ITSS 3300 Exam 1 Review

What happens in a fully digital organization?

Significant business relationships are digitally enabled and mediated

Core business processes are accomplished through digital networks

Key corporate assets are managed digitally

Digital organizations offer greater flexibility in organization and management (Time shifting, space shifting)

Digital organization are better suited to globalization

Internet has drastically reduced costs of operating on global scale

Increases in foreign trade, outsourcing

Business invest heavily in information systems to achieve which strategic business objectives

1. Operational excellence 

2. New products, services, and business models 

3. Customer and supplier intimacy 

4. Improved decision making 

5. Competitive advantage 

6. Survival

Strategic Plans

Typically answer the “Why” question, in terms of overall direction of the organization
 Competitive / Marketplace, Information Systems, Management, Human Resources, Key Investments

 Plans typically created by/for executives, boards. Owner of this in a business = CSO, Chief Strategy Officer 

Tactical Plans

address the “What” question: 

◦ Specific Product Decisions, System Selection and Implementation, Resource Management (People, $$, etc.) 

◦ Plans typically created by/for vice presidents and director levels in the organization. Owner of this in a business = C0O, Chief Operational Officer 

Operational Plans

answers the “How”, “When”, “Who”, “Where” questions: 

◦ Process Improvement, Cost Containment Initiatives, System Programming, Training and Retention Programs, Maintenance and Sustainability. Owner of this in a business = Department leads: HR, Finance, Marketing, IT (CIO) 

◦ Plans typically created by/for operational managers in the organization

Activities of information systems produce information organizations need:

Input, processing, output, feedback

Input

Captures raw data from organization or external environment

Processing

Converts raw data into meaningful form 

Output

 Transfers processed information to people or activities that use it 

Feedback

Output is returned to appropriate members of organization to help evaluate or correct input stage

Components and Characteristics of an Organization 

Use of hierarchical structure 

Separation of business functions 

Goals, management and leadership styles, types of tasks 

Accountability, authority in system of impartial decision making 

Routines and business processes 

Organizational politics, culture, environments, and structures

Organizations typically have some form of separate management structures for various business functions

Sales and Marketing

Human Resources

Finance and Accounting

Supply Chain

Manufacturing, Production

Information Systems must support all of these functions and their processes.

Culture

 May be powerful unifying force as well as restraint on change

Encompasses set of assumptions that define goal

and product.

What set of assumptions define goal and product, when talked about culture?

What products the organization should produce

How and where it should be produced

For whom the products should be produced

Influenced by

Management – Executives, Boards, etc

Workforce

Competition

Regulatory

Politics

Divergent viewpoints lead to political struggle, competition, and conflict. The resistance greatly hampers organizational change.

How IS impacts organizational change

They become bound up in organizational politics

They potentially change an organization’s structure, culture, politics, and work

They controls innovation, as a critical element of the organization 

They flatten organizations

Decision making is pushed to lower levels 

Fewer managers are needed (IT enables faster decision making and increases span of control) 

Organizations flatten

Why do IS become bound up in organizational politics?

they influence access to a key resource—information 

Why do IS organizations flatten?

an authority increasingly relies on knowledge and competence rather than formal positions

What are the list of accounting and finance systems?

Debits and Credits

Financial Reporting and Analysis

Accounts Receivable Management

Treasury – Disbursement, Reconciliation

Asset Management – Depreciation, Maintenance

Budgeting and Forecasting/Planning

Auditability and Controls

What are the implimentation considerations of debits and credits?

Chart of Accounts, Department

What are the implimentation considerations of Financial Reporting and Analysis?

Business Intelligence and Visualization

What are the implimentation considerations of Accounts Receivable Management?

Customers, Products/Services/Charges

What are the implimentation considerations of Treasury – Disbursement, Reconciliation?

Banking

What are the implimentation considerations of Asset Management – Depreciation, Maintenance?

Capital and Equipment

What are the implimentation considerations of Budgeting and Forecasting/Planning?

Business Intelligence, Funding

What are the implimentation considerations of Auditability and Controls?

Workflow, Employees

What are the Human Resource Systems?

Recruiting – Internal and External

HR Actions – Hire/On-Board, Positions, Evaluations, Terminations

Time and Attendance – Pay Practices, Vacations, Time Clock, Scheduling

Benefits Administration – Eligibility/Enrollment, Corporate Payments

Payroll – Salary Administration, Taxes, Disbursements

What are the implimentation considerations of Recruiting – Internal and External?

People, Sources

What are the implimentation considerations of HR Actions – Hire/On-Board, Positions, Evaluations, Terminations?

People, Departments, Positions

What are the implimentation considerations of Time and Attendance – Pay Practices, Vacations, Time Clock, Scheduling?

People, Positions, Shifts, Departments

What are the implimentation considerations of Benefits Administration – Eligibility/Enrollment, Corporate Payments?

People, TPAs, Banking

What are the implimentation considerations of Payroll – Salary Administration, Taxes, Disbursements?

People, Govt/Tax, Banking, Positions

What are all the supply chain systems?

Requisitions/Orders

Purchasing – Purchase Orders, Vendor Management

Inventory/Warehousing – Stock, Replenishment, Fulfillment

Shipping and Receiving – Receipts and Returns, Distribution

Accounts Payable – Invoice Matching, Vendor Payments

What are the implimentation considerations of Requisitions/Orders?

Items

What are the implimentation considerations of Purchasing – Purchase Orders, Vendor Management?

Items, Vendors, Departments

What are the implimentation considerations of Inventory/Warehousing – Stock, Replenishment, Fulfillment?

Items, EOQ, Demand/Analytics, Chart of Accounts

What are the implimentation considerations of Shipping and Receiving – Receipts and Returns, Distribution?

Items, Chart of Accounts, Departments

What are the implimentation considerations of Accounts Payable – Invoice Matching, Vendor Payments?

Banking, Vendors, Items

What is in a customer relationship management?

Knowing the customer

In large businesses, too many customers and too many ways customers interact with firm

What is included in customer relationship management systems?

Capture and integrate customer data from all over the organization Manage all interactions with customer

Consolidate and analyze customer data

Distribute customer information to various systems and customer touch points across enterprise

What are the terms for CRM systems?

Sales Force Automation – Contacts and Prospects, Leads

Marketing – Prospect Data, Campaigns, Cross Sell

Customer Service - Requests

What are the implementation considerations of Sales Force Automation – Contacts and Prospects, Leads, and, Customer Service - Requests?

Customers

What are the implementation considerations of Marketing – Prospect Data, Campaigns, Cross Sell?

Customers, Products

Business value of CRM systems

Increased customer satisfaction 

Reduced direct-marketing costs

More effective marketing 

Lower costs for customer acquisition/retention 

Increased sales revenue 

What is the Churn rate for CRM systems?

Number of customers who stop using or purchasing products or services from a company

Indicator of growth or decline of firm’s customer base

What are the challenges of implementing enterprise systems?

Very Expensive to Purchase and Implement Enterprise Applications 

High Risk to Organization, 

High Visibility 

Technology Changes Business Process Changes 

Requirements Gaps 

Transition Issues (Internal and External) 

Organizational Learning, Resistance to Changes 

Switching Costs, Dependence on Software Vendors 

Data Standardization, Management, Cleansing

What are the trends in enterprise applications?

Service Oriented Architecture standards

Open-source applications

On-demand solutions (vs On-Premise)

Cloud-based versions

Functionality for mobile platform

Social CRM

What does the social crm enterprise trend application have?

Incorporating social networking technologies

Company social networks

Monitor social media activity; social media analytics

Manage social and web - based campaigns

What does the Business Intelligence enterprise trend application have?

Inclusion of BI and AI with enterprise applications

Flexible reporting, ad hoc analysis, “what - if ” scenarios, digital dashboards, data visualization

What are the stages of Knowledgement Management?

Acquisition

Storage

Dissemination

Application

What does Knowledge Acquisition have?

Documenting Tacit and Explicit knowledge

Storing documents, reports, presentations, best practices

Unstructured documents (e.g., e-mails)

Developing online expert networks

Creating Knowledge

Tracking Data from Transaction Processing Systems and External Sources

What does Knowledge Storage have?

Databases

Content and Document Management Systems

Role of Management

What does Knowledge Dissemination have?

Portals, wikis

E-mail, instant messaging

Search engines, collaboration tools

A deluge of information? ex, Training programs, informal networks, and shared management experience help managers focus attention on important information.

What does Knowledge Application have?

New business practices

New products and services

New markets

What does learning management systems(LMS) do?

Provide tools for management, delivery, tracking, and assessment of employee learning and training

What are examples for LMS?

Support multiple modes of learning(Web-based classes, online forums, and so on)

◦Automates selection and administration of courses

Assembles and delivers learning content

Measures learning effectiveness

What does Content Management Systems do?

Help capture, store, retrieve, distribute, preserve documents and semi-structured knowledge

What are examples for content management systems?

Bring in external sources (News feeds, research)

Tools for communication and collaboration (Blogs, wikis, and so on)

Digital asset management systems

Document management

What is the key problem for Content Management Systems?

Developing Taxonomy (Classification or Index)

Why do we use collaboration tools?

Communicate! Communicate! Communicate! (E-mail and Discussions, Virtual Meetings)

Store (and Find) Documents and Information (Content Management Media and Document Management)

Make Decisions and Solve Problems (Group Communication, Shared Content)

Manage Projects (Schedule and Deliverables, Tasks and Assignments)

Examples of Collaboration Management Systems

Microsoft SharePoint – Office 365

Google – Docs, Groups

Blackboard - eLearning

What are major characteristics for Capturing Knowledge: Expert Systems?

Capture tacit knowledge in very specific and limited domain of human expertise

Capture knowledge as set of rules

Typically perform limited tasks

◦ Diagnosing malfunctioning machine

◦ Determining whether to grant credit for loan

◦ Diagnosis based on lab results and exam

Used for discrete, highly structured decision making

Knowledge base: Set of hundreds or thousands of rules

Inference engine: Strategy used to search knowledge base

◦ Forward chaining

◦ Backward chaining

Problems/Issues for Capturing Knowledge: Expert Systems

Most expert systems deal with problems of classification

◦ Have relatively few alternative outcomes

◦ Possible outcomes are known in advance

Many expert systems require large, lengthy, and expensive development and maintenance efforts

◦ Hiring or training more experts may be less expensive

What satisfies Organizational Intelligence: Case-Based Reasoning?

Descriptions of past experiences of human specialists (cases), stored in knowledge base

System searches for cases with characteristics similar to new one and applies solutions of old case to new case

Successful and unsuccessful applications are grouped with case Stores organizational intelligence CBR found in:

◦ Medical diagnostic systems

◦ Customer support

Fuzzy Logic

Rule Based Technology that represents imprecision used in linguistic categories (e.g. cold, cool, etc.) to represent a range of values

Describe situation linguistically, then represent in a small number of rules Used when if-then rules are extremely difficult:

◦ Autofocus Systems

◦ Detecting Medical Fraud

What is involved in Machine Learning?

How computer programs improve performance without explicit programming

◦ Recognizing patterns

◦ Experience

◦ Prior learnings (database)

Contemporary examples

◦ Google searches

◦ Recommender systems on Amazon, Netflix

What is the process in Neural Networks?

Find patterns and relationships in massive amounts of data too complicated for humans to analyze

“Learn” patterns by searching for relationships, building models, and correcting over and over again

Humans “train” network by feeding it data inputs for which outputs are known, to help neural network learn solution by example

Used in medicine, science, and business for problems in pattern classification, prediction, financial analysis, and control and optimization

What do Intelligent Agents do?

Work without direct human intervention to carry out repetitive, predictable tasks

◦ Deleting junk e-mail

◦ Finding cheapest airfare

Use limited built-in or learned knowledge base

◦ Some are capable of self-adjustment, for example: Siri

Chatbots

◦ Natural Language Tools such as ChatGPT

Agent-based modeling applications:

◦ Model behavior of consumers, stock markets, and supply chains

◦ Predict spread of epidemics

What are Business Processes?

◦ Sets of activities, routines, steps

◦ Flows of material, data, information, knowledge

◦ May be tied to functional area or be cross-functional

They may be assets or liabilites

What are Strutctured Processes?

Support operational and structured managerial decisions and activities

Standardized

Usually formally defined and documented

Exceptions rare and not (well) tolerated

Process structure changes slowly and with organizational agony

Example: Customer returns, order entry, purchasing, payroll, etc.

What are Dynamic Processes?

Support strategic and less structured managerial decision and activities

Less specific, fluid

Usually informal

Exceptions frequent and expected

Adaptive processes that change structure rapidly and readily

Example: Collaboration; social networking; illdefined, ambiguous situations

What are Business Processes Examples?

❑Sales and Marketing

➢Identifying Prospects

❑Human Resources

➢Producing Payroll

❑Finance and Accounting

➢Creating Financial Statements at Period Close

❑Supply Chain

➢Maintaining Inventory Levels

❑Manufacturing, Production

➢Assembling The Product

What are the problems with information silos?

◦ Data duplication

◦ Data inconsistency.

◦ Data isolation

◦ Disjointed processes.

◦ Lack of integrated enterprise information.

◦ Inefficiency: decisions made in isolation.

◦ Increased cost for organization.

Why is Process Mapping Important?

❖Describe Who does What and When

❖Show flow/sequence of activities, required inputs, resulting outputs

❖Data Flow Diagrams show flow of data and information through the process activities

❖Identify communications and hand-offs

❖Process Analysis shows opportunities for efficiency and/or redesigning the process

Disintermediation

taking the immediate steps away.

Digital Goods

Goods that can be delivered over a digital network

Cost of producing first unit is almost entire cost of product

Costs of delivery over the Internet very low

Marketing costs remain the same; pricing highly variable Industries with digital goods are undergoing revolutionary changes (publishers, record labels, etc.)

What are the types of E-commerce?

◦ Business-to-consumer (B2C)

◦ Example: BarnesandNoble.com

◦ Business-to-business (B2B)

◦ Example: Granger.com

◦ Consumer-to-consumer (C2C)

◦ Example: eBay

E-commerce can be categorized by platform

◦ Mobile commerce (m-commerce)

What is Electronic Data Interchange?

Computer-to-computer exchange of standard transactions such as invoices, purchase orders

Major industries have EDI standards

◦ Define structure and information fields of electronic documents

More companies are moving toward web-enabled private networks ◦ Allow them to link to a wider variety of firms than EDI allows

◦ Enable sharing a wider range of information

What are location-based services?

Used by vast majority of smartphone owners.

Based on GPS map services

Geosocial services

◦ Where friends are

Geoadvertising

◦ What shops are nearby

Geoinformation services

◦ Price of house you are passing

OOPS! What about privacy and security?

What are Cookies?

Used to remember things about websites: your login information, what you have in your shopping cart, what language you prefer, etc.

They are created by websites and sit in your browser until they expire.

What are the types of cookies?

Session

First Party Persistent

Third Party Persistent

What are Session Cookies?

Typically last only for current session

◦ Example: Non-personalized Shopping Cart Contents

What is First Party Persistant?

Used only by web site that created it

◦ Example: Bank Web Site Login Info

What is Third Party Persistant?

Tracking cookies available anytime

◦ Examples: Ads, Social Media Widgets, Web Analytics, Malware

What are Tracking Cookies?

Usually used for advertising purposes, retargeting in particular.

Can record all kinds of other personal information

What is Retargeting?

a tactic that often relies on tracking cookies to show ads to people who have previously visited a specific site or shown interest in a particular product.

What are Advertising Companies?

can cobble together a history of what websites you visit from cookies

What is a Referrer URL?

include information about the previous site that a user visited