Management Information Systems for Competitive Advantage

This text discusses the importance of Management Information Systems in gaining a competitive advantage in the market. It covers topics such as CRM, OLTP, OLAP, web generations, and Porter's five forces analysis for Elite Education Institute.

Running head: MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Student number:
Date of submission:
Author note:

1MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Table of Contents
Part I : True or False...................................................................................................................2
Justification for the question:.......................................................................................................2
Part II Multiple Choice:...................................................................................................................3
Part III Short Answer Questions:.....................................................................................................4
Business solution that provides competitive advantage and necessity:.......................................4
Functions of CRM and its integration with RGT framework:.....................................................5
Online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP):....................5
Difference between OLTP and OLAP:........................................................................................6
Web generations:.............................................................................................................................6
Porter’s five forces analysis of Elite Education Institute (EEI):......................................................7
Competitive rivalry:.....................................................................................................................7
Supplier power:............................................................................................................................7
Buyer power:...............................................................................................................................8
Threat of substitution:..................................................................................................................8
Threat of new entry:.....................................................................................................................9
References:....................................................................................................................................10

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Part I: True or False
No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Answer True False False True True True False False True True
Justification for the question:
1. Inaccessible information is useless information since the importance of information lies
in the actions needed to implement or understand them. The importance of any given
information depends on the outcome or the results expected out of its analysis, which is
only possible if the information itself is accessible.
2. Business intelligence also referees to the strategic analysis of the business operations
needed in order to overcome the market issues as well as issues with the implementing
innovative ideas within the system.
3. Management Information Systems mainly deals with the people, organizations and the
technology and the relationships among people and the organizations are most important
in MIS.
4. All modern computers only understand 0 and 1.
5. Fuzzy logic is based on "values of truth" instead of the usual "true or false"/ (1 or 0).
6. Search engine optimization increases the website visibility using keywords as well as tags
that are found in the website.
7. Customers/clients can also often use PaaS as well as IaaS, which has the flexibility of
using an operating system can install and use whatever operating systems. Major IaaS
providers include Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine as well as Microsoft
Azure.

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8. Consumer to Business (C2B) business occurs when an end user or customer sells
products as well as services to a particular business. It is an inversion of the B2C model
of e-commerce business.
9. In a recent research, it has been found that a malware known as badBIOS can infect the
BIOS firmware of a computer.
10. In computing technologies, a denial-of-service attack or (DoS attack) is a form of cyber-
crime wherein the hackers makes the workstations or the systems unavailable for its
intended users for a prolonged period of time by interrupting the connection of the system
to the internet.
Part II Multiple Choice:
No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Answer D B B D C C A B D A
Answer 1. D. the extent of detail within the information.
Answer 2. B. Fine
Answer 3. B. RAM
Answer 4. D. Voice over internet protocol (VOIP).
Answer 5. C. 280 million calculations per second.
Answer 6. C. OLTP
Answer 7. A. Recovery
Answer 8. B. Expert systems
Answer 9. D. Knowledge management system.

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Answer 10. A. It allows only specific locations within an infrastructure to share information
and applications.
Part III Short Answer Questions:
Business solution that provides competitive advantage and necessity:
Mobile financial services or mobile banking is extensively used in most of the banks in
today’s world in order to enable the banks to be at a higher competitive advantage in the market.
The reason being most of banks and other financial organizations are gradually shifting to an age
of digitalization wherein customers no longer have to travel physically to the bank in order to
receive banking services. The banks have designed innovative android as well as IOS
applications that can be used by the customers in order to perform most of the banking tasks
even form their homes, which in turn makes it extremely beneficial for the customer. More
sophisticated and easy to use the mobile applications are more helpful it is for the customers to
use them. That in turn causes the bank to be at a better competitive advantage in the market as
compared to the other banks due to better customer satisfaction.
Competitive necessity is provided by use of cloud solutions in the banking industry since
it is one of the most secure and cost effective solution for the corporate companies for storing
data. Data is stored in the secure servers, which are maintained and monitored by the data centers
of the cloud service provider such as Amazon web services, Microsoft Azure etc. Cloud
infrastructure gives the companies a business flexibility as well as agility in data storage. It stores
the data in an encrypted manner thereby ensuring better data security. It is a necessity since
secure online storage of data it is more preferable by the organizations instead of storing them on
traditional in house servers and other mediums such as external hard disk drives and flash drives.

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Functions of CRM and its integration with RGT framework:
The Customer relationship management systems (CRM systems) helps in the efficient
management of information and sharing of information across the different department of an
organization as well as the with its customers directly. The sales and marketing departments of
the organizations use the CRM systems in order to effectively communicate with the customers.
CRM primarily acts as a data management system that aids in the smooth management of
customer relationship management as well as other customer centric information for the effective
management of the business operations.
The RGT framework is used in order to optimize process execution of preexisting
strategies. It is used to help in the growth of market share as well as transforming the service
offering of the different organizations, which in turn will attract more number of customers. The
RGT framework ensures to address all the needs of the present trends of the markets as well as
the customers, which again is what the CRM also aims to do (Shah and Nair 2013). CRM is
mainly associated with growing the organization and expanding the management operations
within the organization using the features of RGT framework. The RGT tools further analyze the
mathematical values and data collected from the CRM calculations, and a shared output or result
is achieved through the integrated system.
Online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP):
Online transaction processing or OLTP is a system in which the information systems help
in managing the transaction specific applications ideally for data entry as well as retrieval of
transaction processing (Scarborough 2016). In other words, the transactional data management
by the use of advanced computerized techniques can be referred to as online transaction
processing. It is used extensively in many organizations in today’s world.

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Figure 1: Functioning of OLTP (Source: As used by the author).
Online analytical processing or OLAP helps in addressing analytical queries of multi-
dimensional nature in an easy way (Mayer 2014). OLAP is an important segment of business
intelligence, encompassing relational databases, report writing as well as data mining.
Difference between OLTP and OLAP:
Online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) are both
systems of online processing. Applications that are transaction-oriented are handled by OLTP
through the internet (example ATM machines). Multidimensional queries related to analytics
such as financial reporting or forecasting are handled by OLAP. OLTP is an online modifying
system of databases, whereas, OLAP is a system that answers database queries online.
Web generations:
The first generation of web is the Web 1.0, which is also known as the read only web or
also a cognition system. It started as a place of information for organizational information to be
broadcasted to the people. It provided limited interaction of users or contribution of content.

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Web 2.0 is also known as read-write web. It allowed assembling as well as managing
widespread crowds that share common goals of social networking.
Web 3.0 also known as semantic web aims to reduce the human involvement and leave
much of the important tasks to be done by the machines using contents that are readable by the
machines over the web (Marginson 2015). It has two main platforms of which are semantic
technologies as well as social environment of computing.
Web 4.0 is a future version of the web, which is a read-write-execution-concurrency form
of web with features that are much more advanced and intelligent than the earlier versions. It is
also known as the symbiotic web wherein humans and machines can combine and work together.
Porter’s five forces analysis of Elite Education Institute (EEI):
The porters five forces analysis can be done for elite education institute as discussed below:
Competitive rivalry:
With the increase in the number of educational firms in Australia, the competition also
increases within them. They are always in a rivalry with each other in order to protect their
increasing market share (Cook et al. 2013). They are always in a competition to offer better
courses to the student at a more competitive price than what is being offered in the market by
other institutions. Some of the most important market competitors of EEI in Australia are
Institute of Tertiary and Higher Education Australia and Kent Institute, Australia.
Supplier power:
Suppliers have a greater control when the number of suppliers exceed the number of
buyers in the markets. Through forward integration the suppliers can cause vertical integration
and offer competition at retail level for the existing buyers in the education industry (Macdonald

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2013). When the members of the incumbent industry are not potential customers of the suppliers,
then the suppliers will attain greater power in conducting business with Elite education institute.
Buyer power:
The members of the EEI can measure the power exhibited by the buyers by
understanding their concentration in the market. It is more when their concentration is more in
the market shares. That is when the students have more power in selecting the courses offered by
the institute or they can even have issues over course fees (Hou, Rego and Service 2013). Well
informed students in Australia know about their future if they pursue a particular course from
EEI and they know the return they will achieve in future in return for the money they invest on
the expensive courses of EEI. (Boud and Feletti 2013). They tend to have a more asymmetrical
control over the business of EEI. Course standardization as per other educational institutes in
Australia can cause the students to express more of their views or they can also post their
concerns and complains about EEI on social and public forums.
Threat of substitution:
There is always a threat of substitution of the different full time academic courses offered
by EEI. Many students cannot afford the expensive full time courses offered by the institute.
Often they also do not meet the basic educational criteria to pursue the courses (McGrath 2013).
That is when they look for alternate options such as short term less expensive certificate courses
in similar domain form private institutions such as Australian training and Qualification College
or other on line courses available over the internet such as simplilearn.com etc (Khodakarami
and Chan 2014). These professional certificate courses are less expensive than the full time
academic courses offered by EEI and have comparable professional importance for the students
in Australia that they can use to shape their careers in their future.

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Threat of new entry:
Some of the notable educational institutes in Australia are listed below which are
potential threats for the elite education institute:
- Cambridge International College.
- AICL Sydney.
- Kings International College.
- Shafston International College Brisbane.
- Baxter Institute of Technology Melbourne.
- Brighton Institute of Technology Melbourne.
- AIH Sydney.

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References:
Boud, D. and Feletti, G., 2013. The challenge of problem-based learning. Routledge.
Cook, B.G., Tankersley, M. and Landrum, T.J. eds., 2013. Evidence-based practices (Vol. 26).
Emerald Group Publishing.
Hou, X.Y., Rego, J. and Service, M., 2013. Paramedic education opportunities and challenges in
A ustralia. Emergency Medicine Australasia, 25(2), pp.114-119.
Khodakarami, F. and Chan, Y.E., 2014. Exploring the role of customer relationship management
(CRM) systems in customer knowledge creation. Information & Management, 51(1),
pp.27-42.
Macdonald, D., 2013. The new Australian health and physical education curriculum: A case
of/for gradualism in curriculum reform?. Asia-Pacific Journal of Health, Sport and
Physical Education, 4(2), pp.95-108.
Marginson, S., 2015. International education in Australia: The roller coaster. International
Higher Education, (68), pp.11-13.
Mayer, D., 2014. Forty years of teacher education in Australia: 1974–2014. Journal of education
for teaching, 40(5), pp.461-473.
McGrath, R.G., 2013. The end of competitive advantage: How to keep your strategy moving as
fast as your business. Harvard Business Review Press.
Scarborough, N.M., 2016. Essentials of entrepreneurship and small business management.
Pearson.

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Shah, M. and Sid Nair, C., 2013. Private for-profit higher education in Australia: widening
access, participation and opportunities for public-private collaboration. Higher Education
Research & Development, 32(5), pp.820-832.