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CRITICAL BUSINESS THINKING
Instructor Note: There are few right or wrong answers in the business world.
There are really only ecient and inecient, and eective and ineective
business decisions. If there were always right answers businesses would never
fail. These questions were created to challenge your students to apply the
materials they have learned to real business situations. For this reason, the
authors cannot provide you with one version of a correct answer. When grading
your students’ answers, be sure to focus on their justi#cation or support for their
speci#c answers. A good way to grade these questions is to compare your
student’s answers against each other.
1. MODELING A BUSINESS PROCESS
Project Purpose: To revamp a process
Potential Solution: Student answers to this question will vary depending on
the process they have chosen to #x. Review the chapter for an example of an
improved burger ordering process. Students can choose any process from
2. REVAMPING ACCOUNTS
Project Purpose: To revamp an accounting department using BPM.
Potential Solution: A key advantage of technology is its ability to improve
business processes. Working faster and smarter has become a necessity for
companies. Initial emphasis was given to areas such as production, accounting,
procurement, and logistics. The next big areas to discover technology’s value
in business process were sales and marketing automation, customer
relationship management, and supplier relationship management. Some of
these processes involve several departments of the company and some are the
result of real-time interaction of the company with its suppliers, customers, and
other business partners. The latest area to discover the power of technology in
automating and reengineering business process is business process
management. Business process management (BPM) integrates all of an
organization’s business process to make individual processes more ecient.
BPM can be used to solve a single glitch or to create one unifying system to
consolidate a myriad of processes.
3. What Type of System Would You Use?
Project Purpose: To dierentiate between the dierent types of systems
Potential Solution:
You need to analyze daily sales transactions for each region. (TPS)
You need to analyze stang requirements for each plant. (MIS)
You need to determine which customers are at risk of defaulting on their
bills. (Transaction Processing System)
4. Unstructured Communications
Project Purpose: To identify challenges associated with email as a
communication tool
Potential Solution: Using email as a primary communication tool has several
disadvantages such as issues tracking who received the email, who read the
email, and who forwarded the email. If an employee’s email is over its limit
they will be unable to receive the email. A spam #lter could accidently delete
5. IGoogle Digital Dashboard
Project Purpose: To practice using a digital dashboard.
Potential Solution: iGoogle is a fantastic website and your students will gain
a tremendous amount of value from con#guring their own personal digital
6. Bot Shopping
Project Purpose: To use a shopping bot.
Potential Solution: Student answers to this question will vary depending on
the product they were considering purchasing. You can assign all of your
Business Driven Information Systems - Instructor’s Manual Chapter 2 Page 2 of 9
7. Networking Neural
Project Purpose: To understand neural networks.
Potential Solution: A neural network, also called an arti#cial neural network,
is a category of AI that attempts to emulate the way the human brain works.
Neural networks analyze large quantities of information to establish patterns
and characteristics in situations where the logic or rules are unknown. Neural
networks’ many features include:
- Learning and adjusting to new circumstances on their own.
- Lending themselves to massive parallel processing.
- Functioning without complete or well-structured information.
8. Driving Your Business
Project Purpose: To understand how MIS supports a business
Potential Solution: Student answer will vary depending on the type of
business they choose to study. If you want to generate consistent
answers then provide your students with a business type such as:
- Extreme sports store
- Grocery store
- Clothing store
APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE BUSINESS PROJECTS
Instructor Note: There are few right or wrong answers in the business world.
There are really only ecient and inecient, and eective and ineective
business decisions. If there were always right answers businesses would never
fail. These questions were created to challenge your students to apply the
AYK I: Making Business Decisions
Business Driven Information Systems - Instructor’s Manual Chapter 2 Page 3 of 9
Porter’s strategies outlined in Chapter 1 suggest entering markets with a
competitive advantage in either overall cost leadership, dierentiation, or focus.
To achieve these results, managers must be able to make decisions and forecast
future business needs and requirements. The most important and most
challenging question confronting managers today is how to lay the foundation for
tomorrow’s success while competing to win in today’s business environment. A
AYK II: DSS and EIS
Dr. Rosen can use DSS systems to model all of the organizational information to
support or reject his purchase decision. Dr. Rosen can use sensitivity analysis to
study of the impact that changes in buying the new business will have on his
AYK III: Finding Information on Decision Support Systems
Student answers to this question will vary depending on which systems they
research on the Internet. In general, their presentation should focus on how a
DSS can help grow a small to medium sized business. Be sure your students
AYK IV: Discovering Reengineering Opportunities
This assignment will change depending on how each school performs tuition
payments and registering for classes. Just ensure each student presents As Is and
To Be process diagrams clearly demonstrating how the new process will increase
eciency and eectiveness in the process. Broken, redundant, and antiquated
AYK V: Dashboard Design
The importance of this activity is to get your students thinking about each
category and its importance to the company. Each category should be displayed
with metrics to measure the indicator such as Green, Yellow, and Red status
indicators or percentages or levels. This is the critical part of the activity -
displaying how the dashboard is going to measure each indicator. For example:
Customers: satisfaction levels (red, green, yellow), number of customers,
number of lost customers, number of new customers, order level per
customers
Marketing: campaign success, coupon success, new product launch success
Sales: total sales, sales per quarter, sales comparatives, competitor sales
comparatives, sales quota levels, sales representatives, sales per customer,
sales per region
Customer service: satisfaction, average time to resolve issues, metrics on call
center, metrics on customer service representatives
Billing: average collection period, outstanding bills, time to generate bills,
customers in arrears
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AYK VI: DARPA Grand Challenge
Ask your student to review the DARPA website to become familiar with the
competition.
How is the DoD using AI to improve its operations and save lives?
The DARPA Grand Challenge was designed to leverage American ingenuity
to develop autonomous vehicle technologies that can be used by the
Why would the DoD use an event, such as the DARPA Grand
Challenge, to further technological innovation?
By oering a generous prize, along with notoriety the DOD is able to get
many of the greatest minds in the country working on creating autonomous
Describe how autonomous vehicles could be used by organizations
around the world to improve business e=ciency and e>ectiveness.
There are numerous ways that autonomous vehicles could be used around
The Ansari X is another technological innovation competition
focusing on spacecraft. To win the $10 million Ansari X Prize, a
private spacecraft had to be the Brst to carry the weight equivalent
of three people to an altitude of 62.14 miles twice within two
weeks. SpaceShipOne, a privately built spacecraft, won the $10
million Ansari X Prize on October 4, 2004. Describe the potential
business impacts of the Ansari X competition.
Space travel is the next exciting frontier. Business impacts could range from
vacation trips to the moon to picking up space materials for the production
DARPA Videos
The DARPA challenge is an excellent topic when discussing AI. Here is the
latest article on this year’s DARPA challenge.
Robots And Their Masters Ready For DARPA 'War Zone' Race
http://www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=THMMTXP
AYK VII: Driving Decisions
Great way to kick o a discussion on how decisions impact business. People have
accidents. That’s not what this post is about. People also do stupid, reckless
AYK VIII: IYogi Help Desk Support
Help Desks are critical for any business and measuring the success of a help desk
is far more dicult than it sounds. For example, if you track how long it takes to
close an issues the sta might focus on getting through the issues quickly and not
on the quality of the work completed. Here are a few examples of CSFs and KPIs:
Time to resolution
Number of issues resolved
Type of computer causing majority of issues
The average time a customer waits for their call to be answered.
AYK IX: Dashboard for Tracking Junk
Student’s answers can include the following:
Location
Amount collected
Number of stops
Employee on truck
AYK X: Building Robots
Your students robots will vary – ask them to include data tracking devices or wearables.
Have fun with this exercise!!
Here are a few videos to give your students some ideas
Robot Violinist - Video
Robot Emotions
The emotional robotScience correspondent Alok Jha visits the University of
Hertfordshire to meet an android developed to show emotions
Robot Babies
The State Department readies new Internet freedom policies, the FAA may lift the
ban on cell phones during air travel, and Japanese researchers are working on
AYK XI: Educational Processes
Student analysis of this project will depend on how your school operates. Just be
sure that the To-Be process includes updates to the current As-Is process. Here is
Business Driven Information Systems - Instructor’s Manual Chapter 2 Page 9 of 9
