1. (TCO A) Cloud computing (Points : 10) is the same as e-commerce. reduces the size of IT organizations. increases business costs.

requires special software, other than a browser, to be installed on each computer.

2. (TCO A) Networking and telecommunications technologies, along with computer hardware, software, data management technology, and the people required to run and manage them, constitute an organization's (Points : 10) data management environment networked environment IT infrastructure information system

3. (TCO B) The value chain model (Points : 10) categorizes five related advantages for adding value to a firm's products or services. sees the supply chain as the primary activity for adding value. categorizes four basic strategies a firm can use to enhance its value chain. helps a firm identify points at which information technology can most effectively enhance its competitive position.

4. (TCO C) Which common database challenge is illustrated by the text's discussion of receiving multiple pieces of the same direct mail advertising with an identical address? (Points : 10) Data normalization Data accuracy Data redundancy Data quality

5. (TCO D) Which of the following is not an example of the emerging mobile computing platforms? (Points : 10) eReaders

The iPad Android phone CRM

(TCO A) Define operational excellence. How can information systems help achieve it? (Points: 25) Operational excellence is the success of higher levels of productivity, cost effectivity, profitability and all areas of operations and performance, which may also include decision making and human resource and their skills. Information systems also help achieve operational excellence by improving communications to suppliers and improving the supply chain. Information systems could help managers to communicate with workers and other employees more effectively, enable technological inventions in products and services, minimize warehouseoperating costs and simplify distribution.

(TCO B) List three organizational factors that can prevent a firm from fully realizing the benefits of a new information system, and provide examples of each. There are multiple reasons why a firm could be prevented from realizing the benefits of a new information system. Some of the features of organizations include the organizations unwillingness to change, politics, and structure. The company might be happy with its own value and unwilling to change how things are going there. For example; a company that has been running for several years with a hardworking teams who are competent with their work, feel no need to introduce a computer to help them out. A new information system might be resisted by end users or by managers for political reasons as well because they might be concerned about the political changes the system implies. For example; a new system might reduce the power that the manager had in overseeing the employees, and he or she may not want to relinquish this power. An information system, by allowing the distribution of knowledge, may be better used in a company with a flatter organization. A company with a highly stratified hierarchy may have difficulty adjusting its business processes and structures to an information system that does not follow the same business hierarchy of information.

(TCO C) List and describe three main capabilities or tools of a DBMS. A Database Management System (DBMS) includes capabilities and tools for many purposes such as organizing, managing and accessing the data in the database. There are three principal capabilities of a DBMS. 1) The data definition language: The data definition language specifies the structure and content of the database. In order to create database tables and to define the characteristics of the fields in the table, this capability is wide used.

2) The data dictionary: The data dictionary is used to store the information about the data in the database, including names, definitions, formats and descriptions of data elements. It also has the capability of capturing additional informations like usage, authorization, security, programs, reports and more that use each data element in large business databases. 3) The data manipulation language: The data manipulation language is a specialized language for accessing and manipulating the data in the database. For example; SQL (Structured Query Language) This language contains commands that permit end users and programming experts to extract the data from the required database to satisfy information requests and develop applications.

(TCO D) Describe the effect of cloud computing on traditional IT infrastructure. There is huge impact of cloud computing on tradition IT infrastructure. Due to cloud computing, now the users no longer have to own their own infrastructure. The users only have to consume the resources as a service and only pay for those that they use. This being said, as a Service model, the users can be billed either through a utility computing or subscription basis. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is that the users are no longer are faced with business limiting capital expenditure, instead they can make the decision to convert this expenditure into operational expenditure. This will result in enabling the business to move forward on a level IT playing field with some of the largest competitors. With the resources on the cloud, sharing computing power among multiple users can improve utilization rates, as services aren't left idle, reducing costs significantly while increasing the speed of application development. The cloud has low barriers to entry, shared infrastructure and costs, low management overhead and immediate access to a broad range of applications. Another benefit with cloud computing is that; the users can terminate the contract at anytime and services are often covered by a service level agreement with financial penalties, which is never possible with traditional IT infrastructure.