Exam 15: Managing Information

A system that is designed to manage farm field irrigation and farming pest management decisions, based on 20 years of scientific research and data then advise farmers how much to irrigate and when to check soil temperatures is called a(n)_______.

Jupiter Communications An entrepreneur developed Kibu.com as an online fashion magazine for girls between the ages of 13 and 18. The messages from Kibu's advertisers were tailored for and intriguing to a teenage audience. Revenue came from companies that sponsored various channels and features on the site, such as the Fashion Channel. Kibu had a loyalty program, the kPoints xChange, which gave site visitors an incentive to communicate with the site and its sponsors. Each time they did, they earned points that could be exchanged for merchandise such as CDs, movie tickets, or beaded jewelry. Visitors who filled out surveys could win one of the 10,000 Kibu Boxes. Box recipients got still more points if they went to the Box Channel and filled out forms telling one to three of the participating companies how they liked the products inside. By September 2000, however, the site closed, and its founders returned the remaining start-up capital to investors. Refer to Jupiter Communications. Kibu.com collected survey information for itself and its sponsors and then looked for behavior patterns that could provide useful market information for its advertisers. Kibu was engaged in ____.

Data and information are the same as knowledge.

Compare and contrast executive information systems, decision support systems, and expert systems.

Which of the following is one of the critical issues companies need to address in order to sustain a competitive advantage through information technology?

Data encryption transforms data into complex, scrambled digital codes that can only be unencrypted by authorized users who possess unique decryption keys.

A decision support system (DSS)____.

A manufacturer of pharmaceuticals can access information about its sales and share new product information with drug store chains through the use of ____.

Jupiter Communications An entrepreneur developed Kibu.com as an online fashion magazine for girls between the ages of 13 and 18. The messages from Kibu's advertisers were tailored for and intriguing to a teenage audience. Revenue came from companies that sponsored various channels and features on the site, such as the Fashion Channel. Kibu had a loyalty program, the kPoints xChange, which gave site visitors an incentive to communicate with the site and its sponsors. Each time they did, they earned points that could be exchanged for merchandise such as CDs, movie tickets, or beaded jewelry. Visitors who filled out surveys could win one of the 10,000 Kibu Boxes. Box recipients got still more points if they went to the Box Channel and filled out forms telling one to three of the participating companies how they liked the products inside. By September 2000, however, the site closed, and its founders returned the remaining start-up capital to investors. Refer to Jupiter Communications. Kibu.com would use firewalls to ____.

____ allow managers and employees to use a Web browser to gain access to customized company information and to complete specialized transactions.

____ is the process of discovering unknown patterns and relationships in large amounts of data.

Baseball management discovered that its sales increased by almost 100 percent in those seasons when it held an open house prior to the opening game and allowed people to see the box seats and examine the view of the stadium from those seats. In terms of data mining, the management discovered a(n)____ pattern.

The key to sustaining competitive advantage is ____.

A(n)____ allows companies to exchange information and conduct transactions by purposefully providing outsiders with direct, Web browser-based access to authorized parts of a company's intranet.

City of London For over a century, the city of London, England has had the worst traffic in Europe. Drivers spend half of their time not moving in their vehicles, and the average speed is 9 mph, down from 12 mph in 1903 when traffic consisted of horses and carriages instead of cars and trucks. To improve traffic, Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, imposed a "Congestion Zone" fee of £8 (about $13)per day for any vehicle that enters the eight square miles of central London between 7 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. on weekdays. Drivers who come into the zone but don't pay will be fined any where from £60 ($96)to £180 ($290). The Transport for London and the consultants it hired broke the project into several different steps. First, 688 cameras were used in 203 locations to take accurate pictures of vehicles entering the congestion zone. At each camera site, a color and a black and white camera were used for each lane of traffic that was being monitored. In general, the cameras are only 90% accurate in reading the license plate numbers on the cars. But, with 688 cameras in total, multiple pictures are taken of each car, and partial pictures of license plates are matched with complete pictures, with the former tossed and the latter retained. Next, the pictures from the cameras are sent via a dedicated fiber-optic cable to an "image management store." Fiber-optic cables were needed because they're the biggest and fastest "pipes" available for sending data from one place to another. The lines were also dedicated so that the system was completely closed and secure. If other systems or networks went down, the congestion zone network would be unaffected. An "image management store" is basically a huge farm of networked, redundant servers. If one server goes down, you've got multiple backup servers running live with the same data. A huge farm of network servers was needed because the city anticipated processing a million pictures a day (again, remember that multiple pictures are taken of the 250,000 cars entering the zone each day). Once the pictures are snapped, transported via fiber-optic cable, and placed in the image management store, the next step is reading the license plate in the picture and then turning that image into readable text that actually matches license plate records already stored in government databases. Transport of London uses software that scans digitized documents-in this case, digital pictures-into ASCII text and then matches and compares multiple pictures of the same license plate. For example, imagine that a license plate is 12345678 and that the congestion cameras get three partial pictures (12345, 34567, and 5678)and one complete picture (12345678). The software had to be able to know that all four pictures were from the same vehicle, and then it had to know that it should use the last picture (12345678)and not the partial pictures when converting the picture to text. Finally, once the license plate was converted to text, the license plate number would then be matched with an existing license plate already recorded in a government database. At that point, congestion zone charges are linked with whoever owns the vehicles. Refer to City of London. What kind of technology is used to turn the license plate number captured by a photograph into readable text that actually matches license plate records already stored in government databases?

Unsupervised data mining is unethical.

The establishment of ____ is an information security procedure that encrypts Internet data at both ends of the transmission process.

A system that requires employees to scan their thumbprints as they start work is called a(n)___________.

Information has strategic importance for organizations because it can be used to obtain first-mover advantage and to sustain a competitive advantage once it has been created.

Text and pictures that have been digitized cannot be searched or edited like text and pictures found in word processing software. ____ can be used to convert digitized documents into ASCII code that can be edited by word processing software.