Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
Chapter 12 Enhancing Decision Making
1) Improving the quality of high-value decision making by an executive will save an organization
far more money than improving the quality of lesser-value decisions made at a lower level.
2) Unstructured decisions are novel and nonroutine, and there is no well-understood or agreed-
on procedure for making them.
3) A structured decision can be made by following a well-defined set of procedures. No “feel”
or intuition is necessary.
4) Middle management face primarily unstructured decisions.
5) Structured decision making is most prevalent at lower organizational levels.
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
6) Big data is commonly used to analyze and predict consumer preferences.
7) The intelligence phase of decision making consists of discovering, identifying, and
understanding the problems occurring in the organization.
8) The implementation phase of Simon’s decision-making model includes choosing among
solution alternatives.
9) The first stage in Simon’s decision-making process model is the design stage.
10) The classical model of management does not address what exactly managers do when they
plan, decide things, and control the work of others.
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
11) DSS are a special category of GIS.
12) A geographic information system is a decision support system designed specifically to work
with spatial information.
13) MIS typically produce fixed, regularly scheduled reports based on data extracted and
summarized from the firm’s underlying transaction processing systems.
14) Data visualization technologies are used to help human users see patterns and relationships
in large amounts of data.
15) DSS primarily address structured problems.
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
16) What-if analysis works forward from known or assumed conditions.
17) Backward sensitivity analysis software is used for goal seeking.
18) GDSS facilitate the solution of unstructured problems by a set of decision makers working
together as a group in either the same location or different locations.
19) Web-based tools for videoconferencing and electronic meetings are the primary tools for
GDSS.
20) During a GDSS meeting, the attendees control the use of GDSS tools.
21) Most major league teams have embraced sabermetrics, the application of statistical analysis
to baseball records to evaluate the performance of individual players.
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
22) Since all the major league teams use sabermetrics in one way or another to guide their
decisions, the A’s no longer have the competitive edge they once enjoyed when they were
the only ones with this knowledge.
23) Senior managers, middle managers, operational managers, and employees have different
types of decisions but have the same information requirements.
24) The classical model of management states that the actual behaviour of managers appears to
be less systematic, more informal, less reflective, more reactive, and less well organized
than the classical model would have us believe.
25) In their decisional role managers act as the nerve centres of their organizations, receiving the
most concrete, up-to-date information and redistributing it to those who need to be aware of it.
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
26) In informational role their they act as entrepreneurs by initiating new kinds of activities;
they handle disturbances arising in the organization; they allocate resources to staff
members who need them; and they negotiate conflicts and mediate between conflicting
groups.
27) Businesses must deal with both structured and unstructured data from many different
sources, including big data.
28) The underlying foundation of business intelligence is a powerful database system that
captures all the relevant data to operate the business.
29) Forecasts, scenarios, models: These include the ability to perform linear forecasting, what-if
scenario analysis, and analyze data using standard statistical tools.
30) Predictive analytics are being incorporated into numerous business intelligence applications
for sales, marketing, finance, fraud detection, and health care
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
31) Which of the following statements best describes the business value of improved decision
making?
A) Improved decision making creates better products.
B) Improved decision making results in a large monetary value for the firm as numerous
small daily decisions affecting efficiency, production, costs, and more add up to large
annual values.
C) Improved decision making enables senior executives to more accurately foresee future
financial trends.
D) Improved decision making strengthens customer and supplier intimacy, which reduces
costs.
32) When there is no well-understood or agreed-on procedure for making a decision, it is said to
be
A) undocumented.
B) unstructured.
C) documented.
D) semistructured.
33) The type of decision that can made by following a definite procedure is called
a(n)________ decision.
A) structured
B) unstructured
C) semistructured
D) procedural
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
34) Which type of decision is deciding whether to introduce a new product line?
A) structured
B) unstructured
C) recurring
D) nonrecurring
35) Which type of decision is calculating gross pay for hourly workers?
A) structured
B) unstructured
C) semistructured
D) none of the above
36) The decision to approve a capital budget is an example of a(n) ________ decision.
A) semistructured
B) unstructured
C) structured
D) undocumented
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
37) The decisions involved in creating and producing a corporate intranet can be classified as
________ decisions.
A) procedural
B) unstructured
C) structured
D) semistructured
38) Checking store inventory is an example of a(n) ________ decision.
A) semistructured
B) unstructured
C) structured
D) none of the above
39) Simon’s description of decision making consists of which four stages?
A) planning, financing, implementation, and maintenance
B) planning, design, implementation, and maintenance
C) intelligence, design, choice, and implementation
D) intelligence, design, financing, and implementation
40) Which phase of decision making finds or recognizes a problem, need, or opportunity?
A) design
B) intelligence
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
C) choice
D) implementation
41) The five classical functions of managers are planning, organizing, deciding, controlling, and
A) coordinating.
B) leading.
C) managing.
D) negotiating.
42) In contrast to the classical model of management, behavioral models see the actual behavior
of managers as being more
A) systematic.
B) informal.
C) reflective.
D) well organized.
43) Behavioral models of managers find that, from observation, managers
A) perform often fewer than 100 activities a day.
B) operate best with standardized, predictable, printed information.
C) create a formalized, hierarchic structure of contacts to provide filtered information.
D) typically work in a fragmented manner, with only 10% of activities exceeding an hour
in duration.
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
44) Mintzberg’s classification of managerial roles outlines which three main categories?
A) interpersonal, informational, and decisional
B) symbolic, decisional, and interpersonal
C) symbolic, interpersonal, and technical
D) technical, interpersonal, and informational
45) The role of liaison falls into which of Mintzberg’s managerial classifications?
A) decisional
B) informational
C) interpersonal
D) symbolic
46) The role of entrepreneur falls into which of Mintzberg’s managerial classifications?
A) decisional
B) informational
C) interpersonal
D) symbolic
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
47) According to Mintzberg, managers in their informational role act as
A) figureheads for the organization.
B) leaders.
C) nerve centers of the organization.
D) negotiators.
48) Which of the following managerial roles is not supported by information systems?
A) liaison
B) nerve center
C) leader
D) negotiator
49) As discussed in the chapter text, the three main reasons that investments in information
technology do not always produce positive results are
A) management support, technical logistics, and user compliance.
B) organization, environment, culture.
C) information quality, information integrity, and information accuracy.
D) information quality, organizational culture, and management filters.
50) The concern that data values of an information source fall within a defined range reflects
which quality dimension of information?
A) accuracy
B) integrity
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
C) validity
D) consistency
51) The concern that the structure of data is consistent within an information source reflects
which quality dimension of information?
A) accuracy
B) integrity
C) validity
D) consistency
52) Which types of decisions are automated for high-velocity decision making?
A) highly-structured decisions
B) semi-structured financial decisions
C) unstructured financial decisions
D) all of the above
53) Which of the following describes how the Simon framework of decision-making works in
high-velocity decision environments?
A) All four steps of the process are handled by software algorithms; humans are eliminated
from the decisions because they are too slow.
B) The first three steps of the process are handled by software algorithms and the final step
is handled by experienced managers.
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
C) The first two steps of Simon’s framework are eliminated and the final two steps are
handled by software algorithms.
D) All fours steps are performed by humans with the support of high-speed, high-volume
DSS and ESS.
54) Which of the following is a disadvantage of high-velocity, automated decision-making
systems?
A) inability to handle high volumes of decisions
B) inability to handle structured decisions
C) inability to handled semi-structured decisions
D) inability to control themselves and respond to new environments
55) Which of the following systems support a manager’s role as leader of an organization?
A) decision support systems
B) telepresence systems
C) e-mail
D) MIS
56) Which of the following statements best describes the term business intelligence?
A) the infrastructure for collecting and managing business data
B) the tools and techniques used to analyze and understand business data
C) software developed exclusively for business management
D) information systems involved in business decision making
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
57) Business intelligence would be useful for analyzing and decision making in which of the
following situations?
A) deciding what marketing techniques are most successful with high-value customers
B) identifying the most efficient methods for packing and delivering finished products to
destinations
C) forecasting the effect on sales given projected future variations in weather and other
environmental variables
D) all of the above
58) Which of the following companies is not one of the top five producers of business
intelligence and analytics products?
A) Sun
B) Microsoft
C) SAP
D) IBM
59) Which of the following is not one of the six main elements in the business intelligence
environment discussed in this chapter?
A) managerial users and methods
B) organizational environment
C) user interface
D) data from the business environment
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
60) Which of the following is not one of the five main analytic functionalities of BI systems for
helping decision makers understand information and take action?
A) production reports
B) business case archives
C) parameterized reports
D) forecasts, scenarios, and models
61) ________ are visual tools for presenting performance data in a BI system.
A) Dashboards and scorecards
B) Paramaterized reports
C) Reports and the drill-down feature
D) Scenarios and models
62) Which of the following are most likely to rely primarily on the drill-down functionality of
BI for their decision-making needs?
A) IT developers
B) managers
C) operational employees
D) business analysts
Laudon/Laudon/Brabston, Management Information Systems, Seventh Canadian Edition
63) Which of the following are most likely to rely primarily on production reports for their
decision-making needs?
A) operational employees and supervisors
B) senior managers
C) analytic modelers
D) business analysts
64) Which type of information system uses data visualization technology to analyze and display
data for planning and decision making in the form of digitized maps?
A) GIS
B) DSS
C) MIS
D) TPS
65) Predictive analytics is used for all of the following except
A) anticipate customer response to price changes.
B) identifying the most profitable customers.
C) determining the best routes for product delivery.
D) establishing consumer credit scores.