IT

Section 1: True False (20 Points Total: 1 Point Each)

Please enter either “T” or “F”

1.    According to class-assigned material, most managers, like doctors, rely on the best available information to make business decisions.

2.    An IT competitive advantage is typically short-lived.     

3.    The primary purpose of session cookies is to report a user’s activities to marketers.

4.    A Zero Day Attack exploits a previously unknown vulnerability in a computer application, one that developers have not had time to address and patch.         

5.    An example of an IP address is www.pepperdine.edu

6.    On the Gartner Hype Cycle, the “slope of enlightenment” follows directly after the “peak of inflated expectations”.

7.    The higher up the corporate hierarchy information travels, the coarser it gets.

8.    Key Suppliers is one of the nine Business Model Canvas components.

9.    The acronym “ERP” stands for “Enterprise Research Planning”.  

10.Before an organization determines whether to implement new IT systems, it is imperative to understand what the business drivers are first.      

11.Human resources can be considered a component of IT infrastructure. 

12.N=1 and R=G refer to WAN configurations.

13.It is possible to seed business strategies from the IT side.

14.The three major SQL operations are Extract, Search, and Retrieve.

15.Business models based on today’s largely static information architectures face challenges from the IoT.

16.Tacit knowledge consists of facts, rules, and procedures.

17.The HTTP protocol is considered “stateful”.

18.WANs connect LANs together.

19.DevOps is the practice of operations and development engineers participating together in the entire service lifecycle, from design through the development process to production support.

20.According to the Chief Enterprise Architect at Chubb Insurance, simply describing EA is not enough. He claims that EA is more about “security, solutions, and scalability”.

Instructions: On Sections 2 & 3, please answer the questions as clearly and succinctly as possible while at the same time providing adequate depth to your answers.

Section 2: Short Answer (20 points total: 2 Points Each)

1.    Describe the difference between IS and IT.

2.    List two benefits that an ERP offers to implementing organizations and explain how these benefit the company.

3.    Compare and contrast positive and negative network effects.

4.    Explain how virtualization can help the environment.

5.    Give an example of a long-tail product and briefly explain why it is considered “long tail”.

6.    Give two reasons why Shadow IT (alternatively known as unofficial IT) can be detrimental to enterprises.

7.    Explain why standardization is not always desirable in enterprises.

8.    What are legacy systems?

9.    Why would IBM and Apple, who are usually competitors, forge a partnership?

10.Explain what Dr. Omar El Sawy is trying to convey in the graphic below. What is the salient lesson for you as a businessperson?

Section 3: Mini-Case Analysis (60 Points Total)

Please read the following fictional mini-case and answer the questions. Each question is worth 10 points.

Mini-Case: Murthy Technologies

Murthy Technologies is a growing maker of IT products such as mobile technologies (cell phones, tablets, etc.), other computer hardware (e.g. wireless routers), and software. The company began as a small entrepreneurial start-up in founder Ashwin Murthy’s garage, and has achieved rapid recognition due to the ingenious designs and advanced functionality of Murthy’s products. Some of Murthy’s customers have become very passionate about the elegant interfaces and well-engineered products produced by the company. “Boutique” suppliers, some of whom operate out of their garages, have also designed some innovative components that have helped shape Murthy’s products.

Dr. Murthy expanded his company out of the garage by hiring friends from around the world to help him design, market, and distribute his devices. This has resulted in a collegial, yet somewhat jumbled, organization. The corporate headquarters is located off of the 405 in West Los Angeles, CA, USA, but most of its global staff works either out of offices in exotic locales such as Mumbai, India, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Kiel, Germany, or, in the case of many of the sales staff, from their homes.

Due to its entrepreneurial startup culture, processes “grew like weeds”. Over time, most departments refined their processes so that they worked well within their local organization. However, there were too many missed “handoffs” between internal organizations. The knowledge of how things work resides primarily in the brains of the people who designed the process, and very little of this knowledge is written down.

When a customer needs on-site support, the company assigns its own service technicians as well as using contractors with whom the company has a relationship. Much of the support work conducted by these resources is documented on paper forms.

While Murthy’s staff is doing a serviceable job in marketing the company’s products, Dr. Murthy believes that the time is ripe to take a huge leap into the “major leagues” of his industry. Murthy products are sold via retailers such as Best Buy, through OEMs (specialty custom designed products), and a nascent online presence. Murthy has also begun to license some of his products to major tech giants. The Google “Irish Pub Advisor” app, developed by Murthy, is especially popular around St. Patrick’s Day. Surprisingly, some of the competitors who engage in cutthroat competition with Murthy also bundle Murthy products into packages with their own products. Today’s business ecosystems are a far cry from the supply chains of yesteryear!

The products are delivered to their destinations by logistics partners such as UPS (small quantities) as well as by trucking companies, who can fill a semi trailer with Murthy products. Small products can be delivered by the USPS.

Component parts are sourced from a variety of suppliers. Manufacturing is currently done in a large company-owned factory in Thailand. Murthy also outsources additional manufacturing to other plants wherever in the world it can ensure that quality will be high and labor costs will be competitive. “Quality” is the operative word here, because the company’s ability to compete is based on its brand reputation and its ability to adjust to a rapidly changing demand environment. In addition to labor costs, Murthy seeks to reduce other costs in such areas as its sales force and management staff.

Murthy Technologies’ computer systems are a collection of off-the-shelf software packages, internally developed applications, locally designed web sites, and several consultant-built applications. There are seven “home-grown” project tracking systems that the various project managers use; marketing analysts use their own spreadsheets; an inventory of applications revealed that salespeople used Act On, Markato, Pipedrive, and Freshdeck to manage customer relationships; and the company’s core systems consist of a mishmash of applications that were built “on the fly” to support a single business function. Some of the systems require users to print out data and then re-enter the same data into a different information system. The corporate websites can take orders for products, but are not completely integrated with Murthy’s backend systems. Murthy has recently hired a new CIO, Sandra Schultz, and is building its corporate IT group to prepare for the anticipated spurt of growth.

Ms. Schultz has been getting very little sleep recently as she tries to get her arms around the enormity of her new job. She sees IT as key to helping Murthy Technologies take the giant leap its founder has envisioned. In addition to the need to refresh Murthy’s tired legacy systems, she also must contend with headaches like government regulations (which have recently forced Murthy into additional reporting requirements), the need to streamline business processes through IT, and mandates from big retailers like Wal-Mart (who wants Murthy to implement RFID chips on their products). And if all this weren’t enough, Ms. Schultz must find ways to glean more competitive advantages through IT and build a platform for future IT capabilities.

Sandra Schultz is overwhelmed. She received her MBA from Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and has tapped the Wave Network to find qualified and energetic students to help her creatively find ways to exploit technology in order to improve business competitiveness. You have been hired as a consultant to Ms. Schultz’s Office of the CIO. Please answer the following questions posed by Ms. Schultz.

1.    Ms. Schultz realizes that all IT investment decisions need to start with an understanding of her firm’s business drivers. She has heard that there is a comprehensive approach to understanding business models called the Business Model Canvas. She has asked that you please perform a Business Model Canvas analysis for Murthy Technologies.

2.    When she first arrived at Murthy, Ms. Schultz realized that many of the business decisions being made were “gut-level”. She had studied how a large multinational consumer goods company had used analytics to support better, smarter, real-time business decisions, and wants to bring an analytics capability to Murthy. She believes that in order for Murthy’s product managers to effectively employ analytics, the IT tools would need to be easy to use and readily accessible to these managers. Give Ms. Schultz two suggestions as to how Murthy could use IT analytics tools to deliver value. What characteristics would these tools have that would make them easy for non-IS business professionals to use?

3.    Ms. Schultz believes that Murthy Technologies should begin a multi-year IT development project to build an end-to-end solution that handles all of Murthy’s needs: manufacturing, supply chain management, human resources, finance, customer relations, etc. Is there a class of packaged software solutions that would meet this business need? If so, what kind? What are the primary benefits of such a system? How would implementing such a solution change Murthy’s current processes? Please explain all of your answers.

4.    Ms. Schultz must find a way to optimize her existing IS environment. She wants to develop a set of policies and make technology decisions that will enable Murthy Corp. to take advantage of standardization and IT reuse, while at the same time building in the ability to quickly react to changes in the business environment. How should she go about this? What are the benefits of adopting such a practice? What are the downsides if she doesn’t manage this well? What types of resistance from her business constituents might she encounter if she doesn’t handle this initiative well? Be very specific in your answers. 

5.    Dr. Murthy worries that “we don’t know what we know”. He wonders how the company would function if those veteran employees who have deep knowledge of Murthy’s processes would leave the company. Since he has a vision of growing the company to play in the “big leagues”, he is also concerned that company know-how be available to every Murthy employee in order for the company to scale up. On a recent business trip he read an article about an organization that was able to build a platform and culture to effectively capture and memorialize their know-how. Using this company as a model, explain how Murthy Industries can best capture and share the information that his organization needs.

6.    Sandra Schultz is excited about the possibilities of gaining customer insights from “big data”. Some of her C-level colleagues think that “big data” is just another example of IS hype, and that there is not really anything new here. What argument can Ms. Schultz make to support her belief that big data is really a departure from the past? How could big data improve Murthy Technologies’ performance?