Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 1
IIBM Institute of Business Management
Semester-IV Examination Paper MM.100
Information System
Section A: Objective Type (30 marks)
??This section consists of Multiple Choice questions & Short Answer 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. Stationary device related to the mouse is
a. Trackball
b. Pointing Stick
c. Electronic mouse
d. None of the above
2. Assembler language is also called
a. First generation languages
b. Second generation languages
c. Fourth generation languages
d. None of the above
3. HTML stands for
a. Hypertext Markup Language
b. Hypertext Multimedia Language
c. Hypertext Media Language
d. None of the above
4. Telecommunications networks covering a large geographic area is called
a. Local area networks
b. Broad band
c. Wide area networks
d. Virtual private network
5. Customer focused marketing process that is based on using the Internet, Intranet & Extranet to
establish two-way transactions between a business and its customers or potential customers
a. Target marketing
b. Focused marketing
c. General marketing
d. Interactive marketing
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 2
6. The obsessive use of computers, or the unauthorized access and use of networked computer
systems is
a. Hacking
b. Cyber Thefting
c. Computer crime
d. None of the above
7. Practice of sending extremely critical, derogatory and often vulgar e-mail messages or newsgroup
posting to other users on the Internet or online services is
a. Spamming
b. Flaming
c. Computer crime
d. None of the above
8. Security measures provided by computers devices that measure physical traits that make each
individual unique is
a. Biometric security
b. IT security
c. Firewall security
d. None of the above
9. Midrange systems is
a. High-end network servers
b. Dependent on network servers for Windows software, processing power and storage
c. Client network servers
d. None of the above
10. D.B.M.S help in eradicating problem of
a. Data Redundancy
b. Data Dependency
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
Part Two:
1. What are the advantages of a database management approach to the file processing approach?
2. Write a short note on Electronic data interchange?
3. Define Neural Networks?
4. Define the following
a. Prototyping
b. End-user development
END OF SECTION A
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 3
Section B: Caselets (40 marks)
??This section consists of Caselets.
??Answer all the questions.
??Each 3aselet carries 20 marks.
??Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 200 to 250 words).
Caselet 1
Most companies store reams of data about their customers. The IT challenge has been how to
integrate and massage that information so the business units can respond immediately to changes in
sales and customer preferences.
Hency Schein Inc. (www.henryschein.com) has it figured out. The $2.8 billion distributor of
health care products designed and built a data warehouse with an in-house team of six IS
professionals. CIO Jim Harding says he knew that having the right skills was critical to the data
warehouse project, yet at the time, Schein had zero warehousing experience in its IT shop. So he and
Grace Monahan, vice president of business systems, hired people for what they call “Team Schein.”
Because Harding had chosen two key tools for the data warehouse – data extraction software
from Informatica Corp. and user query and reporting software from Micro Strategy Inc. – the focus
was on finding people who had experience with those tools. So Monahan hired three people from
outside: project director Daryll Kelly, data modeler Christine Bates, and front-end specialist Rena
Levy, who’s responsible for the user interface and data analysis, as well as user support and training.
Dawen Sun, who handles extract, transform, and load issues, and database administrator Jamil
Uddin hold two other key positions. Another term member is rotated in form Schein’s application
development group.
Besides having the right skills, the other top priority was ensuring data quality. “It seems kind of
obvious,” says Harding, “but sometimes these projects forget about quality, and then the data
warehouse ends up being worthless because nobody trusts it.” So at the outset of the project, the
team interviewed about 175 potential business users to determine the information they needed to
access and the reports they wanted to see. Plus, the team analyzed the old paper reports and the
condition of the data housed in the company’s core transaction system. Monahan says those steps
brought to light the importance of cleansing data in a system that’s designed for transactional
purpose but not suitable for a data warehouse. That led to a long period of standardizing
transactional codes in order to produce the sales reporting that business analysts needed.
“It’s in-house people who have this gold coin of knowledge of how their systems really work,
which data is really good and not so good, and how the end users really want to use the data,”
Kimball says. “Data quality is the hardest part of the project, because it’s very time-consuming and
detailed, and not everyone appreciates it unless they’ve been through a couple of projects, like Daryll
has,” Harding says.
And there was yet another tedious obstacle. The data warehouse was designed to provide a very
granular level of detail about customers, “so we can slice and dice at will,” Harding says. But the
result was sluggish system performance. So the team created summary tables to make the queries
work faster, and those tables needed to be tested. It was a lengthy process, Harding says, but in the
end, it worked very well. The journey has taken well over two years. The system went live 18
months ago but “really came into its own” in February, Harding says.
Of course, building a data warehouse is a never-ending job. New companies are acquired,
products are added, customers come and go, and new features and enhancements are ongoing. But
from an IT standpoint, the data warehouse is complete and has 85 percent of the data is to provide
the European operation with its own data warehouse system and tie it into in the U.S.
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 4
Harding says his project will surely justify the costs, but he lacks hard numbers. “We didn’t have
a formal ROI that you could track later. I don’t even know how you would do it,” he says. “The
reason we’re doing the project is because of the value it brings to the business.”
Lou Ferraro, vice president and general manager of Schein’s medical group, says the business
benefits are outstanding. He can now figure out who his most profitable customers are, target
customers for certain types of promotions, and look at the business by product categories or sales
territories. Ferraro says the data warehouse also helps select customers for direct-mail marketing
campaigns that range “upward of million pieces annually.”
One of the most valuable features of the data warehouse has been the ability it gives users to add
more fields to reports as they are using the system. “Once you create a basic report, draw a
conclusion, and drill further based on those assumptions, it allows you to use that data and go even
further, as opposed to creating a new report, and another and another,” Ferraro says. The IT
department used to create, edit, revise, run, download, reprogram, and print piles of paper reports –
daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly – for the analysis of sales and market trends. But today,
business users search, sort, and drill down for that information themselves in a fraction of the time.
The data warehouse has become “a part of our culture,” says Harding. “It’s got that kind of aura
about it within the company.”
1. What are some of the key requirements for building a good data warehouse? Use Henry Schein
Inc. as an example.
2. What are the key software tools needed to construct and use a data warehouse?
Caselet 2
The return on investment from voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) technology has proved difficult,
in part because upfront costs can be high and traditional long-distance phone charges have dropped
in recent years. Adding voice requires that all elements of the corporate network be tested – and in
some cases replaced or upgraded – for VOIP applications.
Grant Thornton. Chicago-based Grant Thorton Inc., (www.granthornton.com) , a global accounting
and auditing firm, has set up a VOIP network in the United States featuring centralized management,
five – digit dialing for calls between offices and employees, hub-based voice mail, and unfield
messaging. With 51 offices and 2,800 employees nationwide, “We really wanted our geographically
dispersed sales teams to be able to communicate more quickly and easily, enabling us to provide
faster, more flexible service,” says Kevin Lopez, national manager of telecommunications at Grant
Thornton.
The new network has been in place since last spring. Grant Thornton has cut communication
costs by routing voice traffic over its wide-area network and eliminating toll charges. It has also
reduced network management requirements and consolidated 28 stand-alone systems into four hubs
– all without replacing its existing private branch exchange (PBX) and digital phones. The payoff?
Grant Thornton has saved $800,000 in its first year on intracompany long-distance toll charges and
$160,000 on equipment lease payments, Lopez says.
Grant Thornton selected Avaya Inc. (www.avaya.com) to provide their VOIP functions because
that supplier was best able to leverage its existing PBX and digital phone investments, and because
its leasing plan lowered the company’s monthly costs, Lopez says. For Grant Thornton, the savings
in administration and monthly recurring costs were too great to ignore. Now, says Lopez the
company is looking to enhance the network so it’s more robust and to improve visibility into the
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 5
network by using specialized systems management tools. “And in the next year, we hope to boost
bandwidth for audio – and videoconferencing, which will further reduce our costs,” he says.
Lillian Vernon. Cutting the costs of leasing T1 lines from the phone company was the key at Rye,
New York-based catalog retailer Lillian Vernon Corp. (www.lillianvernon.com). For example, in
late 2001, Lillian Vernon replaced an aging automated call distribution (ACD) system with a VOIP
enabled multimedia contact center, reducing the number of T1 lines used from six to two. That move
saved the company $100,000 during 2001’s peak holiday sales season, says Ellis Admire, director of
MIS operations. “By converting voice calls from analog to digital signals, we can carry up to 72 calls
on a single T1 line, versus the previous high of 24 simultaneous analog voice calls,” Admire says.
Lillian Vernon chose the eQuene multimedia contact center from eOn Communications Corp.
(www.evoncommunications.com), because it lets customer with the same ease as a phone call.
Admire says eOn’s VOIP-enabled ACD system was chosen because it uses open, Linux-based
technology that is up to date and reliable.
H.B. Fuller. H.B. Fuller Co. (www/hbfuller.com), St. Paul, Minnesota, expects a payback on its new
VOIP deployment in about a year, says Kevin Wetzel, manager of global network services at the
manufacturer of adhesives, sealants, coatings, and paints. VOIP technology finally proved reliable
and sturdy enough for use this past summer, Wetzel says. The reliability comes from the additional
of centralized processing, which reduces the overhead of having multiple local processing locations
and provides remote-site recoverability. So if a WAN circuit fails, the calls can still be completed.
H.B. Fuller uses VOIP at 30 sites globally, incorporating about 3,500 digital phones. Most of the
sites are in the United States, with the remainder scattered throughout Europe, South America, and
the Asia-Pacific Rim, in places where the cost savings were almost immediate, Wetzel says. The
network uses Cisco Systems’ (www.cisco.com) CallManager and other related call center and
unified-messaging products.
The savings vary dramatically – from 20 to 80 percent – depending on the application and the age
of the analog phone systems replaced. But Wetzel says the average savings delivered by switching
from traditional analog phone services to VOIP has been about 50 percent. By the end of this year,
H.B. Fuller hopes to expand the VOIP network to 41 locations in 30 countries. That will mean more
toll-bypass savings, and will reduce travel and long-distance bills when employees use the internal
audioconferencing capability. Over the next four years, Wetzel estimates that H.B. Fuller will save
about $2 million because of its VOIP investment.
1. What are the main business benefits that can be gained by companies that switch to VOIP
telephone systems?
2. What are some of the major cost factors that may limit a positive rate of return from investment
in VOIP projects?
END OF SECTION B
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 6
Section C: Applied Theory (30 marks)
??This section consists of Long Questions.
??Answer all the questions.
??Each question carries 15 marks.
??Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 150 to 200 words).
1. What can be done to improve the security of business by using Internet?
2. What role does database management play in managing data as a Business resources?
END OF SECTION C
---------------------------------------------------------------- ***- -------------------------------------------------------
IIBM Institute of Business Management 1
IIBM Institute of Business Management
Semester-IV Examination Paper MM.100
Information System
Section A: Objective Type (30 marks)
??This section consists of Multiple Choice questions & Short Answer 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. Stationary device related to the mouse is
a. Trackball
b. Pointing Stick
c. Electronic mouse
d. None of the above
2. Assembler language is also called
a. First generation languages
b. Second generation languages
c. Fourth generation languages
d. None of the above
3. HTML stands for
a. Hypertext Markup Language
b. Hypertext Multimedia Language
c. Hypertext Media Language
d. None of the above
4. Telecommunications networks covering a large geographic area is called
a. Local area networks
b. Broad band
c. Wide area networks
d. Virtual private network
5. Customer focused marketing process that is based on using the Internet, Intranet & Extranet to
establish two-way transactions between a business and its customers or potential customers
a. Target marketing
b. Focused marketing
c. General marketing
d. Interactive marketing
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 2
6. The obsessive use of computers, or the unauthorized access and use of networked computer
systems is
a. Hacking
b. Cyber Thefting
c. Computer crime
d. None of the above
7. Practice of sending extremely critical, derogatory and often vulgar e-mail messages or newsgroup
posting to other users on the Internet or online services is
a. Spamming
b. Flaming
c. Computer crime
d. None of the above
8. Security measures provided by computers devices that measure physical traits that make each
individual unique is
a. Biometric security
b. IT security
c. Firewall security
d. None of the above
9. Midrange systems is
a. High-end network servers
b. Dependent on network servers for Windows software, processing power and storage
c. Client network servers
d. None of the above
10. D.B.M.S help in eradicating problem of
a. Data Redundancy
b. Data Dependency
c. Both (a) & (b)
d. None of the above
Part Two:
1. What are the advantages of a database management approach to the file processing approach?
2. Write a short note on Electronic data interchange?
3. Define Neural Networks?
4. Define the following
a. Prototyping
b. End-user development
END OF SECTION A
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 3
Section B: Caselets (40 marks)
??This section consists of Caselets.
??Answer all the questions.
??Each 3aselet carries 20 marks.
??Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 200 to 250 words).
Caselet 1
Most companies store reams of data about their customers. The IT challenge has been how to
integrate and massage that information so the business units can respond immediately to changes in
sales and customer preferences.
Hency Schein Inc. (www.henryschein.com) has it figured out. The $2.8 billion distributor of
health care products designed and built a data warehouse with an in-house team of six IS
professionals. CIO Jim Harding says he knew that having the right skills was critical to the data
warehouse project, yet at the time, Schein had zero warehousing experience in its IT shop. So he and
Grace Monahan, vice president of business systems, hired people for what they call “Team Schein.”
Because Harding had chosen two key tools for the data warehouse – data extraction software
from Informatica Corp. and user query and reporting software from Micro Strategy Inc. – the focus
was on finding people who had experience with those tools. So Monahan hired three people from
outside: project director Daryll Kelly, data modeler Christine Bates, and front-end specialist Rena
Levy, who’s responsible for the user interface and data analysis, as well as user support and training.
Dawen Sun, who handles extract, transform, and load issues, and database administrator Jamil
Uddin hold two other key positions. Another term member is rotated in form Schein’s application
development group.
Besides having the right skills, the other top priority was ensuring data quality. “It seems kind of
obvious,” says Harding, “but sometimes these projects forget about quality, and then the data
warehouse ends up being worthless because nobody trusts it.” So at the outset of the project, the
team interviewed about 175 potential business users to determine the information they needed to
access and the reports they wanted to see. Plus, the team analyzed the old paper reports and the
condition of the data housed in the company’s core transaction system. Monahan says those steps
brought to light the importance of cleansing data in a system that’s designed for transactional
purpose but not suitable for a data warehouse. That led to a long period of standardizing
transactional codes in order to produce the sales reporting that business analysts needed.
“It’s in-house people who have this gold coin of knowledge of how their systems really work,
which data is really good and not so good, and how the end users really want to use the data,”
Kimball says. “Data quality is the hardest part of the project, because it’s very time-consuming and
detailed, and not everyone appreciates it unless they’ve been through a couple of projects, like Daryll
has,” Harding says.
And there was yet another tedious obstacle. The data warehouse was designed to provide a very
granular level of detail about customers, “so we can slice and dice at will,” Harding says. But the
result was sluggish system performance. So the team created summary tables to make the queries
work faster, and those tables needed to be tested. It was a lengthy process, Harding says, but in the
end, it worked very well. The journey has taken well over two years. The system went live 18
months ago but “really came into its own” in February, Harding says.
Of course, building a data warehouse is a never-ending job. New companies are acquired,
products are added, customers come and go, and new features and enhancements are ongoing. But
from an IT standpoint, the data warehouse is complete and has 85 percent of the data is to provide
the European operation with its own data warehouse system and tie it into in the U.S.
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 4
Harding says his project will surely justify the costs, but he lacks hard numbers. “We didn’t have
a formal ROI that you could track later. I don’t even know how you would do it,” he says. “The
reason we’re doing the project is because of the value it brings to the business.”
Lou Ferraro, vice president and general manager of Schein’s medical group, says the business
benefits are outstanding. He can now figure out who his most profitable customers are, target
customers for certain types of promotions, and look at the business by product categories or sales
territories. Ferraro says the data warehouse also helps select customers for direct-mail marketing
campaigns that range “upward of million pieces annually.”
One of the most valuable features of the data warehouse has been the ability it gives users to add
more fields to reports as they are using the system. “Once you create a basic report, draw a
conclusion, and drill further based on those assumptions, it allows you to use that data and go even
further, as opposed to creating a new report, and another and another,” Ferraro says. The IT
department used to create, edit, revise, run, download, reprogram, and print piles of paper reports –
daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly – for the analysis of sales and market trends. But today,
business users search, sort, and drill down for that information themselves in a fraction of the time.
The data warehouse has become “a part of our culture,” says Harding. “It’s got that kind of aura
about it within the company.”
1. What are some of the key requirements for building a good data warehouse? Use Henry Schein
Inc. as an example.
2. What are the key software tools needed to construct and use a data warehouse?
Caselet 2
The return on investment from voice-over-Internet protocol (VOIP) technology has proved difficult,
in part because upfront costs can be high and traditional long-distance phone charges have dropped
in recent years. Adding voice requires that all elements of the corporate network be tested – and in
some cases replaced or upgraded – for VOIP applications.
Grant Thornton. Chicago-based Grant Thorton Inc., (www.granthornton.com) , a global accounting
and auditing firm, has set up a VOIP network in the United States featuring centralized management,
five – digit dialing for calls between offices and employees, hub-based voice mail, and unfield
messaging. With 51 offices and 2,800 employees nationwide, “We really wanted our geographically
dispersed sales teams to be able to communicate more quickly and easily, enabling us to provide
faster, more flexible service,” says Kevin Lopez, national manager of telecommunications at Grant
Thornton.
The new network has been in place since last spring. Grant Thornton has cut communication
costs by routing voice traffic over its wide-area network and eliminating toll charges. It has also
reduced network management requirements and consolidated 28 stand-alone systems into four hubs
– all without replacing its existing private branch exchange (PBX) and digital phones. The payoff?
Grant Thornton has saved $800,000 in its first year on intracompany long-distance toll charges and
$160,000 on equipment lease payments, Lopez says.
Grant Thornton selected Avaya Inc. (www.avaya.com) to provide their VOIP functions because
that supplier was best able to leverage its existing PBX and digital phone investments, and because
its leasing plan lowered the company’s monthly costs, Lopez says. For Grant Thornton, the savings
in administration and monthly recurring costs were too great to ignore. Now, says Lopez the
company is looking to enhance the network so it’s more robust and to improve visibility into the
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 5
network by using specialized systems management tools. “And in the next year, we hope to boost
bandwidth for audio – and videoconferencing, which will further reduce our costs,” he says.
Lillian Vernon. Cutting the costs of leasing T1 lines from the phone company was the key at Rye,
New York-based catalog retailer Lillian Vernon Corp. (www.lillianvernon.com). For example, in
late 2001, Lillian Vernon replaced an aging automated call distribution (ACD) system with a VOIP
enabled multimedia contact center, reducing the number of T1 lines used from six to two. That move
saved the company $100,000 during 2001’s peak holiday sales season, says Ellis Admire, director of
MIS operations. “By converting voice calls from analog to digital signals, we can carry up to 72 calls
on a single T1 line, versus the previous high of 24 simultaneous analog voice calls,” Admire says.
Lillian Vernon chose the eQuene multimedia contact center from eOn Communications Corp.
(www.evoncommunications.com), because it lets customer with the same ease as a phone call.
Admire says eOn’s VOIP-enabled ACD system was chosen because it uses open, Linux-based
technology that is up to date and reliable.
H.B. Fuller. H.B. Fuller Co. (www/hbfuller.com), St. Paul, Minnesota, expects a payback on its new
VOIP deployment in about a year, says Kevin Wetzel, manager of global network services at the
manufacturer of adhesives, sealants, coatings, and paints. VOIP technology finally proved reliable
and sturdy enough for use this past summer, Wetzel says. The reliability comes from the additional
of centralized processing, which reduces the overhead of having multiple local processing locations
and provides remote-site recoverability. So if a WAN circuit fails, the calls can still be completed.
H.B. Fuller uses VOIP at 30 sites globally, incorporating about 3,500 digital phones. Most of the
sites are in the United States, with the remainder scattered throughout Europe, South America, and
the Asia-Pacific Rim, in places where the cost savings were almost immediate, Wetzel says. The
network uses Cisco Systems’ (www.cisco.com) CallManager and other related call center and
unified-messaging products.
The savings vary dramatically – from 20 to 80 percent – depending on the application and the age
of the analog phone systems replaced. But Wetzel says the average savings delivered by switching
from traditional analog phone services to VOIP has been about 50 percent. By the end of this year,
H.B. Fuller hopes to expand the VOIP network to 41 locations in 30 countries. That will mean more
toll-bypass savings, and will reduce travel and long-distance bills when employees use the internal
audioconferencing capability. Over the next four years, Wetzel estimates that H.B. Fuller will save
about $2 million because of its VOIP investment.
1. What are the main business benefits that can be gained by companies that switch to VOIP
telephone systems?
2. What are some of the major cost factors that may limit a positive rate of return from investment
in VOIP projects?
END OF SECTION B
Examination Paper of Semester IV
IIBM Institute of Business Management 6
Section C: Applied Theory (30 marks)
??This section consists of Long Questions.
??Answer all the questions.
??Each question carries 15 marks.
??Detailed information should form the part of your answer (Word limit 150 to 200 words).
1. What can be done to improve the security of business by using Internet?
2. What role does database management play in managing data as a Business resources?
END OF SECTION C
---------------------------------------------------------------- ***- -------------------------------------------------------
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