MIS Final Exam

High when buyers have many choices of whom to buy from and low when their choices are few. To reduce buyer power (and create a competitive advantage), an organization must make it more attractive for customers to buy from it instead of competition. One of the best examples of an IT based program is a loyalty program. Loyalty programs reward customers based on the amount of business they do with a particular organization. Loyalty programs are a good example of using IT to reduce buyer power because of the rewards customers receive, they are more likely to be loyal to or give most of their business to a single organization.(Requires large scale IT systems)

High when buyers have few choices of whom to buy from and low when their choices are many. Supplier power is the converse of buyer power. A supplier organization in a market will want buyer power to be low. A supply chain consists of all parties involved, directly or indirectly, in the procurement of a product or raw material. In a typical supply chain, an organization will probably be both a supplier and a customer. As a buyer, the organization can create a competitive advantage by locating alternative supply sources. A business to business marketplace is an internet based service that brings together many buyers and sellers.

One important variation of a B2B marketplace is a private exchange. A private exchange is a B2B marketplace in which a single buyer posts its needs and then opens the bidding to any supplier who would care to bid. This is typically carried out through a reverse auction which is an auction format in which increasingly lower bids are solicited from organizations willing to supply the desired product or service at an increasingly lower price

High when there are many alternatives to a product or service and low when there are few alternatives from which to choose. Ideally, an organization would like to be in a market in which there are few substitutes for the product or services it offers which is seldom today but an organization can still create a competitive advantage by using switching costs. Switching costs are costs that can make customers reluctant to switch to another product or service. A switching cost need not have an associated monetary cost.

High when it is easy for new competitors to enter a market and low when there are significant entry barriers to entering a market. An entry barrier is a product or service feature that customers have come to expect from organizations in a particular industry and must be offered by an entering organization to compete and survive.

High when competition is fierce in a market and low when competition is more complacent. Although competition is always more intense in some industries than in others, the overall trend is toward increasing competition in almost every industry.An example is the retail grocery industry

The book by Thomas Friedman where he describes the unplanned cascade of technological social shifts that effectively level the economic world. A flat world meaning: a global, web-enabled platform for multiple forms of sharing knowledge and work. irrespective of time, distance, geography, and increasingly, language.

(1) Fall of the Berlin Wall (2) Netscape IPO (3) Work flow software (4) Open sourcing (5) Outsourcing (6) Off shoring (7) Supply chaining (8) In-sourcing (9) Informing (10) Wireless. In addition to those, there is: 9/11, the dot-com bust, and the Enron scandal

A Transactional Processing System (TPS) is the basic business system that serves the operational level (analysts) in an organization. The most common example of a TPS is an operational accounting system such as a payroll system or an order-entry system.Transactional information encompasses all of the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of daily operational tasks. Ex. Purchasing stock, making an airline reservation, withdrawing cash from an ATM. Analytical information encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of managerial analysis tasks. Analytical information includes transactional information along with other information such as market and industry information.Ex. Trends, sales, product statistics, and future growth projections. Managers use analytical information when making important ad hoc decisions such as whether the organization should build a new manufacturing plant or hire additional sales personnel. Online analytical Processing is the manipulation of information to create business intelligence in support of strategic decision making. Business Intelligence is a broad, general term describing information that people use to support their decision-making efforts.

A Decision Support System models information to support managers and business professionals during the decision-making process. Three quantitative models often used by DSS include: (1) Sensitivity Analysis: The study of the impact that changes in one (or more) parts of the model have on other parts of the model. Users change the value of one variable repeatedly and observe the resulting changes in other variables. (2) What-if Analysis: Checks the impact of a change in an assumption on the proposed solution. Ex. What will happen to the supply chain if a hurricane in South Carolina reduces holding inventory from 30 percent to 10 percent?" (3) Goal-seeking Analysis: Finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal such as a desired level of output. Instead of observing how changes in a variable affect other variables as in what-if analysis, goal-seeking analysis sets a target value for a variable and then repeatedly changes other variables until the target value is achieved. DSS work with TPS because TPS supplies transactional based information to the DSS and the DSS summarizes and aggregates the information from the many different TPS systems which assists managers in making informed decisions.

An Executive Information System is a specialized DSS that supports senior-level executives within the organization. An EIS differs from a DSS because an EIS typically contains data from external sources as well as data from internal sources. A few of the capabilities offered in most EIS's: (1) Consolidation: Involves the aggregation of information and features simple roll-ups to complex groupings of interrelated information. Many organizations track financial information at a regional level and then consolidate the information at a single global level. (2) Drill-Down: Enables users to view details, and details of details, of information. Viewing monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly information represents drill-down capability. (3) Slice-and-dice: The ability to look at information from different perspectives. one slice of information could display all product sales during a given promotion. Another slice could display a single product's sales for all promotions.

Digital Dashboards integrate information from multiple components and tailor the information to individual preferences. Digital dashboards commonly use indicators to help executives quickly identify the status of key information or critical success factors.EIS systems such as digital dashboards allow executives to move beyond reporting to using information to directly impact business performance. The three categories of business measures: (1) Market pulse: Examples include daily sales numbers, market share, and subscriber turnover. (2) Customer Service: Examples include problems resolved on the first call, call center wait times, and on-time repair calls. (3) Cost driver: Examples include number of repair trucks in the field, repair jobs completed per day, and call center productivity

A common feature of an EIS is a digital dashboard. Digital dashboards help executives react to information as it becomes available and make decisions, solve problems, and change strategies daily instead of monthly.

Business-to-Business (B2B) applies to businesses buying from and selling to each other over the internet. Online access to data, including expected shipping date, delivery date, and shipping status, provided either by the seller or a third-party provider is widely supported by B2B models. Electronic marketplaces or emarketplaces are interactive business communities providing a central market where multiple buyers and sellers can engage in ebusiness activities. Their primary goal is to increase market efficiency by tightening automating the relationship between buyers and sellers. Existing emarketplaces allow access to various mechanisms in which to buy and sell almost anything, from services to direct materials.

Business-to-Consumer(B2C) applies to any business that sells its products or services to consumers over the internet.Common B2C ebusiness models include eshops and emalls. An eshop, is a version of a retail store where customers can shop at any hour of the day without leaving their home or office. These are sometimes called "Bricks and clicks". The online businesses channeling their goods and services via the internet only(Amazon.com) are called pure plays. An emall consists of a number of eshops; it serves as a gateway through which a visitor can access other eshops.