CS 330
Study Questions

• We have discussed IS managers moving from a support to a strategic role. Why is this change occurring?
• Could the University of Waterloo employ IT as a competitive tool? If so, how?
• What methods might operations management use to allay fears about job security and to gain data centre staff support during the implementation of an unattended data centre?
• Is a TPS equivalent to an MIS? Explain.
• What is an ERP system? What are its benefits and problems?
• Describe the key components of a typical contact centre. How do each of the pieces fit together?
• What approaches might you use to convince top management to invest in organizational infrastructure, particularly when such investments cannot be identified with a specific project?
• Just as there is essentially one global telephone system and one global computer network, some believe that eventually there will be one global data management system. What are some of the issues and problems which might need to be addressed in such a complex project?
• How can an organization migrate to OSI when communications standards are changing constantly? Why should they?
• Santa Fe Railroad, a large employer, decided to "teach operational railroad employees to program [in a 4th GL], rather than teach programmers the intricacies of railroad operations". Discuss the advantages of this approach.
• With distributed systems comes the risk of counterproductive distributed development, where the potential for 'reinventing the wheel' exists at each distributed site. What could be done to prevent this activity?
• You have just been hired to develop an IS plan, including both technology and people plans. Your client, Waterloo Windmills, has 14 SUN Workstations (1994 vintage), 5 Macintosh SE personal computers (1989 vintage), one DEC VAX/750 minicomputer (1982 vintage) and one IBM mainframe (old!) running still-used COBOL transactions. As well, many users have their own (undocumented) personal computers to look after their own needs. The IS Manager reports to the Director of Finance. There are 6 IS staff, including one Systems Analyst, three Programmers, and two Operations Clerks. What do you do?
• How can you prepare for potential career changes as a result of job loss from new ways or new technologies?
• How would it be possible for an organization to use outsourcing to gain a competitive edge on its competition?
• Why might an organization want to pursue the more traditional approaches to systems development rather than having end users develop systems?
• Critical success factors (CSFs) are the few key areas where things must go right in order for the organization to flourish. How can you determine which are the CSFs in your organization, and then use that knowledge to develop a systems plan?
• What factors should be considered before the recommendation of a LAN-based architecture for your organization?
• Since any standards can hinder an organization's opportunity to be flexible and dynamic, discuss whether IS standards might hinder the organization's ability to stay competitive.
• Given that the price of hardware storage continues to decline dramatically, it should be possible to put all of an organization's documents on-line for ready accessibility. Thus, all information would be 'live' and there would be no more need for archival information. What are the merits or pitfalls of this argument?
• "PCs present a hidden cost that is at least as large as the visible IT costs." What does this mean?
• What is the difference between a vision and a strategy?
• Why do many systems departments lack credibility? What can be done to correct this?
• If the future is uncertain and ever-changing, how can and why should organizations set visions and strategies and be pro-active?
• We are teaching users to 'do it themselves'. How is this potentially going to impact our future IS jobs?
• What are some useful partnerships which could be developed by an IS executive? Why/how might these partnerships be useful?
• What are some areas of responsibility or roles for IS Departments?
• Why should IS teams be concerned about studying the marketplace when the marketing departments should be doing this anyway?
• One of the major problems for IS management is a division between application development personnel needs and the company's need for legacy support. Briefly explain the problem and what you might do to resolve it.
• A number of our in-class discussions and our speakers identified topics related to distributed network systems management. What are the key issues in this area? Why are these issues important?
• Similar questions about development of a technology infrastructure, disaster planning, operations management, outsourcing, end user computing, legacy systems.