Exam 16: Managing Information in a Global World

What are the two basic methods of capturing information?

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

Dynamic Team Sports Canada,located in Toronto,implemented a system that requires employees to scan their thumbprints when punching in. Which term describes this newly added technology?

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

Which term is best used to define Excel spreadsheets that list property assessment appeals in the city of Toronto?

What have companies that use electronic data interchange,extranets,and the Internet to gain a competitive advantage experienced?

Kevin is hired by a fast food restaurant to determine why sales have started to decrease. Kevin finds that 30 percent of orders include something toasted. There is just one toaster that creates a bottleneck. Lines of cars build up at the drive thru service. Kevin sees potential customers driving in toward the restaurant turn away and go to a competing restaurant. What has Kevin discovered?

Tim is the IT security officer for an engineering firm. Tim must ensure customer records and pricing formulas are not accessible by anyone outside the company. However,the firm wants the public to be able to easily surf its website to learn what services they provide. What layer of security will Tim place between the firm and the public to prevent outside access to customer records and pricing formulas?

Assume that,as a member of the student governing body at your college or university,you have unlimited resources to tackle a challenge that has been posed to you by students,some faculty,and the administration at your school: develop a database that will allow students to identify the quality of instructors before signing up for their courses. Using this challenge as a running example,differentiate between raw data and information,and identify and discuss the characteristics and costs of useful information as they apply to this challenge.

Data brokers have become increasingly common as computing power increases. They often aggregate data from multiple sources and repackage it for sale. Which type of information cost is being described here?

In 1999,Waterloo,Ontario-based Research In Motion (later BlackBerry)introduced the first mobile email device. Prior mobile devices only rarely allowed for two-way mobile textual communication. What does this demonstrate?

What is the term for a private company network that allows employees to easily access,share,and publish information using Internet software?

Narrative 16-2 For more than a century,the city of London,England,has had the worst traffic in Europe. Half the time is spent at a standstill,and the average speed is 9 mph,down from 12 mph in 1903 when traffic consisted of horses and carriages. To improve traffic,London's mayor has imposed a "Congestion Zone" fee of £5 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 enter the zone but don't pay are fined from £50 to £125. First,688 cameras were used in 203 locations to take accurate pictures of vehicles entering the zone. In general,the cameras are only 90 percent accurate in reading the licence plate numbers on the cars. But with 688 cameras in total,multiple pictures are taken of each car,and partial pictures of licence plates are matched with complete pictures,with the former discarded and the latter retained. Next,the pictures from the cameras are sent via a dedicated fibre-optic cable to an "image management store." An "image management store" is basically a huge farm of networked,redundant servers. If one server goes down,multiple backup servers run live with the same data. Doing this was needed because the city anticipated processing one million pictures a day. Once the pictures are snapped,transported via fibre-optic cable,and placed in the "image management store," the next step is "reading" the licence plate in the picture,converting it to readable text,and matching licence plate records stored in government databases. Transport of London uses software that scans digitized documents into ASCII text and then matches and compares multiple pictures of the same licence plate. For example,imagine that a licence plate is 12345678 and that the congestion cameras get three partial pictures-12345,34567,and 5678-and one complete picture,12345678. The software has to interpret that all four pictures were of the same vehicle;then,it has to select the last picture,12345678,not the partial pictures,when converting the picture to text. Finally,once the licence plate is converted to text,its number is then matched with an existing licence plate in a government database. At that point,"Congestion Zone" charges are linked with whoever owns the vehicle. -Refer to Narrative 16-2. Which kind of technology is used to turn the licence plate number captured by a photograph into readable text that matches licence plate records already stored in government databases?

Colin has been hired by a restaurant chain for a co-op term. The restaurant owner wants Colin to take the sales results from each day for each location and create organized reports. The owner wants to make decisions but at the moment does not have the results in a form he can understand. What form are the sales results in that Colin will use to create organized reports?

By examining checkout data,supermarkets have learned that people who are buying non-alcoholic beer often also buy a bag of salty snacks. Which pattern did the use of data mining lead to the discovery of?

Although firewalls can protect personal computers and network services connected to the corporate network,people away from their offices who interact with their company networks via the Internet face a safety risk. Which of the following technologies has proven to be an inexpensive solution to this problem?

What is the goal of an executive information system (EIS)?

Which question identifies a critical issue that companies need to address in order to sustain a competitive advantage through information technology?

Where does data reside for data mining?

According to the resource-based view of information technology,what are the three critical issues that companies need to address in order to sustain a competitive advantage through information technology?