MGMT 38200-005/006: Management Information Systems
Exam 1 Study Guide
Spring 2025
1. Technology and Society
• What is Future Shock?
– Why does it happen?
– What characterizes it?
∗ Acceleration of Change
∗ Information Overload
∗ Overwhelming Choice
∗ Disruption of Social Norms
∗ Transience and Turnover
– How does it relate to culture shock?
• When did Future Shock start happening? Can you give an example?
• Is it still happening? Why or why not?
• How has the stock of technical knowledge changed over time?
• With respect to technical knowledge, is there anything unique about the time period in which
we now live?
• What characterized each of the Three Waves?
– Agrarian Revolution
– Industrial Revolution
– Information Revolution
• Using transportation technology as a vehicle (pun intended), give some ways that technology
can impact society.
• How has Information Technology changed society?
– How we live, work, or play?
– How we communicate or interact?
– How we conduct business?
– How we define important social constructs (e.g. property, community)?
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• Why are we, as business students, studying the impact technology has on society?
• Representative Questions
1. The standardization and distribution of products, services, or experiences on a large scale
to reach a broad audience is referred to as massification.
2. TRUE or FALSE: Wealth accumulated during the industrial revolution was best characterized as diminished, as opposed to exhaustible.
3. How did the automobile change the social structure of America?
– (sample full-credit answer, not intended to be comprehensive) The popularity and
affordability of the automobile greatly enhanced the geographic mobility of American
citizens, resulting in mass migration from rural areas into suburbs. By allowing the
separation of work and home life in a way that had not previously been possible,
the automobile expanded the notion of a community and redefined the concept of a
population center to be a metropolitan area as opposed to a city.
2. Strategy
• Strategy Formulation
– Porter’s Five Forces (“where to play”)
∗ New Entrants
∗ Substitutes
∗ Buyers
∗ Suppliers
∗ Rivals
– Porter’s Generic Strategies (“how to win”)
∗ Cost Leadership
∗ Cost Focus
∗ Benefit Leadership
∗ Benefit Focus
– What is a competitive advantage?
∗ What are some examples?
∗ What makes a competitive advantage sustainable?
· Valuable
· Rare
· Hard to imitate
· Nonsubstutable
– What is operational effectiveness?
∗ Why isn’t technology on its own typically a sustainable competitive advantage?
∗ How is strategic positioning different?
• Strategy Implementation
– Value Chain Analysis
∗ Explain upstream vs. downstream
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∗ Define primary vs. support activities
∗ How do you choose which changes to undertake?
· Economic analysis (i.e. bang for your buck)
· Strategic fit
– What is Supply Chain Management (SCM)?
– What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
– What is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)?
– How has technology enabled collaboration?
• Zara, Shein, and Temu
– What killed Gap, and what makes Zara different?
– In what ways is the Zara model unconventional and/or counterintuitive?
– How does Zara capture/use data?
– What role does RFID technology play in Zara’s success?
– Contrast the tech at Zara’s and Prada’s flagship stores.
– If you were running another fashion retailer, what parts of Zara’s model would be hard
vs. easy to copy, and why?
– How would you define Zara’s strategy?
– Which of Zara’s competitive advantages would you consider sustainable, and why?
– How has Shein managed to compete with Zara?
∗ How are the companies’ approaches similar?
∗ What has Shein done better?
– Where does Temu fit in?
• Representative Questions
1. Which of the following is NOT one of Porter’s Five Forces?
(a) Bargaining power of buyers
(b) Threat of substitutes
(c) Threat of new entry
(d) Government Regulation
(e) Rivalry among existing competitors
2. Benefit leadership as a strategy is also known by what name? Differentiation
3. Explain just-in-time delivery and describe its benefits in the context of retail. Hint: Be
sure to address two distinct benefits with respect to inventory levels.
– Just-in-time delivery is a supply chain management strategy that aims to deliver
products precisely when they are needed. This approach avoids the costs of having
too much inventory, including both storage cost and the risk of obsolescence. It also
avoids the cost of having too little inventory, namely, stock-outs that result in lost
sales.
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3. Information Systems
• What is a system? Give an example from our readings and/or discussions.
• What is Management Information Systems?
• What are the three organizational resources in MIS?
– Information
– People (most important!)
– IT
• Information
– Levels of usefulness/value
∗ data
∗ information
∗ business intelligence
∗ business knowledge
– Dimensions of quality
∗ form
∗ accessibility
∗ relevance
∗ validity
• Information Technology
– Hardware
∗ I/O devices (mouse, keyboard, etc.)
∗ Storage (hard drive, RAM, etc.)
∗ Computing (CPU, GPU)
∗ Telecommunications (routers, fiberoptic cables, etc.)
∗ Everything else (e.g. cords and cables, motherboards, fans, wires, etc.)
– Software
∗ System Software (BIOS, embedded systems, operating systems, utilities)
∗ Application Software (desktop, enterprise, apps)
• Moore’s Law
– technical definition (transistors/chip)
∗ What is a computer chip?
∗ Which hardware components are made from semiconductors?
– managerial definition (i.e. practical implication) = faster/cheaper every ˜2 years
∗ applies beyond semiconductors!
∗ sometimes involves innovations in how computing occurs (e.g. Apple’s M1 chip
architecture)
∗ implications (e.g. IoT, broad access, global development)
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• What is IT infrastructure?
• Network Infrastructures
– Decentralized
– Centralized
– Distributed
∗ Client/Server
∗ Multitiered
• Enablers of machine-to-machine interaction over a network:
– What are APIs and web services? How do they work?
– What are EDI, XML, and JSON?
• Cloud computing
– Definition
– Advantages
∗ Lower capital requirements
∗ Real-time scalability
∗ Reduced maintenance costs
∗ Broad and immediate access to software/services
– Impact
• How is the Internet like a wire?
– Are you connected directly to the Internet?
– What’s an ISP?
• What is the World Wide Web? How does it work?
– What’s the purpose of protocols like HTTP and HTTPS? What’s the difference?
– Locating Information
∗ URL: “What are you looking for?”
∗ IP address: “Where is it?”
∗ DNS: “How do we get there?”
– Transmitting Information
∗ How does TCP/IP work?
∗ How is a router involved?
∗ What is UDP, and why should we care?
• What is bandwidth?
– What are the Internet Backbone and the Last Mile? How are they different?
– What is the principle of Net Neutrality?
∗ What are some of the arguments in favor of it?
∗ What are some of the arguments against it?
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• Representative Questions
1. The high-speed data lines provided by many firms all across the world that interconnect
and collectively form the core of the Internet are referred to as its backbone.
2. TRUE or FALSE: Information technology includes all the hardware associated with processing information.
3. What is Net Neutrality? What is one argument in favor of it?
– (sample full-credit answer, not intended to be comprehensive) Net neutrality is the
principle that all Internet traffic should be treated equally, meaning ISPs cannot
block, slow down, or charge differently based on the type of content, site, application,
etc. One argument in favor of it is that it prevents ISPs (e.g. Comcast) from favoring
their own or affiliated content/services (e.g. NBCUniversal, owned by Comcast) or
large companies that can afford to pay for faster access. This helps keep the Internet
open, competitive, and supportive of innovation by startups.
4. Systems Development
• What is the Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC)? Why learn it?
• What characterizes each of the phases of the SDLC?
– Planning
– Analysis
– Design
– Development
– Testing
– Implementation
– Maintenance
• How are component-based methods (e.g. Rapid Application Development) different from the
SDLC?
• What is the Agile philosophy? How does Scrum apply it?
• What is prototyping? Why is it useful, and in what context?
• What are the advantages vs. disadvantages of prototyping?
• Given a mandate for developing a system, under what circumstances might you choose SDLC
vs. prototyping?
• What is self-sourcing? When might it be a good idea?
• What is outsourcing? When might it make sense?
• What are SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS?
– How are they alike and different from traditional outsourcing?
– What are their primary benefits and risks?
• How was the Three-Mile Island failure different from the sinking of the Vasa?
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– Three-Mile Island represented the failure of a complex system. As such, it was predictably
unpredictable.
– The Vasa represented the failed output of a poorly designed system. A better system
could have prevented it.
• 33% of development projects fail to be successfully deployed. How/why?
– Project definition failures (i.e. charting the wrong course)
∗ Misdiagnosing the problem, incorrectly gathering business requirements, and more
∗ Which phases are most relevant here?
– Project management failures (i.e. poor steering)
∗ Poor communication, inadequate access to resources, and more
∗ What are scope creep and feature creep?
∗ Why might teams skip or minimize steps? What could happen?
– Project execution failures (i.e. sailing incorrectly)
∗ Inappropriate technical choices
∗ Inadequate testing
∗ How do we cope with a rapidly changing technological environment?
– Which of the above can you find evidence for in the Vasa case? What about the Healthcare.gov or Fresh Direct cases?
– What are some of the key lessons from the Vasa?
∗ Methodology matters
∗ Projects rarely fail for just one reason
∗ Communication is critical
• Representative Questions
1. Which of the following is NOT an advantage of prototyping?
(a) Gives end users a feel for the final system
(b) Helps determine technical feasibility
(c) Encourages active end user participation
(d) Leads people to believe the final system will follow shortly.
(e) Helps sell the idea of a proposed system
2. In which phase of the SDLC would you expect to identify the business requirements of
the system? Analysis
3. Explain the difference between component-based development and the traditional SDLC.
– The SDLC is a complete, linear progression that starts from scratch and ends with a
fully functioning system. Any parts developed along the way are brand new, and any
system developed afterwards would be expected to start all over from scratch once
more. By contrast, component-based development recognizes that some parts of a
system are likely to be useful in other systems as well, so effort is made to develop
re-usable components - small, self-contained blocks of code that can be deployed
across other applications within the organization. For example, the user interface
may function very well as part of multiple systems. While the SDLC would recreate a new interface for each new application, the CBD approach would write the
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interface’s code as a component, which could then be re-purposed elsewhere in the
organization. More importantly, before writing anything new, developers in the CBD
approach would start by reviewing the organization’s software library to see what if any - preexisting components could be readily used in the current application.
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