IIBM Institute of Business Management
Examination Paper MM.100
Information Technology and Management
Section A: Objective Type (30 marks)
•This section consists of multiple choice questions & short notes type questions.
•Answer all the questions.
•Part One questions carry 1 mark each & Part two questions carry 5 marks each.
Part One:
Multiple Choices:
1. Computer crime is defined by:
a. AITP
b. SWAT
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
2. Prototyping is sometimes called:
a. ASD
b. RSD
c. RAD
d. None of the above
3. Virtual reality is also called:
a. Computer-simulated reality
b. Neurons
c. Software robots
d. Telepresence
4. A trackball is a stationary device related to the:
a. Keyboard
b. Joystick
c. Mouse
d. All of the above
5. Hand-held microcomputer devices known as:
a. Personal digital assistance
b. Super computers
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
6. KMS stands for:
a. Knowledge memory systems
b. Knowledge making system
c. Knowledge management systems
Examination Paper: Information Technology
2
IIBM Institute of Business Management
d. None of the above
7. A basic system component of information systems is:
a. Memory
b. Processing
c. Storage
d. All of the above
8. How many characters uses the MICR system?
a. 15 characters
b. 18 characters
c. 24 characters
d. 14 characters
9. EBCDIC stands for:
a. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code
b. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Instruction Code
c. Extended Binary Coded Data Interchange Code
d. Electronic Binary Coded Data Interchange Code
10. The smallest element of data is called:
a. Byte
b. Bit
c. Giga byte
d. None of the above
Part Two:
1. Write a note on ‘Cache Memory’.
2. What do know about ‘Assembler’?
3. Write a note on ‘Optical Character Recognition’.
4. Explain the term ‘Electronic commerce’.
END OF SECTION A
Section B: Caselets (40 marks)
•This section consists of Caselets.
•Answer all the questions.
•Each Caselet carries 20 marks.
•Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 150 to 200 words).
Caselet 1
It began as a trading site for nerds, the newly jobless, home-bound housewives, and bored retirees to
sell subprime goods: collectibles and attic trash. But eBay quickly grew into a teeming marketplace
of 30 million, with its own laws and norms, such as a feedback system in which buyers and sellers
Examination Paper: Information Technology
3
IIBM Institute of Business Management
rate each other on each transaction. When that wasn’t quite enough, eBay formed its own police
force to patrol the listings for fraud and kick out offenders. The company even has something akin to
a bank: Its Paypal payment-processing unit allows buyers to make electronic payments to eBay
sellers who can’t afford a merchant credit card account. “eBay is creating a second, virtual
economy,” says W. Brian Arthur, an economist at think tank Santa Fe Institute. “It’s opening up a
whole new medium of exchange.” eBay’s powerful vortex is drawing diverse products and players
into its profitable economy, driving its sellers into the heart of traditional retailing, a $2 trillion
market. Among eBay’s 12 million daily listings are products from giants such as Sears Roebuck,
Home Depot, Walt Disney, and even IBM. More than a quarter of the offerings are listed at fixed
prices. The result, says Bernard H. Tenenbaum, president of a retail buyout firm, is “They‘re coming
right for the mainstream of the retail business.” So what started out as a pure consumer auction
market-place is now also becoming a big time business-to-consumer and even business-to-business
bazaar that is earning record profits for eBay’s stockholders. And as the eBay economy expands,
CEO Meg Whitman and her team may find that managing it could get a lot tougher, especially
because eBay’s millions of passionate and clamorous users demand a voice in all major decisions.
This process is clear in one of eBay’s most cherished institutions: the voice of the Customer
program. Every couple of months, the executives of eBay bring in as many as a dozen sellers and
buyers, especially its high selling “Power Sellers,” to ask them questions about how they work and
what else eBay needs to do. And at least twice a week, it holds hour-long teleconferences to poll
users on almost every new feature or policy, no matter how small. The result is that users feel like
owners, and they take the initiative to expand the eBay economy – often beyond management’s
wildest dreams. Stung by an aerospace down-turn, for instance, machine-tool shop Reliable Tools
Inc., tried listing a few items on eBay in late 1998. Some were huge, hulking chunks of metal, such
as a $7,000 2,300-pound milling machine. Yet they sold like ice cream in August. Since then, says
Reliable’s auction manager, Richard Smith, the company’s eBay business has “turned into a
monster.” Now the Irwindale (California) shop’s $1 million in monthly eBay sales constitutes 75%
of its overall business. Pioneers such as Reliable promoted eBay to set up an industrial products
marketplace in January that’s on track to top $500 million in gross sales this year.Then there is eBay
Motors. When eBay manager Simon Rothman first recognized a market for cars on cars on eBay in
early 1999, he quickly realized that such high-ticket items would require a different strategy than
simply opening a new category. To jump-start its supply of cars and customers, eBay immediately
bought a collector-car auction company, Kruse International, for $150 million in stock, and later did
a deal to include listings from online classifieds site, AutoTrader.com. Rothman also arranged
insurance and warranty plans, an escrow service, and shipping and inspection services.This approach
worked wonder. Sales of cars and car parts, at a $5 billion-plus annual clip, are eBay's single largest
market. That has catapulted eBay in front of No. 1 U.S. auto dealer AutoNation in number of used
cars sold. About half of the sellers are brick-and-mortar dealers who now have a much larger
audience than their local area. “eBay is by far one of my better sources for buyers,” says Bradley
Bonifacius, Internet sales director at Dean Stallings Ford in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And for now,
the big corporations, which still account for under 5 percent of eBay’s gross sales, seem to be
bringing in more customers then they steal. Motorola Inc., for example, helped kick off a new
wholesale business for eBay last year, selling excess and returned cell phones in large lots. Thanks to
the initiative of established companies such as Motorola, eBay’s wholesale business jumped
ninefold, to $23 million, in the first quarter.As businesses on eBay grow larger, they spur the
creation of even more businesses. A new army of merchants, for example, is making a business out
of selling on eBay for other people. From almost none a couple of years ago, these so called Trading
Assistants now number nearly 23,000. This kind of organic growth makes it exceedingly though to
predict how far the eBay economy can go. Whitman professes not to know. “We don’t actually
control this,” she admits. “We are not building this company by ourselves. We have a unique partner
– million of people.”
Examination Paper: Information Technology
4
IIBM Institute of Business Management
Questions:
1. Why has eBay become such a successful and diverse online marketplace? Visit the eBay website
to help you answer, and check out their many trading categories, specialty sites, international
sites, and other features.
2. Why do you think eBay has become the largest online/offline seller of used cars, and the largest
online seller of certain other products, like computers and photographic equipment?
Caselet 2
It’s no secret that somewhere in a back room in the typical Fortune 500 company, there’s a team of
analytical wizards running sophisticated data mining queries that mine for gems such as data about
about the company’s best customers – those top 20 percent of clients that produce 80 percent of the
company’s profits. These jewels can be a business’s most valuable intellectual property, which
makes them very valuable to competitors. What’s to prevent that data set from walking out the door
or falling into the wrong hands? Sometimes, not much. Many companies lack the internal controls to
prevent that information from leaking. The problem is that such data is as hard to protect as it is to
find. Owens & Minor Inc., a $4 billion medical supplies distributor, counts some of the nation’s
largest health care organizations among its customers. In late 1996, it started mining data internally
using business intelligence software from Business Objects SA. “From the beginning, we were
aware of security issues around this strategic information about our operations,” says Don Stoller,
senior director of information systems at Owens & Minor. “For example, a sales executive in Dallas
should only have access to analyses from his region.” It is always possible that someone who has
legitimate access will abuse that trust, but companies can minimize that potential by strictly limiting
access to only those who need it. thus, Owens & Minor uses role-level security functions that clearly
define who has access to which data. “This meant we had to build a separate security table in our
Oracle database,” says Stoller. A few years later, when the company wanted to open its systems to
suppliers and customers, security became even more important. In 1998, Owens & Minor moved
quickly to take advantage of Web-intelligence software from Business Objects that’s designed to
Web-enable business intelligence systems. The result was Wisdom, an extranet Web portal that lets
Owens & Minor’s suppliers and customers access their own transactional data and generate
sophisticated analyses and reports from it.“It business-to-business transactions, security is key,” says
Stoller. “We had to make absolutely sure that Jhonson & Jhonson, for example, could not see any
3M’s information. This meant we had to set up specific customer and supplier security tables, and
we had to maintain new, secured database views using the Oracle DBMS and Business
Objects.”Wisdom was such a success that Owens & Minor decided to go into the intelligence
business with the launch of wisdom2 in the spring of 2000. “We capture data out of a hospital’s
materials management system and load it into our data warehouse,” Stoller explains. A hospital can
then make full use of its business-intelligence software to mine and analyze purchasing data. Owens
& Minor receives a licensing and maintenance fee for the services.Layers of security and encryption
require a considerable amount of overhead data for systems administration. Both Stoller and Michael
Rasmussen, an analyst at Giga Information Group, say that’s the main reason security concerns
about business intelligence are often swept under the carpet. The issues of authentication (identifying
the user) and authorization (what things the user is allowed to do) must be addressed, usually across
different applications, Rasmussen says, adding, “Systems administration can be a real
nightmare.”“We are going through some of this,” says David Merager, director of Web services and
corporate applications at Vivendi Universal Games Inc. (www.vugames.com). “Our business
intelligence needs more security attention.” Business intelligence reports come from two systems: an
Oracle-based for budgets on a Microsoft SQL Server database. The heart of the business intelligence
Examination Paper: Information Technology
5
IIBM Institute of Business Management
system consists of Microsoft’s OLAP application and software from Comshare Inc. that provides the
Web-based front end for the analytics. “Our budget teams use these reports to do real-time
analyses,” says Merager. Rodger Sayles, manager of data warehousing at Vivendi Universal, says
one way to secure such a system is to assign roles to all users within the Microsoft application. Roles
determine precisely what a user is allowed to see and do and are usually managed within a directory.
If your computing architecture is amenable to a single, centralized directory that supports roles, this
may be an attractive solution. “The problem is that once you have over 40 distinct roles, you run into
performance issues, and we have identified about 70 user roles,” Sayles explains. He says there’s
way around this difficulty. “I think we are going to use a combination of Web portals and user roles.
A user would sign on through a particular Web portal, which would effectively place the user in a
role category. This reduces the overhead burden on the application,” says Sayles.
Questions:
1. Why have developments in IT helped to increase the value of the data resources of many
companies?
2. How can companies use IT to meet the challenges of data resources security?
END OF SECTION B
Section C: Applied Theory (30 marks)
•This section consists of Applied Theory Questions.
•Answer all the questions.
•Each question carries 15 marks.
•Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 200 to 250 words).
1. What potential security problems do you see in the increasing use of intranets and extranets in
business? What might be done to solve such problems? Give several examples.
2. Suppose you are a manager being asked to develop e-business and e-commerce applications to
gain a competitive advantage in an important market for your company. What reservations might
you have about doing so? Why?
END OF SECTION C
Examination Paper: Information Technology
6
IIBM Institute of Business Management
Examination Paper MM.100
Information Technology and Management
Section A: Objective Type (30 marks)
•This section consists of multiple choice questions & short notes type questions.
•Answer all the questions.
•Part One questions carry 1 mark each & Part two questions carry 5 marks each.
Part One:
Multiple Choices:
1. Computer crime is defined by:
a. AITP
b. SWAT
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
2. Prototyping is sometimes called:
a. ASD
b. RSD
c. RAD
d. None of the above
3. Virtual reality is also called:
a. Computer-simulated reality
b. Neurons
c. Software robots
d. Telepresence
4. A trackball is a stationary device related to the:
a. Keyboard
b. Joystick
c. Mouse
d. All of the above
5. Hand-held microcomputer devices known as:
a. Personal digital assistance
b. Super computers
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
6. KMS stands for:
a. Knowledge memory systems
b. Knowledge making system
c. Knowledge management systems
Examination Paper: Information Technology
2
IIBM Institute of Business Management
d. None of the above
7. A basic system component of information systems is:
a. Memory
b. Processing
c. Storage
d. All of the above
8. How many characters uses the MICR system?
a. 15 characters
b. 18 characters
c. 24 characters
d. 14 characters
9. EBCDIC stands for:
a. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code
b. Extended Binary Coded Decimal Instruction Code
c. Extended Binary Coded Data Interchange Code
d. Electronic Binary Coded Data Interchange Code
10. The smallest element of data is called:
a. Byte
b. Bit
c. Giga byte
d. None of the above
Part Two:
1. Write a note on ‘Cache Memory’.
2. What do know about ‘Assembler’?
3. Write a note on ‘Optical Character Recognition’.
4. Explain the term ‘Electronic commerce’.
END OF SECTION A
Section B: Caselets (40 marks)
•This section consists of Caselets.
•Answer all the questions.
•Each Caselet carries 20 marks.
•Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 150 to 200 words).
Caselet 1
It began as a trading site for nerds, the newly jobless, home-bound housewives, and bored retirees to
sell subprime goods: collectibles and attic trash. But eBay quickly grew into a teeming marketplace
of 30 million, with its own laws and norms, such as a feedback system in which buyers and sellers
Examination Paper: Information Technology
3
IIBM Institute of Business Management
rate each other on each transaction. When that wasn’t quite enough, eBay formed its own police
force to patrol the listings for fraud and kick out offenders. The company even has something akin to
a bank: Its Paypal payment-processing unit allows buyers to make electronic payments to eBay
sellers who can’t afford a merchant credit card account. “eBay is creating a second, virtual
economy,” says W. Brian Arthur, an economist at think tank Santa Fe Institute. “It’s opening up a
whole new medium of exchange.” eBay’s powerful vortex is drawing diverse products and players
into its profitable economy, driving its sellers into the heart of traditional retailing, a $2 trillion
market. Among eBay’s 12 million daily listings are products from giants such as Sears Roebuck,
Home Depot, Walt Disney, and even IBM. More than a quarter of the offerings are listed at fixed
prices. The result, says Bernard H. Tenenbaum, president of a retail buyout firm, is “They‘re coming
right for the mainstream of the retail business.” So what started out as a pure consumer auction
market-place is now also becoming a big time business-to-consumer and even business-to-business
bazaar that is earning record profits for eBay’s stockholders. And as the eBay economy expands,
CEO Meg Whitman and her team may find that managing it could get a lot tougher, especially
because eBay’s millions of passionate and clamorous users demand a voice in all major decisions.
This process is clear in one of eBay’s most cherished institutions: the voice of the Customer
program. Every couple of months, the executives of eBay bring in as many as a dozen sellers and
buyers, especially its high selling “Power Sellers,” to ask them questions about how they work and
what else eBay needs to do. And at least twice a week, it holds hour-long teleconferences to poll
users on almost every new feature or policy, no matter how small. The result is that users feel like
owners, and they take the initiative to expand the eBay economy – often beyond management’s
wildest dreams. Stung by an aerospace down-turn, for instance, machine-tool shop Reliable Tools
Inc., tried listing a few items on eBay in late 1998. Some were huge, hulking chunks of metal, such
as a $7,000 2,300-pound milling machine. Yet they sold like ice cream in August. Since then, says
Reliable’s auction manager, Richard Smith, the company’s eBay business has “turned into a
monster.” Now the Irwindale (California) shop’s $1 million in monthly eBay sales constitutes 75%
of its overall business. Pioneers such as Reliable promoted eBay to set up an industrial products
marketplace in January that’s on track to top $500 million in gross sales this year.Then there is eBay
Motors. When eBay manager Simon Rothman first recognized a market for cars on cars on eBay in
early 1999, he quickly realized that such high-ticket items would require a different strategy than
simply opening a new category. To jump-start its supply of cars and customers, eBay immediately
bought a collector-car auction company, Kruse International, for $150 million in stock, and later did
a deal to include listings from online classifieds site, AutoTrader.com. Rothman also arranged
insurance and warranty plans, an escrow service, and shipping and inspection services.This approach
worked wonder. Sales of cars and car parts, at a $5 billion-plus annual clip, are eBay's single largest
market. That has catapulted eBay in front of No. 1 U.S. auto dealer AutoNation in number of used
cars sold. About half of the sellers are brick-and-mortar dealers who now have a much larger
audience than their local area. “eBay is by far one of my better sources for buyers,” says Bradley
Bonifacius, Internet sales director at Dean Stallings Ford in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. And for now,
the big corporations, which still account for under 5 percent of eBay’s gross sales, seem to be
bringing in more customers then they steal. Motorola Inc., for example, helped kick off a new
wholesale business for eBay last year, selling excess and returned cell phones in large lots. Thanks to
the initiative of established companies such as Motorola, eBay’s wholesale business jumped
ninefold, to $23 million, in the first quarter.As businesses on eBay grow larger, they spur the
creation of even more businesses. A new army of merchants, for example, is making a business out
of selling on eBay for other people. From almost none a couple of years ago, these so called Trading
Assistants now number nearly 23,000. This kind of organic growth makes it exceedingly though to
predict how far the eBay economy can go. Whitman professes not to know. “We don’t actually
control this,” she admits. “We are not building this company by ourselves. We have a unique partner
– million of people.”
Examination Paper: Information Technology
4
IIBM Institute of Business Management
Questions:
1. Why has eBay become such a successful and diverse online marketplace? Visit the eBay website
to help you answer, and check out their many trading categories, specialty sites, international
sites, and other features.
2. Why do you think eBay has become the largest online/offline seller of used cars, and the largest
online seller of certain other products, like computers and photographic equipment?
Caselet 2
It’s no secret that somewhere in a back room in the typical Fortune 500 company, there’s a team of
analytical wizards running sophisticated data mining queries that mine for gems such as data about
about the company’s best customers – those top 20 percent of clients that produce 80 percent of the
company’s profits. These jewels can be a business’s most valuable intellectual property, which
makes them very valuable to competitors. What’s to prevent that data set from walking out the door
or falling into the wrong hands? Sometimes, not much. Many companies lack the internal controls to
prevent that information from leaking. The problem is that such data is as hard to protect as it is to
find. Owens & Minor Inc., a $4 billion medical supplies distributor, counts some of the nation’s
largest health care organizations among its customers. In late 1996, it started mining data internally
using business intelligence software from Business Objects SA. “From the beginning, we were
aware of security issues around this strategic information about our operations,” says Don Stoller,
senior director of information systems at Owens & Minor. “For example, a sales executive in Dallas
should only have access to analyses from his region.” It is always possible that someone who has
legitimate access will abuse that trust, but companies can minimize that potential by strictly limiting
access to only those who need it. thus, Owens & Minor uses role-level security functions that clearly
define who has access to which data. “This meant we had to build a separate security table in our
Oracle database,” says Stoller. A few years later, when the company wanted to open its systems to
suppliers and customers, security became even more important. In 1998, Owens & Minor moved
quickly to take advantage of Web-intelligence software from Business Objects that’s designed to
Web-enable business intelligence systems. The result was Wisdom, an extranet Web portal that lets
Owens & Minor’s suppliers and customers access their own transactional data and generate
sophisticated analyses and reports from it.“It business-to-business transactions, security is key,” says
Stoller. “We had to make absolutely sure that Jhonson & Jhonson, for example, could not see any
3M’s information. This meant we had to set up specific customer and supplier security tables, and
we had to maintain new, secured database views using the Oracle DBMS and Business
Objects.”Wisdom was such a success that Owens & Minor decided to go into the intelligence
business with the launch of wisdom2 in the spring of 2000. “We capture data out of a hospital’s
materials management system and load it into our data warehouse,” Stoller explains. A hospital can
then make full use of its business-intelligence software to mine and analyze purchasing data. Owens
& Minor receives a licensing and maintenance fee for the services.Layers of security and encryption
require a considerable amount of overhead data for systems administration. Both Stoller and Michael
Rasmussen, an analyst at Giga Information Group, say that’s the main reason security concerns
about business intelligence are often swept under the carpet. The issues of authentication (identifying
the user) and authorization (what things the user is allowed to do) must be addressed, usually across
different applications, Rasmussen says, adding, “Systems administration can be a real
nightmare.”“We are going through some of this,” says David Merager, director of Web services and
corporate applications at Vivendi Universal Games Inc. (www.vugames.com). “Our business
intelligence needs more security attention.” Business intelligence reports come from two systems: an
Oracle-based for budgets on a Microsoft SQL Server database. The heart of the business intelligence
Examination Paper: Information Technology
5
IIBM Institute of Business Management
system consists of Microsoft’s OLAP application and software from Comshare Inc. that provides the
Web-based front end for the analytics. “Our budget teams use these reports to do real-time
analyses,” says Merager. Rodger Sayles, manager of data warehousing at Vivendi Universal, says
one way to secure such a system is to assign roles to all users within the Microsoft application. Roles
determine precisely what a user is allowed to see and do and are usually managed within a directory.
If your computing architecture is amenable to a single, centralized directory that supports roles, this
may be an attractive solution. “The problem is that once you have over 40 distinct roles, you run into
performance issues, and we have identified about 70 user roles,” Sayles explains. He says there’s
way around this difficulty. “I think we are going to use a combination of Web portals and user roles.
A user would sign on through a particular Web portal, which would effectively place the user in a
role category. This reduces the overhead burden on the application,” says Sayles.
Questions:
1. Why have developments in IT helped to increase the value of the data resources of many
companies?
2. How can companies use IT to meet the challenges of data resources security?
END OF SECTION B
Section C: Applied Theory (30 marks)
•This section consists of Applied Theory Questions.
•Answer all the questions.
•Each question carries 15 marks.
•Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 200 to 250 words).
1. What potential security problems do you see in the increasing use of intranets and extranets in
business? What might be done to solve such problems? Give several examples.
2. Suppose you are a manager being asked to develop e-business and e-commerce applications to
gain a competitive advantage in an important market for your company. What reservations might
you have about doing so? Why?
END OF SECTION C
Examination Paper: Information Technology
6
IIBM Institute of Business Management
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