OMIS 351 Study Guide for Final Exam
Q. Should I read the book again? Do I need to re-watch the videos, look over
the PowerPoint slides and review my notes on them?
A. Yes and yes. If you want an “A” or a “B” in OMIS 351, it will require some work. Successful students in the past have read the chapters in the text more than once, have watched the videos more than once, have taken good notes on the PowerPoint slides, and have reviewed those notes prior to the exam.
Q. What’s the most important thing for me to
study?
A. ** If I only had two hours to study for the OMIS 351 Final Exam, I would go through the 7 quizzes from this semester. I would carefully look them over to make sure I understood the concepts being covered. It’s also a good idea to look over the Participation Quizzes.
To get Quiz feedback in Blackboard,
click on a Quiz in Blackboard after it’s due date is past, and you can see all
of your answers along with the correct answers.
The Final Exam is a 100 question multiple choice test (your quizzes have been 25 questions, so it’s just a long quiz). I guarantee at least 10 questions out of the 100 cumulative questions on the Final Exam will be lifted from these 7 quizzes (possibly with minor changes, but the same concept and content). Probably more. The final exam will be like a long quiz, except you will have seen many of the questions before, and the new questions will still come from the same topic areas we’ve covered this semester.
Q. What
are the “topic areas” we’ve covered this semester?
A. Your best bet is to just look at our
online schedule. It’s really not
bad. You have 17 chapters from your
text, and videos (usually 2) and PowerPoint files covering each Unit. Beyond that, you just need to know the skills
and concepts demonstrated in VC1-VC7.
Here are the Unit Overviews:
Unit Overviews
Use these overviews to remind you of what you need to study more… should you focus on watching the videos from the unit, reading the chapters associated with this unit (listed in the online Course Schedule), or should you look at the PowerPoint file and your notes? All of these?
Unit 1: Solving
Business Process Problems with Information Technology
This unit begins with the concept of “Slicing Bread”. The point here is: The guy who invented sliced bread didn’t invent slicing, and he didn’t invent bread. He just matched a new technology (slicing) to an age-old problem (unsliced bread).
That’s the overall point of OMIS 351: You, regardless of your major, should feel comfortable “making the match”… matching technology solutions to business problems. That’s why Dr. Downing puts his hands together in front of class… the one hand is the technology solution, the other hand is the business problem. When the hands are joined a match has been made.
To be able to make such matches, you need to understand what a business process is, and what types of Business Improvements there are (BPA and BPR). These are discussed in Unit 1 (review PowerPoint for more info).
Additionally, you need to know how you should proceed if you think you might have a good match. The answer is the Systems Development Life Cycle, SDLC, seven steps to work through to formally take a business information system from conception to implementation. Each step has specific things to consider, as shown at a high-level here:
Planning: Does system make sense? Feasibility. Scheduling.
Analysis: How can system solve business problem? LAYPERSON language. Process diagrams.
Design: How can system solve business problem? TECHIE language.
Development: Build the system.
Testing: Test the system. Done correctly, this could consume 3 times the time and
resources of programming!!
Implementation: Convert from old system to new system.
Maintenance: Fix, maintain, and improve system.
An error made, or something (like infeasibility) overlooked, in one step will multiply your costs by about a factor of 10 per step. So, missing a $1 error (“We shouldn’t do that because our employees won’t use it”… “OK, we won’t proceed with this system”… a simple fix if recognized in the Planning Stage) in Planning would waste $100 in Design (Step 3… if you had gone through diagramming exercises, hired designers, etc., and THEN realized you shouldn’t do the system).
Unit 2:
Strategic Tools, Frameworks and Ideas to Make Unit 1 Happen
This unit goes into greater detail regarding the “Does this system make sense?” question in the Planning Stage of the SDLC. In particular, this unit seeks to help you answer the question “Will this system and/or proposed match be good for my company?” ‘Good’ usually means will it improve your competitive position? So when you ask “I think I might have a match, but I need to know for sure if it will be good for my company”, you think Unit 2. And in particular, the Seven Strategic Lenses:
Unit 3: IT
Foundations I – Hardware & Software
The remaining units, beginning with Unit 3, focus on the technologies that make up the “technology solution” portion of potential matches.
Unit three discusses hardware and software. We open with the fact that computers talk in 1’s and 0’s. On or off. Binary. A single 1 or 0 is called a “bit”, and 8 bits make up a “byte” (bytes are basically single characters… think anything that’s on your computer keyboard, like 1, 2, 3, a, b, c, etc.). And the only things computers are really better than humans at are 1: Processing 1’s and 0s incredibly fast, and 2: Remembering 1’s and 0’s almost perfectly.
With that as the backdrop, we discuss various types of hardware and software. Check through chapters 5, 13 and 14 to make sure you understand the terms.
Major acronyms to understand:
CRM: Customer Relationship Management software. Deals with everything customers… who they are, what they like, everything. Deals with the right side of the supply chain.
ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning software. Originally built to integrate all functional areas of a company (Engineering, Marketing, HR, etc.). Software to integrate the middle of the supply chain… your company’s departments and operations. Increasingly used to mean “SCM”. SAP (both a company name and a software name), the world’s largest business software provider, refers to its software as “ERP” software, but functionally it’s SCM as the software deals with the entire supply chain.
SCM: Supply Chain Management software. Software that deals with the entire supply
chain, from the left side (suppliers), to the middle (your business
operations), to the right side (customers).
Unit 4: IT
Foundations II – Telecommunications and The Internet (and securing it all)
Unit 4 is important because we’ve got these wonderful devices that process 1’s and 0’s quickly and remember them almost perfectly, and we need to understand how they get connected.
We discuss the three primary reasons for the explosion of the Internet (1: Routers, 2: Ubiquity of the browser, and 3: A commonly accepted and used set of rules and protocols, that being TCP/IP), and how the Internet itself works.
We also discuss security of all of this new connectivity, breaking security into People (most important and most frightening) and Technology. Within Technology, we discuss the three areas Authentication and Authorization, Prevention and Resistance, and Detection and Response.
Unit 5: Social
Media, Peer Collaboration and Production, and The Sharing Economy
Unit 5 is important because Web 2.0 is exploding, users are generating content, many voices are being heard, and businesses better pay attention.
We discuss Social Media, Peer Collaboration and Production, and The Sharing Economy.
Unit 6:
Business Intelligence
This unit focuses on Business Intelligence, a company’s ability to get answers to any number of questions about their business.
We use Microsoft Access, a relational database, as a vehicle to achieve business intelligence. In VC4, we set up a transaction processing system to record orders, and in VC5 we use that database to answer questions about our business.
Unit 7: Google
This unit is important because obtaining and managing information, and profiting from it, represents a large part of the future (and present) of our economy. In particular, we discuss Google as the search engine leader, and also the massive profits being generated from online advertising. We dig into how all of this works.