Chapter 2

Q2-1 What are the Two Key Characteristics of Collaboration?

The difference between cooperation and collaboration is cooperation handles group of people working together on the same task and accomplishing the same objective. Collaboration are groups of people working to achieve a common goal with feedback and iteration. Cooperation lacks those traits so it’s crucial for critical feedback. It’s important to figure out what collaboration characteristics you lack and are great at. The two key characteristics of collaboration is iteration and feedback.

Q2-2 What Are Three Criteria for Successful Collaboration?

The three primary criteria for considering a team’s success is by the outcome, growth in team capability and a meaningful and satisfying experience. Successful outcome is achieving the objectives, make decisions, solve a problem or create a work product. Next is improving the team’s capability overtime by improving overtime on task and asking did we get better? Finally, having a meaningful and satisfying experience by being recognition or having a blast.

Q2-3 What Are the Four Primary Purposes of Collaboration?

The four primary purposes of collaboration are becoming informed, making decisions, solving problems and managing projects. In order to become informed, its required to share data and communicate through interactions. Also to document the data being communicated.

Now decision making has three levels: operational, managerial, and strategic decisions. Operational decisions are about day to day interactions or activities. Managerial decisions decide on the allocation and utilization of resources and strategic decisions support a broad scope, organizational issues. Managerial decisions are sometimes collaborative and strategic decisions mainly are.  The decision process of information systems is classified as structure or unstructured. A structure decision process understands and accepts the method for making the decision. For example, a formula computing the quantity of a reorder item in inventory. Unstructured decision process includes one for which is no agreed on decision making method. For example, predicting the future of the economy or stock market.

Next primary purpose of collaboration is to solve problems; a problem is known as a perceived difference between what is against what ought to be. So it’s crucial to define the problem, identify alternative solutions, specify evaluation criteria, evaluate alternatives, select an alternative and implement solution. Finally, is to manage projects by doing the four phases, the major task of each kind of data a team needs to share. First is the starting phase, by stating the purpose, the roles and ground rules of the project. Second is the planning phase, which is to define activities of who will do what and by when; also the resources that are available. The doing phase are project task that are being accomplished. The finalize phase is to determine completion and write down all feedback or close down project.  

Chapter 1 The Importance of MIS

Chapter 1

Q1-1 Why Is Introduction to MIS the Most Important Class in the Business School

Computers used to be the thing people didn’t like or thought to be abnormal. Now technology is changing the business world fundamentally in its own way.

The Digital Revolution

The information age is a period where primary force in economy is through the production, distribution and control of information. Now the digital revolution is what we are experiencing because we are converting from mechanical devices to actual digital devices. Switching over to digital devices changed everything, from companies to individuals and some weren’t ready for that change. Bells law says these digital devices will evolve every 10 years and create new environments, platforms, programming and networks. Even though digital technology is growing and changing businesses so it’s important to understand what these devices will do. In order to understand the evolving capabilities of digital devices, is knowing every years something is always changing and affecting everything around it.

Fundamental Forces Changing Technology

Moore’s Law: “The number of transistors per square inch on an integrated chip doubles every 18 months” So Bell’s law was misunderstood and Moore’s law concluded that isn’t the computer evolving, its actually the processing power.

Metcalfe’s Law: says as digital devices grow and start to connect together, the network value in those devices will increase. The dramatic rise of the inter web is a great example.  

Nielsen’s Law: States network connections that are used by high speed users will increase by 50 percent a year.

Kryder’s Law: Claims the storage density on digital disks and memory will drastically increase.

This Is the Most Important Class in the School of Business:

If you ever want to become a future business professional, it’s important to know how to be able to access, evaluate and apply IT.

Q1-2 How Will MIS Affect Me?

First thing to know is that technology is changing at an accelerating rate. Since there is technological constantly changing it can affect your job security. So it’s important to develop non-routine cognitive skills and the ability to adapt. There’re 4 non-cognitive routine skills, abstract, systems, collaboration and ability to experiment. Abstract reasoning is constructing a model or representation, like a prototype or something. Systems thinking is when system components show how the components inputs and outputs relate to each other. Collaboration is developing ideas or plans with others and giving or receiving any feedback.  The ability to experiment creates or test using new alternatives and consistent with available resources.

Q1-3 What Is MIS?

Management information systems are used to manage information systems which help organizations help to achieve their strategies. Now information systems (IS) are hardware, software, data, procedures and people that produce information. Compare to information technology where it’s products, methods, inventions, and standards used for the purpose of producing technology. MIS has three key elements: management and use, information systems and strategies. The goals is to manage IS in order to achieve business strategies.

Computer of an Information System:

A system is group of components that interact to achieve some purpose and IS uses a group of components to interact in order to produce information. There are five components: computer hardware, software, data, procedures and people. For example, when you are writing a research for class, you utilize all 5 of these components. These five components are common among all systems and are to mean, develop and maintain.

Q1-4 How Can You Use the Five Component Model

The outermost components hardware, and people can take action and the software and procedure components are both set of instructions. Data is what bridges the gap between human side to computer side. The people or you are the important in the model because we produce the information and not manipulate it. Also another thing is that all component must work together and by using all five components you locate problems and find better solutions. However, going from the computer side of hardware and software to the human side of procedures and people; increases the degree of difficulty of change.

Q1-5 What Is Information?

The common definition is information comes from knowledge derived from data. However, it can also mean when information is presented in a meaningful context. Also information means processing data or data being processed by different means of operations. Lastly, information can be defined as a difference that makes a difference. Graphs are not information because it has data people perceive and use to conceive information.

Q1-6 What Are Necessary Data Characteristics?

The first data characteristic is accuracy, information that needs to be correct and completed data which is process correctly. Secondly, its required that data is timely so it’s available when needed and to keep up the information. Next the data must be relevant both to the context and to the subject. Fourth, it’s necessary to be just sufficient for its purpose but not overloading. Finally, data isn’t free so there cost for developing an IS and operating and maintaining that system.

Q7: 2026

By 2026 most the computer won’t look ordinary computers and smartphones will be changing. In addition, technology will grow so much people may be able to work at home, utilize new technology and access to vas amounts of data. 

Chapter 5

The chapter discusses the topics of what is database processing, why data processing is use and how data processing is use. The chapter starts by describing what’s the purpose of a database and its system components. Part of the sections in the chapters, shows how data models are used to design database structure. These database systems are used to solve problems and who knows where database technology will be in the future.

Q5-1 What Is the Purpose of a Database

Database are used to keep track of things, for example many professionals use spreadsheets to keep track of their inventory. Spreadsheets are used to keep track of a single theme, such as only the inventory. However, a database can be used to keep track of multiple tasks or items. Database can contain multiple themes, such as inventory, emails and tasks. These are both consider a general rule when it comes to the purpose of a database.

Q2: What Is a Database?

Self-describing collection of integrated records is called a database. A database consists of bytes, these characters of data. Bytes in a database are grouped into columns which can be also called fields. Records are grouped into rows and correlate with the fields. So the collection of data in these columns and rows, are grouped together into a table. Files are tables, that display’s the collection of data in both the fields and records. So the structure of the database is a collection of tables or files that correlate with the records and special data called metadata. These databases are sometimes stored on disks. Now the “among the relationship on rows” is where the rows of different tables correlate together. A unique row in one of these tables crosses over to a primary key, which is column or group of columns. These columns can be foreign keys that resides in a foreign table. Relational databases carry data in the form of tables and uses the relationship of foreign keys. Metadata in a database makes the database much more useful. Since the database can use the metadata to remember and record. Now the format of metadata relies on the software which processes the database.

Q5-3 What Is a Database Management System (DBMS)?

A database management systems are the programs creating, processing and administering a database. DMBS are not developed by any organizations and instead are licensed out to organizations from different vendors. A database management system is different from a database and is a software program.

Creating the Database and Its Structures

DBMS is use by database developers to create these tables, relationships and most structures in the database. The developer creates a new table; the metadata fills the table in the form.

Processing the Database

Processing the database is the 2^nd function to the database management system, which is complicated. However, the DBMS are the fundamentals and is using four different processing operations. These operations are to read, insert, modify or delete data. Database Management System rely on these operations, especially when the users either enter new or change the data.

Administering the Database

Now administering the database is the third function to the database management system. The database administration are assistant tools and include various activities to its database. For example, think of security when a user needs to log onto its account. These functions can include recovering past database data. Additionally, improving the structure, performance of database’s and removes unnecessary data.

Q5-4 How Do Database Applications Make Databases More Useful?

 Data in database tables are only useful when the information is conceptual and place in the correct forms. Specifically, there’re four elements of a database application program: forms, reports, queries, application programs. Traditionally databases are shared among many users and serve their purpose. The browser applications in a database are also shared among its users. These applications on the internet are thin-client applications, which aren’t pre-installed on those computers. So the applications forms, reports and queries run through javascipt and html codes. Besides traditional queries, graphical queries are criteria’s created when a user clicks on graphic displays.  Now, multi-user processing commonly does have problems that are difficult to understand. So make sure to be cautious and aware of these multi data conflicts.

Q5-5 How Are Data Models Used for Database Development?

There’re two topics being consider when it comes to database development, both data modeling and database design. The design of the model relies on the user involvement and business environment. Database developers must know what the user wants and what to include. Data models are constructed as database data in a logical representation. It represents the data and what it’s supposed to store in the database.

Entities

An entity is when user wants to track something and can represented in many variations. Attributes are part of entities because they describe the characteristics of the entity. An identifier is what recognizes an attribute’s value which is associated with only one entity.

Relationships

Each entity has a relationship to one another, for example: An “order” is related to a “customer” entity and a “salesperson” entity. So database designers use diagrams to show these type of relationships. Entity-relationship (E-R) diagrams where one type of all the entities are showed in a single rectangle. Lines are used to show the relationship between two separate entities, vertical bars to represent one type of entity and crow’s feet. Crow’s feet are shorthand for multiple lines between different entities and are in one-to-many relationships. Since these type of relationships has one entity correlating with multiple entities however going the other way around doesn’t work.  Many-to many relationships represent different entities that have relations between each other and correlate with other entities too. Crow’s-foot diagram shows the relationships of both maximum and minimum cardinalities.  Maximum cardinality is the maximum number of entities in a relationship. Vertical bar on a line means at least one entity required. Minimum cardinality is the minimum number of entities in a relationship. Small oval means entity is optional so the relationship does not need to have an entity of that type.

Q5-6 How Is a Data Model Transformed into a Database Design?

By converting a data model into tables, relationships and data constraints is what transforms into a database designed. There’re two kinds of database design concept, normalization and the representation of two kinds of relationships. Normalization is processing a poor constructed data table into two or more efficient tables. Since data integrity problems arise when a table is poorly managed and constructed; causing incorrect results.  Normalizing the table is using the various normal forms to take out duplicated data and other problems that could arise. So normalization is well constructed table and has only one type of theme. Representing relationships are turning a data model into a relational database design. Step 1 is to create a table for each entity then the identifier of the entity becomes normalize. Resulting in each table having a single theme and finally represent the relationship between the tables. The users’ role in the development of databases must thorough look through the data tables and devote the time to final judging.

Q5-8 2026?

So in the year 2026, it’s said the amount of databases will drastically increase. It will also have cheaper and unlimited storage in these databases which will have fast processing speeds. Then ACID transactions will come into play and are critical to original commercial applications. Either all of a transaction is processed or none of it is. Transactions are processed in the same manner whether processed alone or in the presence of millions of other transactions. Once a transaction is stored it never goes away, even in the presence of failure. There’ll be new categories of DMBS, such as NotRelational DBMS which supports high transaction rates and processes simple data structures. NewSQL DBMS processes higher level transactions and provide ACID support. Last, In-memory DBMS uses high volume ACID transactions which have complex relational query processing.