Information Access, IT Solutions, And OLAP Vs OLTP Essay.

 Information is of no value to you if you can't access it. 

2. Business intelligence refers solely to information about your competitors. 
3. 
   Management Information System mainly deals with three main organisational resources: People, Information and Technology. They are all playing very important roles in modern business management, people of course are the most important component whereas information is the least important.
4. 
   Technically speaking, computer is a machine that only accepts and understands binary codes: 0, 1.
5. 
   The basic approach of fuzzy logic is to assign values between 1 and 2 to vague or ambiguous information. 
6. 
   SEO improves the visibility of a Web site through the use of tags and key terms found by search engines. 
7. 
   Customers use only applications provided via a cloud infrastructure, which is Software as a Service (SaaS).
8. 
   The C2B e-commerce business model is a true inversion of the C2C e-commerce business model. 
9. 
   A virus has the capacity to hurt the processor of a computer. 
10. 
    The objective of a denial-of-service attack is to prevent legitimate customers from accessing the target site.  

Part II Multiple Choice 

There is only one correct answer for each question. 1 marks for each question.

(Please write your answer in below table. There will be no mark if no answer in the table.)

 Information granularity refers to:

1. the quantity of data within the information.
2. the quality of data within the information.
3. the frequency of data within the information.
4. the extent of detail within the information.

2. At lower organizational levels, information exhibits _____ granularity.
3. unrefined
4. fine
5. concentrated
6. coarse

3. ___ is a temporary holding area for the information you're working with as well as the system and application software instructions that the CPU currently needs.

1. ROM
2. RAM
3. DVD
4. VCD

4. What type of technology allows you to verbally speak with someone over the Internet
5. Wiki feeds
6. Social network
7. Ephone
8. VoIP

5. Assume that you go to a computer store to buy a desktop, the salesman shows you one with 2.8GHz Intel Core CPU, how many calculations this CPU is able to perform per second approximately:
6. 28 billion calculations per second
7. 2.8 billion calculations per second
8. 280 million calculations per second
9. 280*2 million calculations per second

6. Data warehouses exist to support:
7. MRP.
8. OLAP.
9. OLTP.
10. SQL.

7. _____ is the process of reinstalling the backup information in the event the information was lost.
8. Recovery
9. Recycling
10. Retrieval
11. Reproduction
12. Which of the following artificial intelligence systems is capable of finding and differentiating patterns?
13. Neural networks
14. Expert systems
15. Geographic information systems
16. Decision support systems

9. _____ is a mathematical method of handling imprecise or subjective information.
10. Decision support system
11. Fuzzy logic
12. Neural network
13. Knowledge management system

10.  Which of the following is an advantage of a distributed infrastructure?
11. It allows only specific locations within an infrastructure to share information and applications.
12. It ensures that each application is stored exclusively in one location to ensure information security.
13. It can allocate its processing activity to a location where it can most efficiently be done.
14. It divides an IT system into differenttiers where each part performs a specific function. 

Part III   Short Answer Questions

Describe two IT enabled business solutions in one specific industry of your choice (e.g. Banking, airlines., etc.), ONE provides a competitive advantage and one servers as a competitive necessity. Justify your answer.

What are the typical functions in a CRM system? How does CRM fit into the RGT framework?

What is online transaction processing (OLTP) and what is online analytical processing (OLAP)?  What are their major differences between OLTP & OLAP 

Part IV   Practical Questions

1. The evolution of the Web never stops, from the first generation to nowadays’ the semantic Web. The technologies and the applications have changed dramatically. Please explain each generation of the Web concisely and give some representative applications based on their characteristics. 

2. Australia education industry has grown at an unprecedented rate in the past ten years during the period 2008-2018. Elite Education Institute (EEI) takes great pride in the quality of courses and services delivered to students seeking a highly prized Australian Higher Education Qualifications and it expands internationally through strategies that account for the external factors in the industry environment, suppose you are a consultant working on a project that assist the Elite Education Institution to improve its branding and position in the increasingly competitive educational market. According to the Five Forces model, provide a comprehensive analysis for the market and recommendations for the EEI. 

Part II: Multiple Choice

True or False 

Justification for the question:

1. Inaccessible information is useless information since the importance of information lies in the actions needed to implement or understand them. The importance of any given information depends on the outcome or the results expected out of its analysis, which is only possible if the information itself is accessible.
2. Business intelligence also referees to the strategic analysis of the business operations needed in order to overcome the market issues as well as issues with the implementing innovative ideas within the system.
3. Management Information Systems mainly deals with the people, organizations and the technology and the relationships among people and the organizations are most important in MIS.
4. All modern computers only understand 0 and 1.
5. Fuzzy logicis based on "values of truth" instead of the usual "true or false"/ (1 or 0).
6. Search engine optimization increases the website visibility using keywords as well as tags that are found in the website.
7. Customers/clients can also often use PaaS as well as IaaS, which has the flexibility of using an operating system can install and use whatever operating systems. Major IaaS providers include Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine as well as Microsoft Azure.
8. Consumer to Business(C2B) business occurs when an end user or customer sells products as well as services to a particular business. It is an inversion of the B2C model of e-commerce business.
9. In a recent research, it has been found that a malware known as badBIOS can infect the BIOS firmware of a computer.
10. In computing technologies, a denial-of-service attackor (DoS attack) is a form of cyber-crime wherein the hackers makes the workstations or the systems unavailable for its intended users for a prolonged period of time by interrupting the connection of the system to the internet.

Part II Multiple Choice:

Answer 1. D. the extent of detail within the information.

Answer 2. B. Fine

Answer 3. B. RAM

Answer 4. D. Voice over internet protocol (VOIP).

Answer 5. C. 280 million calculations per second.

Answer 6. C. OLTP

Answer 7. A. Recovery

Answer 8. B. Expert systems

Answer 9. D. Knowledge management system.

Answer 10. A. It allows only specific locations within an infrastructure to share information and applications.

Part III Short Answer Questions:

Business solution that provides competitive advantage and necessity:

Mobile financial services or mobile banking is extensively used in most of the banks in today’s world in order to enable the banks to be at a higher competitive advantage in the market. The reason being most of banks and other financial organizations are gradually shifting to an age of digitalization wherein customers no longer have to travel physically to the bank in order to receive banking services.

The banks   have designed innovative android as well as IOS applications that can be used by the customers in order to perform most of the banking tasks even form their homes, which in turn makes it extremely beneficial for the customer. More sophisticated and easy to use the mobile applications are more helpful it is for the customers to use them. That in turn causes the bank to be at a better competitive advantage in the market as compared to the other banks due to better customer satisfaction.

Competitive necessity is provided by use of cloud solutions in the banking industry since it is one of the most secure and cost effective solution for the corporate companies for storing data. Data is stored in the secure servers, which are maintained and monitored by the data centers of the cloud service provider such as Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure etc. Cloud infrastructure gives the companies a business flexibility as well as agility in data storage. It stores the data in an encrypted manner thereby ensuring better data security. It is a necessity since secure online storage of data it is more preferable by the organizations instead of storing them on traditional in house servers and other mediums such as external hard disk drives and flash drives.

Functions of CRM and its integration with RGT framework:

The Customer relationship management systems (CRM systems) helps in the efficient management of information and sharing of information across the different department of an organization as well as the with its customers directly. The sales and marketing departments of the organizations use the CRM systems in order to effectively communicate with the customers. CRM primarily acts as a data management system that aids in the smooth management of customer relationship management as well as other customer centric information for the effective management of the business operations.

The RGT framework is used in order to optimize process execution of preexisting strategies. It is used to help in the growth of market share as well as transforming the service offering of the different organizations, which in turn will attract more number of customers. The RGT framework ensures to address all the needs of the present trends of the markets as well as the customers, which again is what the CRM also aims to do (Shah and Nair 2013). CRM is mainly associated with growing the organization and expanding the management operations within the organization using the features of RGT framework. The RGT tools further analyze the mathematical values and data collected from the CRM calculations, and a shared output or result is achieved through the integrated system.

Part III: Short Answer Questions

Online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP):

Online transaction processing or OLTP is a system in which the information systems help in managing the transaction specific applications ideally for data entry as well as retrieval of transaction processing (Scarborough 2016). In other words, the transactional data management by the use of advanced computerized techniques can be referred to as online transaction processing. It is used extensively in many organizations in today’s world.

                                            Functioning of OLTP (Source: As used by the author).

Online analytical processing or OLAP helps in addressing analytical queries of multi-dimensional nature in an easy way (Mayer 2014). OLAP is an important segment of business intelligence, encompassing relational databases, report writing as well as data mining.

Difference between OLTP and OLAP:

Online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) are both systems of online processing. Applications that are transaction-oriented are handled by OLTP through the internet (example ATM machines). Multidimensional queries related to analytics such as financial reporting or forecasting are handled by OLAP. OLTP is an online modifying system of databases, whereas, OLAP is a system that answers database queries online.

Web generations:

The first generation of web is the Web 1.0, which is also known as the read only web or also a cognition system. It started as a place of information for organizational information to be broadcasted to the people. It provided limited interaction of users or contribution of content.

Web 2.0 is also known as read-write web. It allowed assembling as well as managing widespread crowds that share common goals of social networking.

Web 3.0 also known as semantic web aims to reduce the human involvement and leave much of the important tasks to be done by the machines using contents that are readable by the machines over the web (Marginson 2015). It has two main platforms of which are semantic technologies as well as social environment of computing.

Web 4.0 is a future version of the web, which is a read-write-execution-concurrency form of web with features that are much more advanced and intelligent than the earlier versions. It is also known as the symbiotic web wherein humans and machines can combine and work together.

Porter’s five forces analysis of Elite Education Institute (EEI):

The porters five forces analysis can be done for elite education institute as discussed below:

Competitive rivalry:

With the increase in the number of educational firms in Australia, the competition also increases within them. They are always in a rivalry with each other in order to protect their increasing market share (Cook et al. 2013). They are always in a competition to offer better courses to the student at a more competitive price than what is being offered in the market by other institutions. Some of the most important market competitors of EEI in Australia are Institute of Tertiary and Higher Education Australia and Kent Institute, Australia.

Part IV: Practical Questions

Supplier power:

Suppliers have a greater control when the number of suppliers exceed the number of buyers in the markets. Through forward integration the suppliers can cause vertical integration and offer competition at retail level for the existing buyers in the education industry (Macdonald 2013). When the members of the incumbent industry are not potential customers of the suppliers, then the suppliers will attain greater power in conducting business with Elite education institute.

Buyer power:

The members of the EEI can measure the power exhibited by the buyers by understanding their concentration in the market. It is more when their concentration is more in the market shares. That is when the students have more power in selecting the courses offered by the institute or they can even have issues over course fees (Hou, Rego and Service 2013). Well informed students in Australia know about their future if they pursue a particular course from EEI and they know the return they will achieve in future in return for the money they invest on the expensive courses of EEI. (Boud and Feletti 2013). They tend to have a more asymmetrical control over the business of EEI. Course standardization as per other educational institutes in Australia can cause the students to express more of their views or they can also post their concerns and complains about EEI on social and public forums.

Threat of substitution:

There is always a threat of substitution of the different full time academic courses offered by EEI. Many students cannot afford the expensive full time courses offered by the institute. Often they also do not meet the basic educational criteria to pursue the courses (McGrath 2013). That is when   they look for alternate options such as short term less expensive certificate courses in similar domain form private institutions such as Australian training and Qualification College or other on line courses available over the internet such as simplilearn.com etc (Khodakarami and Chan 2014). These professional certificate courses are less expensive than the full time academic courses offered by EEI and have comparable professional importance for the students in Australia that they can use to shape their careers in their future.

Threat of new entry:

Some of the notable educational institutes in Australia are listed below which are potential threats for the elite education institute:

• Cambridge International College.
• AICL Sydney.
• Kings International College.
• Shafston International College Brisbane.
• Baxter Institute of Technology
• Brighton Institute of Technology
• AIH Sydney.

References:

Boud, D. and Feletti, G., 2013. The challenge of problem-based learning. Routledge.

Cook, B.G., Tankersley, M. and Landrum, T.J. eds., 2013. Evidence-based practices (Vol. 26). Emerald Group Publishing.

Hou, X.Y., Rego, J. and Service, M., 2013. Paramedic education opportunities and challenges in A ustralia. Emergency Medicine Australasia, 25(2), pp.114-119.

Khodakarami, F. and Chan, Y.E., 2014. Exploring the role of customer relationship management (CRM) systems in customer knowledge creation. Information & Management, 51(1), pp.27-42.

Macdonald, D., 2013. The new Australian health and physical education curriculum: A case of/for gradualism in curriculum reform?. Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and Physical Education, 4(2), pp.95-108.

Marginson, S., 2015. International education in Australia: The roller coaster. International Higher Education, (68), pp.11-13.

Mayer, D., 2014. Forty years of teacher education in Australia: 1974–2014. Journal of education for teaching, 40(5), pp.461-473.

McGrath, R.G., 2013. The end of competitive advantage: How to keep your strategy moving as fast as your business. Harvard Business Review Press.

Scarborough, N.M., 2016. Essentials of entrepreneurship and small business management. Pearson.

Shah, M. and Sid Nair, C., 2013. Private for-profit higher education in Australia: widening access, participation and opportunities for public-private collaboration. Higher Education Research & Development, 32(5), pp.820-832.