Exam 17: Managing Information

Using ____ data mining, the user simply tells the data mining software to uncover whatever patterns and relationships it can find in a data set.

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. The developer of Kibu and his investors created the first company to offer both content and chat rooms aimed at girls between the ages of 13 and 18. They hoped this would give them a ____.

The primary difference between raw data and information is meaning to the user.

Most ____ work by using a collection of "if-then" rules to sort through information and recommend a course of action.

According to the resource-based view of information technology, sustainable competitive advantage ____.

Unsupervised data mining is unethical.

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.

A(n) ____ is an information system that helps managers understand problems and potential solutions by acquiring and analyzing information with sophisticated models and tools.

Three major types of information technology are used by executives, managers, and workers inside the company to access and share information. They are executive information systems, intranets, and corporate portals.

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?

Unlike an executive information system, a decision support system (DSS) ____.

What is a first-mover advantage?

The key to sustaining a competitive advantage is using information technology to continuously improve and support the core functions of a business.

Data clusters ____.

Describe the two critical steps that can be used to ensure that an organization's data can be accessed only by authorized users. How does biometrics relate to this process?

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. The information Kibu.com collects would be stored in ____.

Understanding that consumers wanted clean, convenient food when they were away from home was the information the first fast food restaurant founder used to ____.

____ is the process of ensuring that data are reliably and consistently retrievable in a usable format for authorized users, but no one else.

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.

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 ____.