does it relate to the BPM approach?
Facilitates cross functional processes, since it is an integrated system
The strategy can be supported by focusing on different things depending on the strategy.
42
What are the 6 levels from the IT engagement model?
```
Company strategy
Business unit strategy
Project plan
Enterprise architecture
Business unit architecture
Project IT architecture
```
43
How are the different levels from the IT engagement model connected?
Through linking mechanisms.
1. Business linkage: Between company wide IT governance, business units and project management
2. Architecture linkage: The link between top and bottom level on the IT side
3. Alignment linkage: Link between IT and business on the business unit level.
44
What is the IT engagment model?
"The model is the system of mechanisms that bring together key stakeholders to ensure that projects achieve both local and company wide objectives"
45
Name central elements of a swimlane diagram
- Thick line between internal and external actors
- You cannot go back the swimlane
- Decision triangles can be included
- A parallel flow is when an activity leads to 2 flows.
46
What is an entity in data modeling?
An object about which the system needs to store data
47
What should be done when 2 entities have a many to many relationship
An intersection entity, with a composite key as primary key.
48
What are cardinalities
How relationships are between entities (many to many, one to many etc.)
49
What is e-business?
When electronic means are used to interact or conduct business
50
What are the different types of e-business?
B2B
B2C
C2C
G2C
51
What are the 3 types of e-business strategy?
Bricks and mortar: No E-business
Bricks and clicks: E-business and physical shops
Pure play/clicks only
52
What are the different e-business models?
- Online retailing - product and services sold online
- Infomediary - Offers specialized information, no products or services sold directly, news value of data is essential. Loan comparison sites is an example
- Content providers - offers content and relevant information generating revenue through ads or subscription. Relevance is essential. New York times is an example.
- Exchanges - marketplace for seller and buyer, critical mass is essential. An example is DBA.
- Online community (social media)
- E-business infrastructure provider - wordpress for instance.
53
What are the impacts of E-business?
- E-channel compression: Impacts downstream supply chain - by introducing their own webshops for instance.
- E-channel expansion: Adding a intermediary typically focused on providing information, a typical example is trivago or loan comparison sites, which reduce search costs.
- Increases competition
- Extends reach.
54
What is SEO and what are the different types of links?
Search engine optimization:
- Sponsored links
- Organic links: Ranked by desing and seo only
- Keyword bidding
55
What are the 4 dimensions of information quality?
- Contextual dimension focuses on how useful the information is in a specific context. So you would look at if the information is relevant for a specific decision timely, complete and current.
- The intrinsic dimension of quality focuses on how believable the information is, hence if it is objective, credible, comprehensive and supported by other sources.
- Representational quality - How is the information provided to the user.
- Accessibility - Can you easily access the information.
56
What is tacit and explicit knowledge?
- Explicit is written or somehow made explicit. Easy to pass on
- Tacit is more routine and gut based. Is not written down.
57
What is knowledge management?
Using information and knowledge to make value, through better problem solving and decision making.
58
What are potential benefits of using knowledge management?
Can improve:
- Decision making
- Processes
- Customer service
- Innovation
- Product management
59
Explain the knowledge management cycle
Create, capture, codify, store, retrieve, transfer and apply.
60
Which model is used to describe the creation of knowledge?
The SECI model:
you go through 4 processes, that is circular, where new knowledge is being created through the 4 phases socialization, externalization combination and internalization.
61
What is Business Intelligence
- Business intelligence is set of applications, technologies, and processes for gathering, storing, analyzing, and accessing data to help users make better business decisions
62
What is data warehousing?
A data warehouse is "a copy of transactional data that is formated so that it is useful for decision support.
63
What is data mining?
Data mining is the process of analyzing data to identify trends, patterns and other useful information. Typically involves applying statistical techniques to identify trends and patterns. DM seeks to make predictions based on large amounts of data
64
What is a decision support system?
Related to knowledge management.
| A computer based system helping decision makers. Can be data-, model-, document-, and communication driven.
65
What is groupware?
A network based system helping workgroups collaborate, for instance google docs.
66
What is information overload?
"Being faced with more information than one can effectively process"
67
When deciding on how to source an IS project, what are the possibilities?
Custom built
Hybrid solution
Commercial of the shelf (COTS)
68
What should be considered when deciding between a custom built and commercial of the shelf solution?
capabilites, availability of COTS software, is it needed to create a competitive advantage?
Is the need urgent?
What are the total cost of ownership?
69
Describe the system development life cycle
A waterfall approach to custom built systems consisting of different phases such as:
- Planning
- Requirements
- Design
- Development
- Implementation
- Maintenance
70
What is done in the 1st 2 phases of the system development life cycle?
Planning: Focuses on feasibility, technical, economic, organizational, legal and ethical.
Requirements: Desired functions and level of performance. A use case can be used to describe it.
71
What is done in the 3rd and 4th phase of the system development life cycle?
Design: Including models such as process and data models
Development: Convert the design to the actual system. Involves coding software, creating databases, hardware.
72
What are the 2 last phases of the system development life cycle consisting of?
Implementation: Should the implementation be parallel, phased, big bang, or pilot.
Maintenance: Maintaining systems so they are not outdated. Often neglected but important.
73
What are the 2 iterative approaches to custom built systems?
Common for the 2 models is to break each phase into smaller chunks and make many iterations.
Rapid application development (RAD): gather requirements, design a prototype, develop it, test it, review it, and so it goes.
The Spiral model: A spiral consisting of 4 iterative steps:
1. Identify objectives, alternatives and constraints
2. Evaluate alternatives, identify and resolve risks.
3. Develop and verify outcomes from the iteration.
4. Plan the next iteration
74
What are the benefits and risks of prototyping?
Benefits:
- Increased stakeholder involvement
- More efficient at defining requirements
- Typically lower costs
Risks:
- Bad system design
- Can result in undocumented results
- A potentially never ending cycle
75
Define outsourcing and the forms it can take
When responsibility of a function or activity that was previously performed internally is handed over to an external provider.
Can take different forms:
- Complete: Outsourcing all IT-related services.
- Partial, outsourcing certain aspects, can further be divided into:
- Process based outsourcing
- Personnel outsourcing
- Project based outscourcing
- Application outsourcing
76
What are benefits and risks of outsourcing?
Benefits:
- Potential cost savings
- Focus on core activities
- Potential 24 hour productivity
- Access to expertise not available in house
Risks:
- Loss of internal competencies
- Opportunistic behaviour by providers
- Lower morale of remaining workers
