Business Driven Information Systems - Chapter 2 (Strategic Decision Making)

Business Information Technology - Chapter 2 Weekly Questions!!

1. Define TPS and DSS and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantage:

TPS is abbrieviated to Transaction Processing System which deals with the operating area of a business. It is dealt with by analysts at a lower level in the organisation. DDS is also referred to Decision Support System and it assists managers or executives in a decision making process.

An organisation uses these systems as the transaction processing system gives data to the decision support system hence they narrow down the details from the TPS and allows employers to make efficient decisions in the organisation.

2. Describe three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems:

Sensitivity Analysis - Baltzan,Phillips,Lynch and Blakey (2010) describe Sensitivity Analysis as "The study if the impact that changes in one (or more) parts of the model."

What-If Analysis - When a change is monitrored through a belief on a suggested mechanism.

Goal-Seeking Analysis - Where it locates the essential input to reach a particular goal.

3. Describe a business process and their importance to an organisation:

A business process is a set of activities that are used to accomplish certain tasks. This is important to an organisation as it helps them to look out for things such as tasks that are replicated and conjoined tasks in which they can get rid of to find processes that are well orderly runned. A business process also enables an organisation to achieve a set number of goals.

4.Compare business process improvement and business process re-engineering:

Below, I have created a table comparing business process improvement and business process re-engineering:


5. Describe the importance of business process modelling (or mapping) and business process models:

The importance is that business modelling shows the process in a manageable way and it consoles accuracy. Awareness is concentrated on the process model system and gives a highly effective interpretation. The importance of business process models is that it contains diagrams that illustrate a set of activities in a chronological order and analysis can be done on whether the organisation is achieving their goals and objectives.

An example of a business process model:



References:

Baltzan, Phillips, Lynch, Blakely. 2010. Business Information Systems. Mc Graw Hill. Sydney, Australia.

Snell, J. 2001. The Web services insider, Part 5: Getting into the flow. IBM.http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-ref5/process1.gif. Date Accessed: 4 April 2010.

Week and Chapter One Blog: Business Driven Information Systems

1.Explain information technology's role in business and describe how you measure success:

Information technology aims to provide businesses with opportunities along with challenges. If one picked up business related material they will find that there will be a myriad of terminology deriving from information technology.

Information technology's role is to provide the essential communication and provide strong intellect particularly in a business environment. It has the potential to in turning a normal sized business into a large successful organisation.

It is would be highly complex to measure information technology's success and the only mechanism that businesses can use is metrics. These include using Key Performance Indicators, Efficiency and Effectiveness IT metrics and Benchmarking.


2.List and describe each of the forces in Porter's Five Forces Model:

Buyer Power - This is where there are many choices of what buyers are able to purchase hence allows the power to rise and when they have very little choices their power is low.

Supplier Power - When there are little choices which therefore makes the buyers power high and when buyers have many choices their power is low.

Threats of substitute products or services - Where there are many choices to either the service or product the threat is of substituting is substantially high however where there are little choices the threat is low.

Rivalry among existing competitors - Rivalry is most likely to occur if there is intense competition however unlikely to occur if the market is content.



I attempted to make the screen smaller but I couldn't so I'm sorry the screen is abit cut off!!



Rae, GD. n.d. Porter 5-Forces Model. Graham D. Rae Associates Ltd Project Management, IT Consultancy, Marketing. Date Accessed: 4 April 2010.


3.Describe the relationship between business processes and value chain:

The business process makes sure that tasks are achieved by setting specific activities whereas a value chain is used to not only assess the business process but the product or service has value for consumers being added.

4.Compare Porter's three generic strategies:

Below is a graph that I compiled to compare Porter's three generic strategies:




References:

Baltzan, Phillips, Lynch, Blakey. Business Driven Information Systems. 1st Australian/New Zealand Edition. Mc Graw Hill. 2010.

Harvard Business' Channel 2007, YouTube, Viewed 4 April 2010.

Rae, GD. n.d. Porter 5-Forces Model. Graham D. Rae Associates Ltd Project Management, IT Consultancy, Marketing. http://www.grahamrae.net/porter.htm.Date Accessed: 4 April 2010.