Management Information Systems Exam 1 Study Guide

Vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes for chapters 1, 6, and 11, focusing on business information systems, database management, and artificial intelligence.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Technology that identifies patterns and trends to make assumptions and predictions that would not have been humanly possible years ago.

Cloud Computing

A centralized system for storing, managing, and processing data across the Internet using remote computing centers.

Big Data

Many millions of data points generated by IoT devices and websites analyzed to create predictions or unearth patterns of behavior.

Internet of Things (IoT)

A network of physical objects embedded with sensors and software that connect and exchange data with other devices over the Internet.

FAA System Outage (January 2023)

An incident where contractors unintentionally deleted files on the pilot alert system, delaying more than $9,000$ flights.

Return on Investment (ROI)

A metric used to measure the success of investments in information systems.

Smart Shelves

Retail technology using LED digital displays, proximity sensors, and weight sensors to automate restocking alerts and personalize shopper experiences.

Operational Excellence

A business objective where IS and technology improve efficiency and productivity, exemplified by Walmart achieving sales of $559B$ in FY2021.

Sarbanes-Oxley Act

A federal regulation that many businesses must meet via information systems to ensure survival and legal compliance.

Information Technology (IT)

The hardware and software a business uses to achieve its objectives.

Information System (IS)

Interrelated components that manage information to support decision making, control, analysis, visualization, and product creation.

Data

Streams of raw, unprocessed facts.

Information

Data that has been shaped into a meaningful and useful form.

Computer Literacy

A focus primarily on the knowledge of Information Technology (IT).

Information Systems Literacy

An approach that includes both behavioral and technical knowledge of information systems.

Intranets

Internal networks used exclusively by a company's employees.

Extranets

Private networks that allow access to specific portions of data to customers, suppliers, and partners.

Critical Thinking

The sustained suspension of judgment with an awareness of multiple perspectives and alternatives.

Entity

A generalized category representing a person, place, or thing in a database, often referred to as a Table.

Attribute

A specific characteristic of each entity, also known as a Field or Column.

Bit

The smallest unit of data, storing a single binary digit of either $0$ or $1$.

Primary Key

A field in a table that uniquely identifies every record and cannot be duplicated.

Foreign Key

A field in one table that references the primary key of another table to establish a relationship.

Normalization

The process of streamlining complex groups of data to minimize redundant elements and awkward many-to-many relationships.

Referential Integrity Rules

Rules ensuring that relationships between coupled tables remain consistent, such as preventing a record from being created without a corresponding foreign key.

Database Management System (DBMS)

Software used for creating, storing, organizing, and accessing data from a database.

LAMP Stack

A common open-source web/database stack consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/PERL.

Blockchain

A distributed database of transactions operating on a network without a central authority where recorded blocks cannot be altered.

3 V's of Big Data

Volume, Variety, and Velocity.

Data Warehouse

A system that stores current and historical data from many core operational systems, which can be accessed but not altered.

Data Lake

A repository for raw, unstructured, or structured data that has largely not yet been analyzed.

Hadoop

An open-source software framework for processing Big Data using parallel processing across clusters of computer nodes.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

A tool supporting multidimensional data analysis, enabling users to view information in different ways using multiple dimensions.

Data Mining

A discovery-driven process that finds hidden patterns and relationships in large datasets to predict future behavior.

Sentiment Analysis

The process of mining online text comments to measure customer sentiment toward a product or brand.

Data Governance

Policies and procedures for managing data as an organizational resource, including rules for sharing, acquiring, and inventorying information.

Unstructured Decisions

Novel and non-routine decisions involving judgment and complexity, typically made by Senior Management.

Structured Decisions

Repetitive and routine decisions involving a definite procedure, typically made by operational or individual teams.

Business Intelligence (BI)

The infrastructure used for warehousing, integrating, reporting, and analyzing data from the business environment.

Predictive Analytics

The use of statistical analytics and historical data to predict future trends and behavior patterns based on associations and correlations.

Geographic Information System (GIS)

A tool that helps decision makers visualize problems by tying location data about resources to a map.

Balanced Scorecard Method

A framework for measuring firm performance through four dimensions: Financial, Business Processes, Customer, and Learning & Growth.

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

A measure proposed by senior management to understand how well a firm is performing along a specific dimension.

Expert Systems

AI that captures human expertise in a limited domain using a knowledge base and an inference engine.

Supervised Learning

A machine learning technique where a system is trained by humans using examples of desired inputs and outputs.

Neural Networks

Algorithms loosely based on the biological human brain that find patterns in massive amounts of data through iterative learning.

Deep Learning

A complex form of neural networks with many layers used for pattern detection on unlabeled data.

Intelligent Agents

Software programs that work in the background without direct human intervention to carry out specific tasks like searching for content.

Chatbots

Software agents designed to simulate conversation with human users, often powered by Large Language Models (LLMs).