Final Exam Flashcards
What are the fundamental ways of achieving competitive advantage?
- Changing the product: introduce new products or services or enhance current products or services
- Business processes: Use technology to lock in customers, reduce costs, and create entry barriers for competitors in the market
What are the business functions and functional systems?
Business functions are primary and supporting activities that businesses do to operate.
Functional systems are information systems that support these activities.
How can business processes be improved?
IT enables firms to innovate and make significant change. Outside of technology, by adding resources, adding increased specialization, and changing/eliminating non-productive activities.
What are the challenges of implementing business process changes?
- There is a lot of detailed work to be done to determine what to change and make an effective decision.
- Hard to estimate the business value that will emerge from business process changes.
- Many people like the idea of change but do not want to change.
What is the importance of industry standard processes?
Industry standard processes allow there to be consistency across software so that software vendors can provide applications that work across the majority of organizations.
What are ERP Systems?
Enterprise resource planning systems:
1. Support all the primary business processes as well as the human resource and accounting support processes
- Enterprise-wide systems that integrate sales, order, inventory, manufacturing, and customer service activities
- Provide software, pre-designed databases, procedures, and job descriptions for organization-wide process integration
What are CRM systems?
Customer relationship management systems support the business process of attracting, selling, managing, delivering, and supporting customers. It integrates the four phases of the customer life cycle: marketing, customer acquisition, relationship management, and lose/churn.
What are SCM systems?
Supply chain management systems are inter-organizational systems that enable companies to efficiently handle the flow of goods from suppliers to customer.
What challenges do managers face when making decisions?
Information overload, data quality, rationality is difficult to define.
What is OLTP and how does it support decision making?
Online transaction processing systems are systems that collect data electronically and processing the transactions online.
What are OLAP and the data resource challenge?
The data resource challenge can be defined as the inability to use data collected by OLTP’s to improve decision making.
Online Analytics Processing systems help make data useful for decision making.
What are BI Systems and how do they provide competitive advantage?
A business intelligence systems is a system that provides information for improving decision making.
5 Examples:
- Group Decision Support Systems
- Reporting Systems
- Data-mining Systems
- Knowledge Management systems
- Expert systems
What are the purpose and components of a data warehouse?
Purpose is to extract and clean data from operational systems and other sources and to store and catalogue that data for processing by BI tools.
What is a data mart and how does it differ from a data warehouse?
A data mart is a data collection that is created to address the needs of a particular business function, problem, or opportunity.
Data marts are like retail stores to data warehouses which are like distributors.
What are typical data-mining applications?
Data mining is the application of statistical techniques to find patterns and relationships among data and to make classifications and predictions.
