Information Technology & Global Business — Summer 2022

How databases are used for integration across functional areas in an organization?

What is DBMS? What are its merits and demerits?

What are the different types of information required by the different levels of management? Explain with examples

Data is used as competitive tool against the competitors through data mining. Explain.

What are the different models of E-Commerce?

Write a note on: Customer Relationship Management.

Write a note on: Supply Chain Management

Supply chain and Information system management are two important pillars of Global business. Discuss.

You are running a project to engineer and implement a set of business processes and a software solution for customer relationship management. The project involves a large number of organizations―a major corporation and many suppliers of different sizes. During the project, you observe the effects of the differences between the companies’ corporate cultures. This leads to different expectations on how the project should be handled—as well as to frequent misunderstandings between stakeholders. Another effect is a growing degree of distrust and skepticism. What should you try first to integrate the diverse stakeholder groups?

Compare and contrast DBMS and RDBMS.

Mention trends in the Global Business environment that has made Information systems extremely important. Explain which IT technologies affected nature of organizations and how. Page 1 of

CASE STUDY: Organizations are hoarding (over retained data they no longer need. This massive accumulation of unnecessary data results from several technological and organizational factors. From a technology standpoint, the growth of high bandwidth Internet connections and the decrease in the price of hard drive storage gave made it relatively easy and inexpensive to move and store vast amounts of documents and files. From an organizational perspective, few managers are concerned about what is being stored when it seems on the surface to be so inexpensive simply to keep everything. In fact, in most organizations, no one is responsible for limiting the amount of data that is being stored. Business unit managers typically do not see a budget line item for all of the cost associated with unused or unneeded data, so they do not make it a management priority- at least, not until huge amounts of corporate data are involved in a legal matter or a government investigation. Although storing vast amounts of hoarded data seems to have little or no cost, this is not really the case. Hoarding data actually involves significant costs. These costs fall into three broad categories: infrastructure costs; hidden cost and legal compliance and regulatory costs. Infrastructure cost: when companies closely analyze their data, they typically find that 80 percent of their ostensibly “active” files and folders have not been accessed for three to five years. This situation results in unnecessary IT expenditures for electronic data storage, disaster recovery and data migration as old servers and systems are retired. Some organizations also have tens of thousands of backup taped in storage many of which are essentially useless. Nevertheless, they are generating storage fees and excess costs if they are included in the discovery process for litigation Hidden costs :other costs associated with unnecessary data hoarding are hidden – out of sight , and out of mind. One all-too common example of hidden costs is lost productivity when employees have to search through volumes of unused and unwanted materials to find the Information they need. Legal, Compliance and Regulatory costs : the largest costs of over- retained data frequently arise when a company becomes entangled in legal actions. In these scenarios, the court issues a legal hold for all data pertaining to the matter. Alegal hold requires an organization to preserve all relevant information when litigation is reasonably anticipated. A company cannot dispose of any relevant data after the hold is issued . In essence, the legal hold supersedes the company’s right to dispose of information that is not required for any specific operational or regulatory requirements. The process of examining a company’s data to find if they are pertinent to legal case is called discovery. The discovery process can be extraordinary expensive. In many cases, companies must hire attorneys to examine data files to determine whether they are pertinent to discovery requests or subpoenas. Even if companies use electronic discovery software, the costs are still substantial. For example, although an e-discovery company, Blackstone discovery, helped one company firm still incurred those costs. The key point here is that if the company has disposed of the data before the legal matter arose, these costs would have been substantially lower. As this example illustrates, companies should proactively and appropriately dispose of unnecessarily hoarded data. Page 2 of In addition, companies increasingly must adhere to state privacy legislation that requires them to notify state officials and implicated state citizens if private information such as social security numbers or credit card numbers is breached or disclosed. For example, Belmont bank in Massachusetts discovered that a backup tape had been left on a table and disposed of by the cleaning crew. . it appeared that the tape had been incinerated and therefore was not actually disclosed to any third parties. Nevertheless, the bank had to pay a $7,500 civil penalty. Companies also incur costs when legal problem arise from incidents involving the actual loss of credit card information. Security experts estimated the cost of the Target breach to exceed $1 billion. Obviously, hackers and thieves cannot take what organizations no longer possess. One excellent protection against a breach is to dispose of data as soon as they are no longer for business purposes or legal matters.

Are there any advantages to over retaining data? Support your answer.

Storage media are becoming much cheaper, with increasing capacity. Would it easier and cheaper to over-retain data than it would be to pay employee hire an outside expert to oversee this process?

Data are huge when it comes to understanding customer patterns. The more data you have, and the more analysis you are able to do, the better you will understand what makes customers tick.

What do you think about all three costs given in case and discuss its impact on business? Page 3 of