1. What do we mean by strategic information?

For a commercial bank, name five types of

strategic objectives.

Answer: Strategic information is a broad based information required to make decisions for the
formation and execution of business strategies and their target. Strategic information is not used for
the functioning of the daily operations of the business but used for analysis, discerning trends, and
monitoring performance of the business. They are information systems that are developed in
response to corporate business initiative. They are intended to give competitive advantage to the
organization.

Strategic information management (SIM) is a salient feature in the world of information technology
(IT). Data warehouse is the new computing environment to provide this strategic information. Five
types of strategic objectives for a commercial bank are:

1. Retain customers by making quick decisions.

2. Introduce two new credit card schemes for students to market in 2 years.

3. Product Bundling: A successful strategy employed by all banks is product bundling, such as
offering a free checking account for those who open a savings account.

4. Ease of access to bank account from mobile devices to increase online bank users.

5. Teller Referrals: banks consistently train tellers to look for opportunities to cross-sell bank
products and refer customers to the right person.

2. Do you agree that a typical retail store collects huge volumes of data through its operational
systems? Name three types of transaction data likely to be collected by a retail store in large volumes
during its daily operations.

Answer:

Yes, I agree that a typical retail store collects huge volumes of data through its operational systems.
These basically use the Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)systems to input the date into the various
databases. Three types of transaction data likely to be collected by a retail store in large volumes
during its daily operation are:

1. Customer information initiation and update for loyal customers.

2. Credit card approval and cad card submission for the payment.

3. Sale and delivery of gift cards.

3. Examine the opportunities that can be provided by strategic information for a medical center. Can
you list five such opportunities?

Answer: Strategic information for a medical center are:

1. Find out the competitors

2. Number of inpatients and outpatients

3. Use of advance equipment’s and instruments for medical research and treatment.
4. Implementation of EMR and increase in performance

5. Attract, retain and mentor excellent and well qualified doctors, nurses and trainees.

4. Why were all the past attempts by IT to provide strategic information failures? List three
concrete reasons and explain.

Answer:

The past attempts by IT to provide strategic information failed because IT providedstrategic

information from the operational systems. These operational systems such asorder processing,
inventory control, claims processing, billing etc. were not dealing withproviding strategic
information, but were used to run the daily core business of thecompany.Three concrete reasons
are:-1. Many ad hoc requests are received by the IT which leads to a large overhead andcongestion.
Due to the finite resources the company owns, IT is incapable to answer allthe request in a uniform
timely manner which delays processes. 2. The large number of request also keep changing over time.
Hence the users needadditional reports to understand the previous reports.3. Users have to depend
on the IT for reports as they do not have access to theinformation themselvesHence IT were not able
to provide strategic information.

5. Describe five differences between operational systems and informational systems.

Answer:

Five differences between operational systems and informational systems:-1. Operational systems
deals with current data values whereas Information systems dealswith archived, derived and
summarized data values.2. The data structure are optimized for transactions in Operational systems
whereas thedata structure are optimized for complex queries in Informational systems.3. In
Operation Systems, the frequency of accessing data is high whereas in InformationSystem, the
frequency of accessing data is medium or low sometimes.4. In Operation Systems , the access types
used for the data values are read, update anddelete whereas in Information System, the access
types used for the data values is onlyread.5. The number of people associated or dealing with
Operation systems are large where asthe number of people associated with Information systems are
relatively small number.

6. Why are operational systems not suitable for providing strategic information? Give three specific
reasons and explain.

Answer:

Answer:Operational systems are used to run the daily business of the company, they are the
breadand butter of the company. These systems are responsible to put the data in the
database.They collect various types of data such as customer name, sales amount, date,
productnumber, etc., to capture business transactions. This data is then converted to
meaningfulinformation to produce reports for decision making. Strategic information is
importantinformation used for decision making later used for analysis and monitoring performance.
7.Name six characteristics of the computing environment needed to provide strategic information.

Answer:

Six characteristics of the computing environment needed to provide strategic information are
given below:
1. It provides an ideal environment for analysis of data and decision support.
2. Fluid, flexible and interactive environment for the users.
3. It is a 100 percent user driven environment.
4. It provides read intensive data usage.
5. It follows a very responsive and useful interactive pattern.
6. It provides the ability to identify answers to complex, unpredictable questions

8. What types of processing take place in a data warehouse? Describe.

There are four major processes that contribute to a data warehouse −

 Extract and load the data.

 Cleaning and transforming the data.
 Backup and archive the data.
 Managing queries and directing them to the appropriate data sources.