Tutorial Questions: Chapter Eleven

1.      Explain the triple constraint and its importance in project management.The triple constraint involves making trade-offs between scope, time and cost for a project.  It is inevitable in a project life cycle that there will be changes to the scope, time or cost of the project.

—  Increased Scope = increased time + increased cost.

—  Tight Time = increased costs + reduced scope.

—  Tight Budget = increased time + reduced scope.

2.      Describe the two primary diagrams most frequently used in project planning

1.      PERT chart – a graphical network model that depicts a project’s tasks and the relationships between those tasks 

1.      Dependency

2.      Critical path

2.      Gantt chart – a simple bar chart that depicts project tasks against a calendar

3.      Identify the three primary areas a project manager must focus on managing to ensure success.

1.      Managing people

2.      Managing communications

3.      Managing change

Managing people is one of the hardest and most critical efforts a project manager undertakes. Resolving conflicts within the team and balancing the needs of the project with the personal and professional needs of the team are two of the challenges facing project managers. In order to manage communications, a project manager must plan what or how he/she will communicate as a formal part of the project plan. Successful people and organizations learn to anticipate and react to change appropriately.

4.      Outline 2 reasons why projects fail and two reasons why projects succeed.

There are several differing reason why projects fail and why they succeed. The reasons why projects fail include:

1.      The failure to align the project with organisational objectives.

2.      Unrealistic expectations

Two reasons why a project may succeed include:

1.      Excellent communication between those involved in the project

2.      A good decision making structure

Interesting Link: http://www.projectmanagement.net.au/

Tutorial Questions: Chapter Nine

1.      What is your understanding of CRM?

I believe customer relationship management is very significant in business. Relationships between businesses and their customers must be built and maintained in order to experience customer loyalty and repeat business. Loyalty cards and special discounts for customers are a couple of schemes which can improve loyalty and maintain a good consumer and business relationship.

2.      Compare operational and analytical customer relationship management.

Operational customer relationship management supports traditional transactional processing for day-to-day front office operations or systems that deal directly with the customers. Analytical customer relationship management supports back-office operations and strategic analysis and includes all systems that do not deal directly with the customers. Operational customer relationship management focuses on organising and simplifying the management of customer information. It uses a database to provide consistent information about a company’s interaction with a customer.

3.      Describe and differentiate the CRM technologies used by marketing departments and sales departments

Marketing departments often use CRM technologies to understand and utilise the characteristics of their customers. List generators, campaign management and cross selling and up selling are just a few examples of operational CRM technologies used by marketing departments. In sales departments, CRM technologies are used for sales management, contact management as well as opportunity management.

4.      How could a sales department use operational CRM technologies?

It is important for a sales department to keep track of customer information. Therefore there are three ways a sales department may utilise customer relationship technologies. These include:

1.      Sales management CRM systems

2.      Contact management CRM systems

3.      Opportunity management CRM systems

5.      Describe business intelligence and its value to businesses

Business intelligence is the applications and technologies used to gather, provide access to, and analyse data and information to support decision-making efforts. Business intelligence includes simple MS Excel Pivot tables to highly sophisticated software that fetches data from the different front-and back-office systems. Many Businesses are finding that they must identify and meet the fast-changing needs and wants of different customer segments in order to stay competitive in today’s consumer-centric market. BI can tell companies things like;

—  Determine who are the best and worst customers thereby gaining insight into where it needs to concentrate more for its future sales

—  Identify exceptional sales people

—  Determine whether or not campaigns have been successful

—  Determine in which activity they are making or losing money.

6.      Explain the problem associated with business intelligence. Describe the solution to this business problem

Companies can have a lot of data, however they are not able to benefit from levering this information and turning it into useful data for analytical and strategic decision making. The issue most organisations are facing today is that it is next to impossible to understand their own strengths and weaknesses, let alone their enemies, because the enormous amount of organisational data is inaccessible to all but the IT department. The problem: data rich, information poor.

7.      What are two possible outcomes a company could get from using data mining?

Data mining is the process of analysing data to exact data not offered by the raw data alone. Data mining is the primary tool used to uncover business intelligence in vast amounts of data. Using data mining, product line specialists and marketing specialists ‘drill’ into trends of each retail store chain. Their goal is to find buying trends that help them determine which advertising strategies to implement, resulting in an increase in sales. Data mining can provide businesses with important information, such as, new correlations, patterns and trends.

Tutorial Questions: Chapter Eight

1.      Define the term operations management

Operations management is the management of systems or processes that convert or transform resources into goods and services.

2.      Explain operations management’s role in business

Operation management has an influential role in the functioning of the enterprise. The roles required by the operations management’s team are:

Ø  Forecasting

Ø  Capacity planning

Ø  Scheduling

Ø  Managing inventory

Ø  Assuring quality

Ø  Motivating and training employees

Ø  Locating facilities

These responsibilities are largely relied upon by the business to ensure the enterprise obtains a competitive advantage amongst its competitors and receives a growth in business profits.

3.      Describe the correlation between operations management and information technology

There is a strong relationship between operations management and information technology as the tasks required by operations management can be organised and completed with the utilisation of an information system. By automating the most important business practices, business will be able to work more efficiently, reduce overhead, increase agility and improve insight into business processes. An integrated system is the only way to have a consistent view of the data and provide up to date results, on a company wide basis. Organisations have saved millions of dollars by replacing out-dated technology and paper-based systems, and integrating previously disparate systems to eliminate duplication of effort and increase consistency of information.

4.      Explain supply chain management and its role in a business

Supply chain management involves the management of information flows between and among stages in a supply chain to maximise total supply chain effectiveness and profitability. In other words, it is a network of organisations and facilities that transforms raw materials into products delivered to customers.

5.      List and describe the five components of a typical supply chain (exam)

·         Upstream, where sourcing or procurement from external suppliers occurs.

·         Internal, where packaging, assembly or manufacturing takes place.

·         Downstream, where distribution takes place, frequently by external distributors.

·         Tiers of suppliers, a supplier may have one or more subsuppliers, and the subsupplier may have its own subsupplier(s) and so on.

6.      Define the relationship between information technology and the supply chain.

Organisations greatly benefit from the integration of information technology into the management of the supply chain. Information technology has significantly improved companies’ forecasting and business operations. It also provides enterprises with greater visibility over the supply chain inventory levels. IT’s primary role is to create integrations or tight process and information linkages between functions within an organization.

 Interesting Link:http://www.eng.usyd.edu.au/currentstudents/InnoManage/ENGG3005/lectures/Ops_M_ment_ohps.pdf

Tutorial Questions: Chapter Seven

1. Explain the business benefits of using wireless technology.
There are many benefits offered by wireless technology; these include ease of use, tidy work areas, greater efficiency and effective communication between networks and nodes. People now have the ability to access the internet without the need for Ethernet cables. Contemporary mobile phones allow many to stay in constant communication between colleagues and loved ones. It is because of advanced wireless technology people constantly connected and have the ability to interact between work colleagues and conduct business in between working hours.

2. Describe the business benefits associated with VoIP.
Voice over IP (VoIP) uses IP technology to transmit voice calls over internet protocol. VoIP enabled phone calls, faxes, voicemail and conferences over digital networks. It can be argued that VoIP saves money for businesses as VoIP communication is not as expensive as traditional methods of voice communication; VoIP does not attract telecommunication charges. An example of a VoIP benefit for businesses include, Windows installer/MSI package makes it easy to roll out the application to multiple machines and the Skype for Business Control Panel that allows administrators to manage all of a company’s Skype accounts from a centralised interface.

3. Compare LANs and WANs
There is a simple difference between a LAN network and a WAN network. A local area network (LAN) has the ability to connect nodes that reside within a single local area network; a LAN network only connects a network of computers within a small geographical area. A wide area network has the capacity to connect computers within a large geographical radius.

4. Describe RFID and how it can be used to help make a supply chain more effective.
Radio frequency identification are tags that use radio waves to transmit data, they are heavily used in inventory tracking they may eventually replace barcodes. RFID can be mass produced at a very low cost, therefore cheaper for the business in production. There are several ways for businesses can improve the effectiveness of their supply chain. Manufacturers can improve supply chain planning and execution by incorporating RFID. Retailers use RFID to control theft, increase efficiency in their supply chains and improve demand planning. Lastly, pharmaceutical manufacturers use REID systems to combat the counterfeit drug trade and reduce errors in filling prescriptions. (Baltzan et al, 2010)

5. Identify the advantages and disadvantage of deploying mobile technology
Several advantages for deploying mobile technology is the greater level of communication between colleagues and loved ones. There is a higher level of efficiency as there is constant contact. Mobile technology provides users with greater entertainment while on the move, for example the availability of social networking sites and mobile TV. GSP systems have been integrated into mobile phone technology providing people with handy details without the need for a separate GSP unit. A disadvantage in deploying mobile technology is the expense incurred by those using these mobile applications. For example mobile TV provided by Telstra costs 50 cents per clip and $5.00 for an episode, or monthly subscriptions at various rates.

Tutorial Questions: Chapter Six

1. List, describe, and provide an example of each of the five characteristics of high quality information.

High quality information can be characterised into five categories. These characteristics can be identified as accuracy, completeness, consistency, uniqueness and timeliness.

1.      Accuracy- the information must be checked to ensure that it is accurate and correct. For example, the spelling of the document is correct and the information is composed in a logical way. In a Spread sheet document, data must be accurate and avoid data redundancy.

2.      Completeness- Data and information must always be complete in order for it to make sense and assist an enterprise in its decision making processes. In a spread sheet document, all fields must contain valid data. For example, names and addresses must be included in each record which requires this information.

3.      Consistency- a characteristic involves information which is consistent as a whole. For example, an essay must contain an argument which is present throughout the whole document.

4.      Uniqueness- involves differences within each cell of a spread sheet. It is important that no cell is the same as another, as data redundancy can occur.

5.      Timeliness- Data and information within a business must be up-to-date with the changes of a growing and dynamic business. For example, customer information such as house addresses must be updated to ensure that the customer is informed with business updates and vice versa.

2. Define the relationship between a database and a database management system.

A database is it system which has the ability to store key business information and has a purpose to organise a collection of business data; whereas, a database management system (DBMS) is a group of programs that has the ability to manipulate and organise the data. A DBMS is the computer program used to manage and query that data located on the database, E.g. Oracle. The DBMS is a useful tool for businesses as it allows employees to identify trends and manipulate the data so it can be applied into the decision making process.

3. Describe the advantages an organisation can gain by using a database.

There are many advantages that an organisation can gain when the business is using a database system. For example, Business and customer information is easily organised and this particular data can be analysed into meaningful charts and graphs. Database application can also provide businesses with certain decision making skills such as, goal seeks and what-if analysis. These tools can offer enterprises with a competitive advantage as they assist in the decision making process. A database may also help organisations identify certain market trend through the data mining system; these trends include the number of sales expected by a business during a particular time in the year. Therefore, employees may act accordingly and respond to these generated trends, for example, increasing the number of items manufactured during this time to keep up with consumer demand.

4. Define the fundamental concepts of the relational database model.

The fundamental components of a relational database are entities and attributes. An entity is a person, transaction or event which has the ability to store and receive information. An attribute are characteristics or properties of an entity class. A relational database is a series of two dimensional tables that link to each other through primary and foreign keys. Once these relationships are formed the tables has the ability to “talk” and interactive with each other.

5. Describe the benefits of a data-driven website.

A data driven website has many advantages in the operation of an organisation. A data driven website is an interactive website kept constantly updated and relevant to the needs of its customers through the use of a database. The customers have the ability to search particular criteria in the website and the database runs a query to reach the required information. The benefits of a data driven website are business development, content management, the ability to minimise human error, more efficient and improve business stability.

6. Describe the roles and purposes of data warehouses and data marts in an organisation.

Data warehouses are a logical collection of information, gathered from many different operational databases that support business analysis activities and decision making tasks. The primary purpose of a data ware house is to aggregate information throughout an organisation into a single repository for decision making purposes. A data mart contains a subset of data warehouse information. To distinguish between data warehouses and data marts, think of data warehouses as having more organisational focus and data marts having focused information subsets particular to the needs of a given business unit such as finance or production and operations. (Baltan, et al, 2010)  

Tutorial Questions: Chapter Five

1.     What is information architecture and what is information infrastructure and how do they differ and how do they relate to each other?

Information architecture can be identified as the operation which identifies how and where important information is maintained and secured. Infrastructure architecture includes the hardware and software and telecommunications and equipment, that when combines, provides the underlying foundation to support the organisation's goals.

2.     Describe how an organisation can implement a solid information architecture 

The three primary areas of information architecture include: backup and recovery, disaster recovery and information security. In order for a business to implement a solid information architecture system these three elements must be involved.

Backup and recovery is a significant procedure to implement into a business’s operations, this is because important business data is too significant to lose when a system failure occurs. Backup and recovery means the business’s ability to create copies of information and data and their ability to retrieve it in case of system failure. Grandfather, Father, Son is a common backup system used by many businesses to back up their important data.

Disaster recovery can be a plan or a cost curve designed to aid the business in the event of a disaster. Disaster recovery plan, disaster recovery cost curve and business continuity planning are all plans which can be implemented by a business to ensure the safety of their information and data during an event of a disaster.

Information security refers to the safety of a business information system. Implementing passwords, antivirus software, firewalls and biometric devices will ensure the safety and security of the system. 

3.     List and describe the five requirement characteristics of infrastructure architecture.

·         Flexibility- systems must have to ability to be flexible and adapt to the changes of the business. For example, the business may decide to implement a new TPS, as a result the software of the system must be updated quickly to suit the new TPS requirements.

·         Scalability- can be identified as the ability of the system to adapt to increased demands.

·         Reliability- the system and its components must always be operating efficiently with a limited amount of system failure.

·         Availability- The system should be available to access by all authorised users whenever desired.

·         Performance- Is the system’s ability to carry out transactions or other significant processes.

4.     Describe the business value in deploying service oriented architecture.

Service orientated architecture can be identified as a business IT approach which mainly focuses on repeated processes or services. Service orientated architecture assists businesses in carrying out these specific processes and has the ability to adapt quickly, easily and economically to support the dynamic nature of an enterprise. There are several benefits for businesses implementing a service orientated architecture. E.g. SOA allows businesses to plug in new services or upgrade existing services in a large fashion, therefore helping businesses to address new system requirements quickly and efficiently.  

5.     What is an event? 

An event can be expressed as the eyes and ears of a business and has the ability to alert those responsible about a significant change in data. An event has the ability to detect any threats or opportunities within the business and report to those who, in turn act on the information and act accordingly.   

6.     What is a service?

A service can be identified as software products. They must have a user friendly interface so they can be used by a broad audience; they must also have the infrastructure architecture characteristics because they have a large impact on a business’s productivity. A few examples of contemporary service forms are ‘credit checks’ and ‘customer information’. These services are essential to businesses as they are accountable for carrying out simple yet significant business operations and tasks.

7.     What emerging technologies can companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively?

Two emerging technologies that companies can use to increase performance and utilise their infrastructure more effectively are web services and open systems.

Web services are a medium used to share data and information between shared protocols and standards. With the use of web services, businesses have more interoperability as two or more systems can share data and resources within a network even if the hardware and software are made by different manufacturers. According to Baltzan (et al, 2010) web services encompass all the technologies that are used to transmit and process information on and across a network, most specifically the internet.

Open systems can be identified as a non-proprietary IT hardware and software made available by the standards and procedures by which their products work, making it easier to integrate the (Baltzan et al, 2010). This emerging technology can increase performance as they allow for greater information sharing.