IT week 7 and quizes

A marketing analyst gets a product list from another department every Monday. It always arrives with wrong codes and missing fields, so she spends her first hour fixing it, builds her report, and never mentions it — the fix works. Redman's read on this arrangement:

Efficient — the person closest to the data should quietly fix it

A hidden tax — the correction cost recurs forever because the list's creators never learn

Acceptable — the report ships on time, so there's no real cost

A tooling gap — better software would catch the errors for her

b

An operations director wants a read on the quality of the customer records her team works from — this week, with no budget. Following Redman's measurement approach, she should:

Commission a full IT audit of the database

Survey the team on how much they trust the data

Have the team mark obvious errors in the last 100 records and count the error-free ones

Wait — real quality problems will surface as customer complaints

c

A fulfillment team completes a clean order for about $1 of effort. A teammate shrugs off flawed orders: "someone fixes the field and moves on." Using Redman's rule of ten, the better per-order estimate when the data is flawed:

About the same — fixes take seconds

Roughly double — the work plus the rework

Too variable to estimate without an audit

Roughly ten times the clean-order cost

d

Measurement done, a manager finds a third of incoming records flawed. Her first instinct: assign two staffers to check and fix every record before anyone uses it. Redman would redirect her to:

Trace the recurring errors to where they're created and get those teams fixing root causes

Keep the checkers — inspection before use is standard practice

Automate the checking with a data-cleaning tool

Centralize all record creation under one specialist

a

A regional grocery chain breaks its internal capabilities — inventory lookup, delivery scheduling, loyalty points — into separately callable APIs, then recombines two of them to launch a curbside-pickup service. In the authors' terms, this is:

The outside-in way — designing around what API consumers are trying to get done

The unbundling way — decompose capabilities into APIs, then re-bundle them

The ecosystem way — mapping the value network and filling a gap in it

Offloading — handing non-core competencies to third-party providers

b

A payroll-software company keeps shipping API features its engineers find elegant, but the partner developers who build on it say integration takes weeks. Applying the outside-in way, the company's first move is:

Publish more endpoints so developers have more options

Require internal teams to communicate only through APIs

Redesign the API around the tasks developers are hiring it to do

Recruit more partners to grow the surrounding ecosystem

c

A midsize furniture maker wants in on the "API economy" but has no dedicated tech division. The article's recommended starting point:

Open every internal system to the web and see what sticks

Budget a multi-year replatforming program before any API work

Wait for an industry regulation to dictate the API standard

Form a small cross-functional team, pilot one opportunity, iterate

d

Mid-videoconference, a construction crew severs a major fiber route between two cities — yet the call barely stutters. In Jackson's road-trip terms, that's because:

Each packet is addressed individually and can take any surviving route

The ISP serves a cached local copy of the call

The call reserved a dedicated end-to-end circuit before it started

Protocols compress the video until the damaged line is repaired

a

A support team hires more agents whenever the ticket backlog grows. More agents clear tickets faster, the backlog shrinks, and hiring pauses. In North's terms, backlog-and-hiring form:

A balancing loop — the change feeds back to counteract itself

A reinforcing loop — the change feeds back to amplify itself

A one-way causal chain

An external shock to the system

a

A causal loop diagram shows: marketing spend →(+) signups →(+) revenue →(+) marketing spend. Under North's sign rules, left unmanaged this structure generates:

Stable equilibrium

Exponential growth until something outside the loop limits it

Steady decline toward zero

Oscillation between growth and decline

b

After an error incident, a company adds approval steps to a process. Errors drop for a quarter — then climb past the old rate as employees route around the new steps. North would explain this pattern as:

The fix was underfunded

The employees lacked training

Unperceived feedback: short-term success preceding long-term failure

Normal random variation

c

Two project teams have equally capable members, yet one consistently ships late. A systems-thinking explanation starts by examining:

Which team has the stronger individual performers

How each team's work is structured and interconnected

Which team logs more hours

Which team has the more experienced manager

b

Two founders open a diagramming tool and start sketching a table for every noun in their pitch deck. Per the guide's design sequence, the step they skipped comes first:

Listing every entity that will become a table

Assigning each table a primary key

Drawing the relationships between the tables

Working out what the business needs the database to answer

d

A gym keys its member table on full name; two members named Jordan Lee join, and check-ins start crediting the wrong account. The guide's fix:

Give each row a primary key — a generated or auto-incrementing unique value

Add middle names to make records more distinct

Split members across two tables by last name

Index the name column for faster lookups

a

An online shop's orders table must record which customer placed each order. Following the guide's parent–child pattern, the schema should:

Copy the customer's name and email into every order row

Store the customers table's primary key in orders as a foreign key

Merge customers and orders into one wide table

Keep a list of order numbers inside each customer row

b

A boutique wants to send a gift on the one-year anniversary of each customer's first purchase. For the schema to support that promise, it must:

Add a foreign key from products to customers

Track gift inventory in the customers table

Store each customer's first-purchase date as a customer field

Log every marketing email in the orders table

c

An analyst maps expense approval: reports under $200 approve automatically; anything larger routes to a manager. No report ever takes both paths. At the split she should place:

A parallel gateway — the flow continues down both paths at once

An intermediate event — the process pauses until the manager finishes

An exclusive gateway — a condition sends the flow down exactly one path

Two separate pools — one per possible outcome

c

A team diagrams order fulfillment across its own sales and warehouse staff plus an outside shipping carrier. The cleanest BPMN layout:

One pool for the company with sales and warehouse as lanes; a separate pool for the carrier

A single pool with three lanes — sales, warehouse, carrier

Three pools, one per team, joined by sequence flows

One pool, with the carrier marked off by a group artifact

a

A refund process starts whenever a customer's refund form arrives, then holds 48 hours before a follow-up email goes out. The right event pairing:

Two start events — one for the form, one for the delay

A message start event to launch the process, an intermediate timer event for the hold

An exclusive gateway at the start and an end event at the hold

One start event, with the delay noted in an annotation

b

A survey process gathers responses over two weeks, and the results must be kept for the annual report. The right data artifacts:

An annotation for the responses and a group around the step

A single data input, consumed once at the start

A message flow carrying responses to an end event

A data collection object for the gathering step, data storage for the kept results

d

What is a spec

Specification Document is a detailed written guide that outlines the materials, standards, quality requirements, and methods needed to complete a project.
In engineering or IT: It defines the technical requirements, architecture, and functional goals before building a product

Format of a spec

Part A —>Executive

problem

success looks like

Part B —> AI

Scope

Inputs and and behaviors

Computational thinking focus and strength

focuses on the parts/what parts solve this… , zooming in on components
strength= building and automating

Systems thinking focus and strength

focuses on what emerges over time…, zoom out to see the whole

strength= diagnosing and predicting

When you give a system the same input twice, do you get the same answer both times in terms of deterministic and probabilistic

Deterministic —> same answer, same input and output every time

Probabilistic —> Not same answer, same input, different output every time

Business process

activity or set of activities that accomplish a specific organizational goal

________ _________ carry out business processes by capturing thier _____________ and executing their ___________-

information systems

data

activities

ERP

Enterprise resource planning systems. Digitalize most of a company’s business process (ex= SAP)

CRM

customer relationship management

Often part of a large ERP system

Front office

processes customers touch: Sales, marketing, service

Salesforce is a CRM system

Back office

Process that runs the business: finance, operations, human resources

SAP = ERP system

BPMN

business process model and notation

Bridge Communication: Connects business analysts, process owners, managers, and IT developers with a shared, easy-to-read flowchart language.

Process Automation: Translates visual diagrams directly into executable software components or workflow languages like BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).

Symbol for start and end for a BPMN

thin circle

thick circle

can a BPMN have mroe than 1 end circle?

yes, depending on what happens

What do rounded rectangles represent in a BPMN

activities/ tasks that a person or system performs. Turns inputs into outputs

Named with an active verb and a noun (ex: Make pizza )

what do the arrows represent in a BPMN

flows/ what moves between the steps

name a flow using a noun phrase (Ex: validate record)

What does the diamond with an x represent

gateway/decision point where flow splits

labeled wit ha question and exit arrows with its answers

How long a business process takes, and how often it goes wrong.

does not measure how long a real-world process takes or how often it goes wrong on its own

What are pools/swim lanes of a BPMN

pool is the whole process, names which process it is

Swimlanes= divide the pool by who does the work. (scientist, cook)

A swimlane in a BPMN is a ___________ or ___________. Never a __________

role, system

person

Ex: NOT albert, but scientist

Why map a company’s process before you choose a technology for it

you can only place automation or AI on a step you can see

A drawing makes every step it’s own box

How do you sort every step of a BPMN

Script does it- same input and output every time

AI model does it- messy input, and the output can vary (PDF, email, recoording)

Person does it- judgement someone has to answer for

what’s an AI skill

Written set of instructions an AI model follows to do one job.

Consistent- Does the same job the same way every time

scope- it says what the AI takes in, what it hands back, and what it doesn’t do

Language- Written in plain language, not a code

what’s a scope

defines the boundaries, limits, and specific deliverables of the work

How long a process takes, and how often it goes wrong

1. How long a process takes, and how often it goes wrong: It depends on the process, its complexity, and the circumstances. Measure process duration and how frequently errors occur to identify inefficiencies and evaluate performance.

Re-keying, rework loops and queues, and how each affects a process.

Re-keying means entering the same data multiple times, rework loops occur when tasks must be repeated to correct errors, and queues are work waiting to be processed. All three can increase processing time and reduce efficiency.

Choosing where to intervene in a process.

Identify bottlenecks, errors, and unnecessary steps by mapping and analyzing the process. Target the root cause of inefficiency to improve the process's overall performance.