Test Papers / Previous Question Papers of Indira Gandhi National Open University MS54 Management Information Systems June 2005

MANAGEMENT PROGRAMME
Term-End Examination

MS-54 : MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Time: 3 hours

Maximum Marks: 100
(Weightage 70%)

June, 2005

SECTION A

1. (a) Discuss about Rational Individual models of decision making and Organisational models for decision making. What are their implications for Information System Design ?

(b) What is Nolan's Six Stage Growth model ? Discuss different stages in the model.

2. (a) Describe the major steps in implementation of MIS design. Are they overlapping or exclusive ? Explain.

(b) System development is an iterative process and it consists of many identifiable stages. What stages detine "the way things are" and "the way things shouldb e". Describe these stages.

3. (a) What is a multiplexer ? What is it's main job ? Discuss Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM), Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Statistical Time Division Multiplexing (STDM).

(b) In DBMS literature, systems are often classified according to the logical structutes of the underlying data 'model'. Discuss the taxonomy of data structures by naming and briefly describing various types of structures.

4. (a) Discuss the beneficial and harmful effects of computers on
(i) Organisations
(ii) The Society, and
(iii) The International Scene

(b) What is a "tortious liability" ? Discuss about the tortious liabilities in use of computers?

5. Write short notes on :

(a) Transaction Processing Systems (TPS)
(b) Benefits of Expert Systems
(c) Organisational Resistance to DBMS tools
(d) Trojan Horse

SECTION B

6. Read the case study given below and answer the questions at the end of the case.

General Electric's SCISOR analyzes financial news

General Electric's Research and Development Center has developed a natural language system called SCISOR (System for Conceptual Information Summarization, Organization, and Retrieval) that performs text analysis and question-answering in a limited, predefined subject area (called a constrained domain). One application of this system deals with analyzing financial news. For example, SCISOR automtically selects and analyzes stories about corporate mergers and acquisitions from the online financial service of Dow Jones. Ii is able to process news in less than 10 seconds per story. First, it determines whether the story is about a corporate merger or acquisition. Then, it selects infomation such as the target, suitor, and price per share. The system allows the user to browse and ask questions such as, "What price was oftered for Polaroid ?" or "How much was Bruck Plastics sold for ?"

The system's effectiveness was demonstrated in testing, when it proved to be 100 percent accurate in identifying all 31 mergers and acquisitions stories that were included in a universe of 731 financial news releases from the newswire service.

A similar application is a Web-based personalized news system that was developed in Singapore to track business news available in English, Chinese, and Malay, summarize it, and extract desired personalized news in any of these languages.

Questions :

(a) What are the benefits of analyzing financial news via a machine ?

(b) What other applications might be developed with this type of system ?

(c) How could such a system be combined with an Internet news dissemination portal such as money.cnn.com ?

(d) Discuss the reliability factor of such a system.