Questions and Answers of Decision Systems for Business Intelligence

Compare and contrast symbolic processing and numerical processing. Why is the former referred to as "intelligence"?
What factors would lead you to recommend selecting a project that is appropriate for expert systems development?
There are hundreds of DBMS packages on the market. Explain why there are no MBMS packages on the market.
Identify how your features of a user interface should be affected by the decision-making literature covered in Chapter 2.
Prototype a dashboard for some decision. How do you make your decisions about how to represent your data? How do you make your decisions about color?
Design a dashboard that might be useful to you in monitoring your academic progress. Discuss how you decide to balance the long-term performance with the semester performance measures.
What key performance indicators (KPIs) might the dean of your university implement to monitor health of his or her unit?
Examine the annual report of an organization. Discuss how data would need to flow from transaction processing systems within the organization to a dashboard to help monitor the factors of importance
Examine the dashboard of IT expenditures in the federal government discussed in this chapter. What recommendations for changes in the budget can you find by examining these data?
What is the difference between a KPI and a balanced scorecard? How are they related?
What is the purpose of a dashboard?
Why must a dashboard allow drill-down capabilities?
Find example dashboards on the Web. Which of the 13 mistakes of design are apparent? How might you fix them?
What is the difference between group decision support systems and group ware? What features would one expect in GDSS but not in groupware?
What are the advantages of having groups consider issues? What attributes of GDSS exploit those advantages?
What are the disadvantages of having groups consider issues? What attributes of GDSS help to minimize those disadvantages?
How would reengineering efforts be improved by using GDSS?
Discuss two decisions in which you have been involved that might have been improved with the use of GDSS.
What is the difference between DSS with an active mail component and a group DSS?
Critique the concept of using a standardized methodology to design dashboards and executive information systems.
Describe the factors that would influence the design of a transnational executive information system. Include cultural factors that are either unique to a country and/or strongly influence the
Discuss how the design components of a EIS are different from those of a DSS.
What is a Turing test and how might it impact DSS design?
How does one evaluate the overall effectiveness of a DSS?
What is technical appropriateness and how does it impact DSS design?
The DSS of the future will continue to be deployed over intranets or the Internet. As such, their user interfaces will be evaluated both as decision tools and as Web pages. Discuss the guidelines you
How would you evaluate a DSS to determine if it is effective? Discuss the procedures for testing and the mechanisms for evaluation.
Compare and contrast technical appropriateness and organizational appropriateness in the DSS evaluation process.
What role does senior management play in the design of a DSS?
What activities would a designer engage in to develop a satisfactory support base?
Create an interview schedule for users of a hypothetical DSS design project.
Compare and contrast the use of measures of utilization with measures of user satisfaction in measuring DSS effectiveness.
What incentives can one use to encourage users to try the technology?
How can we establish whether a given DSS is effective?
Why and how should users be involved in the design process?
Compare and contrast the use of interviewing and prototyping during the design process in terms of the impact on the implementation process.
The chapter identifies five principles to successful implementation. Discuss how inattention to each of them could discourage implementation efforts.
Discuss how the main features of an object-oriented DSS appliance would differ from the main features of a traditional DSS appliance.
How is the user interface design influenced by the use of object-oriented tools?
Discuss how the use of object-oriented technologies could make applications for transnational corporations easier.
Would the procedures for selecting object-oriented DSS appliances differ from selecting conventional DSS appliances?
Discuss how using an object-oriented tool can facilitate the use of evolutionary development methodologies in the design of DSS.
Discuss how using an objected-oriented DSS appliance would make designing a system easier.
Discuss how the main features of an object-oriented DSS appliance would differ from the main features of a traditional DSS appliance.
One goal of object-oriented design is to facilitate reusability of code. Discuss how using an object-oriented tool would help to adapt the automobile-purchasing system discussed in the book to a
How does a designer know whether to store information about an object as an attribute or to create subclasses?
Suppose you were developing a DSS to facilitate advising. Identify object classes and their attributes. Identify at last two instances of each of the object classes.
What attributes might be associated with an object class "flower"? How would you know if you had appropriate attributes or sufficient attributes?
Find information about one or more DSS appliances. How might it make design of a DSS easier? What problems might it pose?
What characteristics of an organization does a DSS designer need to understand before beginning a project?
Draw an influence diagram that conveys how decisions are made regarding what classes are offered each semester on your campus.
Why is it important to design error and warning messages carefully? What impact might it have on DSS use if they are not designed carefully?
Consider a system that you use. Does it display Norman's design rules?
Discuss the critical success factors associated with DSS design. How would designers evaluate these factors prior to beginning a project?
Suppose you were attempting to justify the development of a DSS for a corporation. Discuss how you would justify the expenditures.
Critique the concept of using a standardized methodology to design DSS.
One of the steps in generally recognized methodologies is the testing of the system to ensure reliability and validity of a system. How would you test a DSS for reliability and validity? What kinds
Discuss the potential design trade-offs involved in designing a specific decision support or expert system directly from tools, as compared with using a DSS appliance or expert system shell.
Consider a DSS design project (perhaps a class project). How would this DSS develop if the evolutionary development process were used?
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using a DSS appliance and available tools in the design process.
Should users design their own DSS? Why or why not?
What kinds of documents would you request to begin the process of understanding users' needs for the development of a DSS for production planning?
Defend the use of the evolutionary development of DSS in a manner that you might for a boss or client of a consulting firm.
Suppose you were designing a DSS to help students make better career decisions. Identify three questions you might use during interviews to determine their decision support needs. How would you alter
How do differences in laws and conventions governing "the press" in different countries impact the design of a DSS?
How do differences in the laws and conventions on privacy impact the design and use of a DSS?
Talk with some of the international students at your university. Discuss differences in decision making and management across the cultures that might impact DSS design.
Talk with some of the international students at your university. Discuss what words, symbols, or concepts that might appear in a DSS might get "lost in translation."
In Greek, there is no word for privacy. Discuss how the absence of this concept would impact building a French-Greek DSS.
Suppose you work for a company that has divisions in two countries, e.g., the United States and China. Each division needs information systems for both transaction processing and DSS development.
Suppose you propose an Internet-based, strategic DSS project at your company (or at some fictitious company) for your (non-information system) department. Discuss the issues that you want included in
Suppose you are developing a DSS for a CEO in a U.S. corporation (you may select a specific industry if you like) for strategic planning. One of the tasks of this CEO is to acquire one or more
What guidelines would you provide to a designer of a transnational DSS to help him or her be more sensitive to the needs of decision makers in all countries? In particular, what aspects of the system
Describe the factors that would influence your design of a DSS for another country. In particular, describe the cultural factors that are unique to that country and/or strongly influence the
Suppose you wanted to display information about others who are your contacts on a social networking site. Discuss the kind of display you would use and the kinds of information you would want on the
What are the principles of good visual design. Find Web pages that display them or sketch a user interface that would have them.
Discuss how you would implement tool bars and menus to address various levels of experience among your users.
Find Web pages or sketch a user interface that displays the characteristics of being harmonious and well behaved and that do no harm.
By what process would you evaluate the user interface of a DSS?
Discuss how the process for establishing user interface requirements for a 1-person system would differ from the process for a 25-person system.
How is the user interface design influenced by the use of object-oriented tools?
What kinds of problems are introduced if designers use stand-alone prototyping packages to design screens and interact with users?
The fact that windows can be sized by the user can be both a problem and an opportunity in the design of DSS. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of sizing windows. How might the disadvantages
Discuss how virtual reality devices might be used as a user interface in a DSS intended to help users select automobiles.
How should the design of a user interface be influenced by the corporate environment? How should its design be influenced by the national environment?
Discuss how you might provide a user interface through which to compare multiple automobiles. Would users' modeling preferences influence this decision?
Accenture utilizes a technique described as "low-fidelity prototyping" when designing user interfaces. This method has designers and users design screens together using paper template items. Hence,
Many computer products now have something called "online documentation." Depending upon the product, this can include a text manual available electronically, a passive request system that accesses
Suppose the problem for which you provided decision support required the decision maker to utilize f-test to determine if part time employees were as productive as full time employees in a call
Identify an article that appears in a newspaper or news magazine. What kinds of models seem to be discussed in the article? Do the assumptions of the models seem appropriate? What kinds of
What attributes of a DSS make model use more attractive?
What kinds of models do you use in your daily life?
How are models and analytics related? How are they different?
Discuss how Google's data mining and GapMinder's data analysis efforts could be used to improve public policy discussion in the United States.
Malcoln Gladwell Published a book in 2005 called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, in which he claimed that frequently the intuitive, first unpression decision (made in the first
What would be the advantages and disadvantages of using Monte Carlo simulation to assess a DSS that provides advice about coursework and/or careers.
J.S. Armstrong said, "Better predictions of how other parties will respond can lead to better decisions." Discuss how you might build such a capability into a DSS.
What are the long-term implications for business when too much intelligence is included in a DSS?
Describe three advantages of each of the kinds of modeling that we discussed in class.
One of the primary things that differentiates a DSS from an MIS is that a DSS facilitates analysis of the data, whereas the MIS facilitates reporting of the data. Discuss the difference between these

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