MIS
MIS Exam 2 Notes
Chapter 5
The Business Benefits of a Solid MIS Infrastructure
MIS Infrastructure: includes the plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets
Hardware: consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system
Software: the set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks
Network: a communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate
Client: a computer designed to request information from a server
Server: a computer dedicated to providing information in response to requests
Enterprise Architect: a person grounded in technology, fluent in business, and able to provide the important bridge between MIS and the business
Supporting operations: Information MIS Infrastructure: identifies where and how important information such as customer records, is maintained and secured
Supporting change: Agile MIS Infrastructure: includes the hardware, software, and telecommunications equipment that, when combined, provides the underlying foundation to support the organization’s goals
Supporting the environment: Sustainable MIS Infrastructure: identifies ways that a company can grow in terms of computing resources while simultaneously becoming less dependent on hardware and energy consumption
To Support Continuous Business Operations, an information infrastructure provides 3 primary elements
Backup and recovery plan
Disaster recovery plan
Business continuity planning
Backup: an exact copy of a system’s information
Recovery: the ability to get a system up and running in the event of a system crash or failure that includes restoring the information backup
Fault Tolerance: the ability of a system to respond to unexpected failures or system crashes as the backup system immediately and automatically takes over with no loss of service
Failover: a specific type of fault tolerance, when a redundant storage server offers an exact replica of real-time data, and if the primary server crashes, the users are automatically directed to the secondary server or backup server. This is a high-speed and high-cost method of backup and recovery
Failback: occurs when the primary machine recovers and resumes operations, taking over from the secondary server
Disaster Recovery Plan: a detailed process for recovering information or a system in the event of a catastrophic disaster
Hot Site - fully equipt facility where a company can move after a disaster
Cold Site - does have a place employees can go but does not have the equipment
Warm Site - has computer equipment but requires installation and configuration
Disaster Recovery Cost Curve: charts
1- the cost of the company of the unavailability of information and technology
2- the cost of the company of recovering from a disaster over time
It’s optimal when the two curves intersect
Emergency Prepardness: ensures that a company is ready to respond to an emergency in an organized, timely, and effective manner
Business Continuity Planning (BCP): details how a company recovers and restores critical business operations and systems after a disaster or extended disruption
Disaster plans
Prioritizing business impact analysis
Emergency notification plans
Technology recovery strategies
Business Impact Analysis: identifies all critical business functions and the effect that a specific disaster may have on them
Emergency Notification Service: an infrastructure built for notifying people in the event of an emergency
Ex: Radio stations occasional test of the National Emergency Alert System
Incident Management: the process responsible for managing how incidents are identified and corrected
Technology Recovery Strategies: focus specifically on prioritizing the order for restoring hardware, software, and data across the organization that best meets business recovery requirements
Key Areas Companies Should Focus On When Developing Technology Recovery Strategies
Hardware (servers, computers)
Software (email, payroll, messaging)
Data Center (climate control, security)
Networking (wireless, fiber, cable)
The characteristics of agile MIS infrastructures can help ensure your systems can meet and perform under any unexpected or unplanned changes
Agile MIS Infrastructure Characteristics
Accessibility: varying levels allow system users to access, view or perform operational functions
Availability: refers to the time frames when the system is operational
Maintainability: refers to how quickly a system can transform to support environmental changes
Portability: refers to the ability of an application to operate on different devices or software platforms, such as different operating systems
Reliability: ensures that a system is functioning correctly and providing accurate information
Scalability: describes how well a system can scale up, or adapt to the increased demands of growth
Usability: the degree to which a system is efficient, easy to learn, and satisfying to use
Administrator Access: unrestricted access to the entire system
Web Accessibility: means that people with disabilities can use the web
High-Availability: when a system is continuously operational at all times
Unavailability: when it’s not operating and cannot be used
Vulnerability: a system weakness, such as a password that is never changed or a system left on while an employee goes to lunch, that can be exploited by a threat
Performance: measures how quickly a system performs a process or transaction
Capacity: represents the maximum throughput a system can deliver; for example, the capacity of a hard drive to represent its size or volume
Serviceability: how quickly a third party can change a system to ensure it meets user needs and the terms of any contracts, including agreed-to levels of reliability, maintainability, or availability
MIS and the Environment
Moore’s Law: refers to the computer chip performance per dollar doubling every 18 months
Increased demand causes environmental issues
Sustainable or green MIS: describes the production, management, use, and disposal of technology in a way that minimizes damage to the environment
Clean Computing: refers to the environmentally responsible use, manufacture, and disposal of technology products and computer equipment
Green Personal Computer (green PC): built using environmentally friendly materials and designed to save energy
Ewaste: refers to discarded, obsolete, or broken electronic devices
Sustainable MIS Disposal: refers to the safe disposal of MIS assets at the end of their life cycle
Components of a Sustainable MIS Infrastructure
Grid computing: a collection of computers, often geographically dispersed, that are coordinated to solve a common problem
Virtualization
Cloud computing
Smart Grid: delivers electricity using two-way digital technology. It’s meant to solve the problem of the world’s outdated electrical grid, making it more efficient and reliable by adding the ability to monitor, analyze, and control the transmission of power remotely
Virtualized systems create a virtual version of computing resources, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device, or network resources
Virtualization: creates multiple virtual machines on a single computing device
A form of consolidation that can benefit sustainable MIS infrastructures in a variety of ways
By inc the availability of applications that can give a higher level of performance, depending on the hardware used
By inc energy efficiency by requiring less hardware to run multiple systems or applications
By inc hardware usability by running multiple operating systems on a single computer
Data Center: a facility used to house management information systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems
Cloud Computing: stores, manages, and processes data and applications over the internet rather than on a personal computer or server
Public Cloud: promotes massive global, and industrywide applications offered to the general public
Private Cloud: serves only one customer or organization and can be located on the customer’s premises or off the customer’s premises
Community Cloud: serves a specific community with common business models, security requirements, and compliance considerations
Hybrid Cloud: includes two or more private, public, or community clouds, but each cloud remains separate and is only linked by technology that enables data and application portability
Utility Computing: offers a pay-per-use revenue model similar to a metered service such as gas or electricity
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): delivers hardware networking capabilities, including the use of servers, networking, and storage, over the cloud using a pay-per-use revenue model
Dynamic Scaling: MIS infrastructure can be automatically scaled up or down based on requirements
Platform as a Service: supports the development of entire systems, including hardware, networking, and applications, using a pay-per-use revenue model
Chapter 6
Data, Information, and Databases
Data Granularity: refers to the extent of detail within the data (fine and detailed or coarse and abstract)
The Four Primary Traits of the Value of Data
Data Type
Data Timeliness
Data Quality
Data Governance
Transactional Versus Analytical Data
Transactional
Airline Ticket
Packing Slip
Sales Receipt
Analytical
Product statistics
Sales projections
Future growth
Trends
Real-time System: provides real-time data in response to requests
Data Inconsistency: Occurs when the same data element has different values
Data Integrity Issues: Occur when a system produces incorrect, inconsistent, or duplicate data
5 Common Characteristics of High-Quality Data
Accurate: is there an incorrect value in the data?
Complete: is value missing from the data?
Consistent: is aggregate or summary data in agreement with detailed data?
Timely: is the data current with respect to business needs?
Unique: is each transaction and event represented only once in the data?
4 Primary Reasons for Low-Quality Data are:
Online customers intentionally enter inaccurate data to protect their privacy
Different systems have different data entry standards and formats
Data-entry personnel enter abbreviated data to save time or prevent entering erroneous data by accident
Third-party and external data contains inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and errors
Data Steward: responsible for ensuring the policies and procedures are implemented across the organization and acts as a liaison between the MIS department and the business
Data Stewardship: the management and oversight of an organization’s data assets to help provide business users with high-quality data that is easily accessible in a consistent manner
Data Governance: refers to the overall management of the availability, usability, integrity, and security of company data
Master Data Management (MDM): the practice of gathering data and ensuring it is uniform, accurate, consistent, and complete, including such entities as customers, suppliers, products, sales, employees, and other critical entities that are commonly integrated across organizational systems
Data Validation: includes the tests and evaluations used to determine compliance with data governance policies to ensure the correctness of data
Database: maintains data about various types of objects (inventory), events (transactions), people (employees), and places (warehouses)
Database Management System (DBMS): creates, reads, updates, and deletes data in a database while controlling access and security
Query-by-example (QBE) tool: helps users graphically design the answer to a question against a database
Common Database Terms
Data Element (or data field): the smallest or basic unit of data
Data Model: logical data structures that detail the relationships among data elements by using graphics or pictures
Metadata: provides details about data
Data Dictionary: Compiles all of the metadata about the data elements in the data model and provides tremendous insight into the database’s functions, purpose, and business rules
Relational Database Model: stores data in the form of logically related two-dimensional tables
Relational Database Management System: allows users to create, read, update, and delete data in a relational database
Entity: stores data about a person, place, thing, transaction, or event
Attributes (fields of columns): data elements associated with an entity
Record: a collection or related data elements
Primary Key: a field (or group of fields) that uniquely identifies a given record in a table. In the table RECORDINGS, the primary key is the filed RecordingsID that uniquely identifies each record in the table
Foreign Key: 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
Physical View of Data: deals with the physical storage of data on a storage device
Logical View of Data: focuses on how individual users logically access data to meet their own particular business needs
While a database has only one physical view, it can easily support multiple logical views that provide for flexibility.
Data Redundancy: the duplication of data, or the storage of the same data in multiple places
Employees become frustrated or confused when faced with incorrect data, this disrupts businesses
Data Integrity: a measure of the quality of data
Business Rule: defines how a company performs certain aspects of its business, and typically results in either a yes/no or true/false answer.
Stating that merchandise returns are allowed within 10 days of purchase is an example of a business rule
Integrity Constraints: rules that help ensure the quality of data
Relational & Business Critical Integrity Constraints
Relational Integrity Constraints: rules that enforce basic and fundamental information-based constraints
Business-Critical Integrity Constraints: enforce business rules vital to an organizaiton’s success and often require more insight and knowledge than relational integrity restraints
Data Warehouse and Blockchain
Data point: an individual item on a graph or a chart
The problem of being data rich and information poor results from an inability to turn business data into business intelligence
Examples of how managers can use BI to answer tough business questions
Where has the business been?
Where is the business now?
Where is the business going?
Business Intelligence Dashboards: track corporate metrics such as critical success factors and key performance indicators and include advanced capabilities such as interactive controls, allowing users to manipulate data for analysis
Consolidation: the aggregation of data from simple roll-ups to complex groupings of interrelated information
Drill-down: enables users to view details, and details or details, of information. The reverse of consolidation
Slice-and-dice: the ability to look at information from different perspectives. One slice of information could display all product sales during a given promotion. Another could display a single product's sales for all promotions.
Pivot: Rotates data to display alternative presentations of the data
Data Mining Techniques
Estimation Analysis: determines values for an unknown continuous variable behavior or estimated future value
Affininity Grouping Analysis: reveals the relationship between variables along with the nature and frequency of the relationships
Cluster Analysis: a technique used to divide information set into mutually exclusive groups such that the members of each group are as close together as possible to one another and the different groups are as far apart as possible
Classification Analysis: the process of organizing data into categories or groups for its most effective and efficient use
Source Data: identifies the primary location where data is collected. Source data can include invoices, spreadsheets, time sheets, transactions, and electronic sources such as other databases
Data Aggregation: the collection of data from various sources for the purpose of data processing
Reasons Business Analysis Is Difficult from Operational Databases
Inconsistent Data Definitions: Every department had its own method for recording data so when trying to share information, data did not match, and users did not get the data they really needed
Lack of Data Standards: Managers needed to perform cross-functional analysis using data from all departments, which differed in granularities, formats, and levels
Poor Data Quality: the data, if available, were often incorrect or incomplete. Therefore, users could not rely on the data to make decisions
Inadequate Data Usefulness: users could not get the data they needed; what was collected was not always useful for intended purposes
Ineffective Direct Data Access: most data stored in operational databases did not allow users direct access; users had to wait to have their queries or questions answered by MIS professionals who could code SQL
Data Warehouse: a logical collection of data-gathered from many different operational databases–that supports business analysis activities and decision-making tasks
ELT or Integration Layer (Extraction, transformation, and loading): is a process that extracts data from internal and external databases, transforms it using a common set of enterprise definitions, and loads it into a data warehouse
Data Mart: contains a subset of data warehouse data
Data Lake: a storage repository that holds a vast amount of raw data in its original format until the business needs it
Data Cleansing or Scrubbing: a process that weeds out and fixes or discards inconsistent, incorrect, or incomplete data
Dirty Data Problems
Duplicate data
Misleading data
Incorrect data
Non-formatted data
Violates business rules data
Non-integrated data
Inaccurate data
Data Quality Audits: determines the accuracy and completeness of its data
Infographics: present the results of data analysis, displaying the patterns, relationships, and trends in a graphical format
Analysis Paralysis: occurs when the user goes into an emotional state of overanalyzing or (overthinking) a situation so that a decision or action is never taken, in effect paralyzing the outcome
Data Visualization: describes technologies that allow users to see or visualize data to transform into a business perspective
Data Visualization Tools: These tools move beyond Excel graphs and charts into sophisticated analysis techniques such as controls, instruments, maps, time-series graphs, and more
Distributed Computing: processes and manages algorithms across many machines in a computing environment
Blockchain: a type of distributed ledger, consisting of blocks of data that maintain a permanent and tamper-proof record of transactional data
Proof-of-work: a requirement to define an expensive computer calculation, also called mining, that needs to be performed in order to create a new group of trustless transactions (blocks) on the distributed ledger or blockchain
Hash: a function that converts an input of letters and numbers into an encrypted output of a fixed length
Proof-of-stake: a way to validate transactions and achieve a distributed consensus. It is still an algorithm, and the purpose is the same as the proof-of-work, but the process to reach the goal is quite different
Immutability: the ability for a blockchain ledger to remain a permanent, indelible, and unalterable history of transactions
Non-fungible Token (NFT): a digital signature backed by blockchain technology that proves ownership of something
Chapter 7
Connectivity: The Key to Communication in the Digital Age
Digital Business Platform: an infrastructure that enables the exchange of goods, services, or information between participants, and examples include social media platforms, ebusiness marketplaces, and cloud computing platforms.
Local Area Network: connects a group of computers in close proximity, such as in an office building, school, or home. It allows the sharing of files, printers, games, or other resources.
Wide Area Network: Spans a large geographic area such as a state, province or country
Metropolitan Area Network: a large computer network usually spanning a city. Most colleges, universities, and large companies that span a campus use an infrastructure supported by a metropolitan area network.
Bandwidth: the maximum amount of data that can pass from one point to another in a unit of time. Ex- when a hose is large more water (data) can flow through
Mobile (travels) and Wireless (without wires) have different meanings
Wireless Fidelity (Wi-FI): a means by which portable devices can connect wirelessly to a local area network, using access points that send and receive data via radio waves
Wireless Access Point: enables devices to connect to a wireless network to communicate with each other
Wifi Infrastructure: Includes the inner workings of a wifi service or utility, including the signal transmitters, towers, or poles, and additional equipment required to send out a wifi signal
Wifi Network Identification: the SSID serves as the name of a wireless network and is broadcasted by the wireless access point or router to let devices in the vicinity know that the network is available for connection
5G: the fifth generation wireless broadband technology that will greatly increase the speed and responsiveness of wireless networks
Wifi 6: the next generation of Wi-Fi is expected to operate at 9.6 Gbps
Satellite: a space station that orbits Earth, receiving and transmitting signals from Earth-based stations over a wide area
Wired Equivalent Privacy: an encryption algorithm designed to protect wireless transmission data
Wi-Fi Protected Access: a wireless security protocol to protect Wi-Fi networks. It is an improvement on the original wifi security standard, Wired equivalent privacy, and provides more sophisticated data encryption and user authentication. Anyone who wants to use an access point must know the WPA encryption key to access the Wi-Fi connection
Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol: a combination of HTTP and SSL to provide encryption and secure identification of an Internet server
Digital Lives, Business, and Society
Wireless Business Applications
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
Global Positioning System (GPS)
Geographic Information System (GIS)
RFID - Radio-Frequency Identification: uses electronic tags and labels to identify objects wirelessly over short distances. It holds the promise of replacing existing identification technologies such as the bar code.
RFID Tag: an electronic identification device that is made up of a chip and an antenna
Asset Tracking: occurs when a company places active or semi-passive RFID tags on expensive products or assets to gather data on items’ location with little or no manual intervention
Global Positioning System (GPS): a satellite-based navigation system providing extremely accurate position, time, and speed information.
Geographic Information System (GIS): stores, views, and analyzes geographic data, creating multidimensional charts or maps
Cartography: the science and art of making an illustrated map or chart.
Geographic Information System Uses
Fidning what is nearby
Routing Information
Sending Information Alerts
Mapping Densities
Mapping Quantities
Location-based Services: applications that use location information to provide a service
Personalized local content
(911, buddy finders, location-based advertising)
IT Consumerization: the blending of personal and business use of technology devices and applications
Pervasive Computing: the growing trend of embedding computer capabilities into everyday objects to make them effectively communicate and perform useful tasks in a way that minimzes the end user’s need to interact with computers as computers (apple watch, alexa)
Bring-your-own-device: Policy allowing employees to use their personal mobile devices and computers to access enterprise data and applications
Enterprise Mobility Management: an enterprisewide security strategy to enforce corporate epolicies while enabling employee use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets
Mobile Device Management: a security strategy comprised of products and services that offer remote support for mobile devices, such as smartphones, laptops, and tablets
Mobile Application Management: a security strategy that administers and enforces corporate epolicies for applications on mobile devices
Mobile Information Management: a security strategy that involved keeping sensitive data encrypted and allowing only approved applications to access or transmit it
Data Divide: a worldwide gap giving advantage to those with access to technology
Digital Inclusion: efforts to reduce the digital divide by providing equal opportunities and access to technology
Digital Literacy: the ability to use digital technology, communication tools, or networks to locate, evaluate, use, and create information
Mobile Application Development: the set of processes and procedures involved in writing software for use on wireless devices