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CAP 353: Information system

Homework No. 1

DoA: 10-02-10

DoS: 24-02-10

Part A

Q1:->How can information technology support a companys

business processes and decision making, and give it a

competitive advantage? Give examples to illustrate your answer.

Ans:-

Business processes

Information technology provides a platform for a company to

connect the global world with Internet. Internet has a wide range

of customers, buyers, service providers, technical staff, etc. with

the help of Internet business can run on a single website like

General Electric Company

Information system and technology provide various channels to

communication like E-mail, Instant messages, SMS servers, etc to

all employees at any time all over the world. This type of software

helps to saving time and cost of the company.

Decision making

Softwares are very important for a company for instant

Information of stocks, assets valuation, sales, purchases, and

service.

Decision making is very easy to the management after IT because

its provide latest information to the management for employee,

stocks, sales, purchase, and services, etc .The management canmake a decision after check IT reports.

.CONCLUSION:

Information technology plays a vital role in the success of anenterprise. For example, the Internet and Internet-like internalnetworks, or intranets, and external inter organizationalnetworks, called extranets, can provide the informationinfrastructure a business needs for efficient operations, effective

management, and competitive advantage.

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Q2:->Identify several basic competitive strategies and explain

how they can use information technologies to confront the

competitive forces faced by a business.

Ans:- A variety of competitive strategies can be developed to helpa firm confront these competitive forces. These include:

Cost Leadership Strategy

*Become a low cost producer of products and services*Find ways to help suppliers or customers reduce their costs*Increase the costs of competitors.

Use of IT

*online build to order

*online seller to order

*online auctions

Differentiation Strategy

*Develop ways to differentiate products and services from

competitors.*Reduce the differentiation advantages of competitors.

Use of IT

*online customer design

*customer online shipment tracking

Innovation Strategy - Find new ways of doing business

*Develop new products & services*Enter new markets or marketing segments*Establish new business alliances*Find new ways of producing products/services*Find new ways of distributing products/services

Use of IT*online discount stock trading*online package tracking and flight management*online full service customer system

Growth Strategies

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*Significantly expand the companys capacity to produce goodsand services

*Expand into global markets*Diversify into new products and services*Integrate into related products and services.

Use of IT*global intranet*merchandise ordering by global satellite network POS inventorytracing.

Alliance Strategies

*Establish new business linkages and alliances with customers,suppliers, competitors, consultants and other companies(mergers, acquisitions, joint ventures, forming virtualcompanies, etc.).

Use of IT*automatic inventory replenishment by supplier*virtual manufacturing alliances

Q3:-> Identify the major types and uses of micro-computer,

midrange and mainframe computer systems ?

Ans:

Microcomputers are used as personal computers, but are

also interconnected in a variety of telecommunications

networks. Small computers, and can be classified into

Desktop, Laptop, Notebook, and PDA (Personal Digital

Assistant)/Palmtop.

Ex.: Internationl Business Machines (IBM) PC 1981 model.

Midrange computers are increasingly being used as powerfulnetwork servers and for many multi-user business data

processing and scientific applications. Also called

Minicomputers and Medium-sized computers. Also small, but

is used on business purposes.

Ex.: Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP series

computers in early 1960s.

Mainframe computers are larger and more powerful and are

used to handle information processing needs for large

organizations. Large fast and inexpensive and used inbusinesses

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Ex: UNIVAC 1 in 1951

Part B

Q4:->Outline the major technologies and uses of computer

peripherals for input , output and storage?

Ans:-input technologies:

Keyboard: most widely-used

Graphical user interface (GUI)

Icons, menus, windows, buttons, bars

Used for selection

Pointing Devices

Electronic Mouse

Trackball Stationary device like a mouse

Roller ball used to move cursor on screen.

Pointing Stick Small eraser head-like device in keypad

Moves cursor in direction of pressure placed on stick

Touchpad Small rectangular touch-sensitive surface

Moves the cursor in the direction of finger moves on

the pad

Touch Screen use computer by touching screen

Video display screen that emits a grid of infrared

beams, sound waves, or a slight electric current

Grid is broken when the screen is touched.

Pen-based Computing

Used in Tablet PCs and PDAs

Pressure-sensitive layer like touch screen under liquid

crystal display screen

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Have software that digitizes handwriting, hand printing, and

hand drawing

Speech Recognition Systems

Discrete: pause between each word

Continuous: conversationally-paced speech

System compares your speech patterns to library of sound

patterns

Training: to recognize your voice patterns

Speaker independent system: understand voice never

heard before

Used in voice-messaging computers

Optical Scanning

Read text or graphics and convert them into digital input

Desktop or flatbed scanners

Optical Character Recognition (OCR):

Read characters and codes

Used to read merchandise tags, sort mail, score tests

Optical scanning wands

Read bar codes such as the Universal Product Code

(UPC)

Output Technologies

Video displays

Cathode ray tube (CRT) like a television

Most desktop PC screens

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs)

Laptop and PDAs, some PCs

Printed Output

Inkjet printer

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Spray ink on page

Laser printer

Electrostatic process like photocopying machine

Voice response systems

Video output

Q5:-> What trends are occuring in the development and use of

the major types of computer systems?

Q6:-> Explain the following terms:

(a)DTP :- End users and organizations can use desktop publishing(DTP) software to produce their own printed materials such asnewsletters, brochures, manuals, and books with several typestyles, graphics, and colors on each page.Typically text material and graphics can be generated by wordprocessing and graphics packages and imported as text andgraphics files. Optical scanners may be used to input text andgraphics from printed material. You can also use files of clip art,which are predawn graphic illustrations provided by the softwarepackage or available from other sources. These packages can alsoconvert documents to HTML format.End users and organizations can use desktop publishing (DTP)softwares to produce their own printed material that lookprofessionally published. These are like:

Adobe page maker Microsoft publishers

QuarkXPress

InDesign

(b)Presentation Graphics:- Presentation packages are used toconvert numeric data into graphics displays such as line charts,bar graphs, pie charts, and many other types of graphics. Most ofthe top packages also help you prepare multimedia presentationsof graphics, photos, animation, and video clips, including

publishing to the World Wide Web

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They are easier to comprehend and communicate thannumerical data

Use of multiple-color and multiple-media displays can moreeasily emphasize key points, strategic differences, andimportant trends in the data.

Presentation graphics have proven to be much moreeffective than tabular presentations of numeric data forreporting and communicating in advertising media,management reports, or other business presentations.

Presentation graphics software packages give you manyeasy-to-use capabilities that encourage the use of graphicspresentations (slide shows), which contain many integratedgraphics and multimedia displays.

Examples:

Microsoft PowerPoint Freelance

Coral Presentations. Graphics and multimedia presentations can be transferred inHTML format to web sites on corporate intranets or the WorldWide Web.

(c)Software licensing :- regardless of weather a softwareapplication is purchased COST or accessed via an ASP ,thesoftware must be licensed for use. Software licensing is acontract of agreement between the software publisher and the

end user. It include Intellectual property rights

Copyright

Trade mark Trade secrets

It is believe that when a company buys a softwareapplication they have not purchase right of ownership.Rather than they have purchase the license to use thesoftware under the term and conditions of software

licensing agreement. The license often prohibits reverseengineering, modifying, disclosing or transferring thesoftware .They also do not provide the right of resellingmultiple copies of the software. When the software isobtained from the ASP the license to dispense use ofsoftware is generated to the ASP and in return the ASPagrees to pay royalty to software vendor.

(e)RAID

A RAID (redundant array of inexpensive/independent disk)

appears to the operating system to be a single logical hard disk.RAID employs the technique ofdisk striping, which involves

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partitioning each drive's storage space into units ranging from asector (512 bytes) up to several megabytes. The stripes of all thedisks are interleaved and addressed in order.

In a single-user system where large records, such as medical or

other scientific images, are stored, the stripes are typically set upto be small (perhaps 512 bytes) so that a single record spans alldisks and can be accessed quickly by reading all disks at thesame time.

In a multi-user system, better performance requires establishinga stripe wide enough to hold the typical or maximum size record.This allows overlapped disk I/O across drives.

There are at least nine types of RAID plus a non-redundant array(RAID-0):

RAID-0 RAID-1: RAID-2RAID-3 RAID-4 RAID-5 RAID-6 RAID-7 RAID-10 RAID-50 (or RAID-5+0)

RAID-53 (or RAID-5+3) RAID-S

(e) Application service providers :-application service providers

are the companies that own ,operate and maintain application

software and the computer system resources . These companies

charge their customers on a per-use or on a monthly or annual fee

basis.

Numbers of companies purchase the application software

they need to run their business from ASPS.

ASPS provide the softwares at lower cost and take short

time.

Asps have their fee structure that is cheaper then

producing application software by own.

They also manage companywide software patches and

upgrads.

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(f)Programming languages:-

A "programming language" is a language designed to describe aset of consecutive actions to be executed by a computer. Aprogramming language is therefore a practical way for us to give

instructions to a computer.

On the other hand, the term "natural language" defines a meansof communication shared by a group of individuals (for example:English or French)

The language used by the processor is called machine code. Thecode that reaches the processor consists of a series of 0s and 1sknown as (binary data).

Machine code is therefore difficult for humans to understand,which is why intermediary languages, which can be understood byhumans, have been developed. The code written in this type oflanguage is transformed into machine code so that the processorcan process it.

The assembler was the first programming language ever used.This is very similar to machine code but can be understood bydevelopers. Nonetheless, such a language is so similar to machinecode that it strictly depends on the type of processor used (eachprocessor type may have its own machine code). Thus a program

developed for one machine may not be ported to another type ofmachine. The term "portability" describes the ability to use asoftware program on different types of machines. A softwareprogram written in assembler code, may sometimes have to becompletely rewritten to work on another type of computer!

A programming language has therefore several advantages:

it is much more understandable than machine code; it allows greater portability, i.e. can be easily adapted to run

on different types of computers.

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