Business Information Systems Report: Tour Down Under

This report analyzes the Business Information System (BIS) used by the Tour Down Under cycling event, organized by the South Australian Tourism Commission. It begins with an introduction to the event and its data-driven operations. The core of the report addresses critical database issues, including deployment failures, privilege-based problems, and broken databases, which are essential for the event's functioning. The report then delves into the mitigation strategies, such as source control and cluster services, to resolve these issues. It also examines the impact of technology, particularly the use of predictive analytics and big data, on decision-making within the organization. Furthermore, the report discusses how the South Australian Tourism Commission utilizes BIS to make routing decisions, condense data, and identify long-term trends, while also addressing cultural, security, ethical, and privacy issues associated with the use of IT/IS, such as hacking and privacy violations through webcams and social media.

Running head: BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEM
BUSINESS INFORMATION SYSTEM
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Introduction
Tour Down under is one of the cycling race in Adelaide is South Australia. The cycling
race was established in 1999 after the support of John Olsen as a gap left by Australian Grand
Prix. The first race was held in 1999 under the banner Santos Tour Down. The race has always
been held in the middle of Australian summer. Some of the features of the race is incorporating
flat and hills sections over a six-day period. It is also important to note that the race, it is a 11-
day event which brings UCI WorldTour professional male cycling teams who are supposed to
race on the streets of Adelaide. One of the advantages of Santos Tour Down under usually
provides an important contribution to the state tourism. It also showcases the attraction of South
Australia. Currently Santos Tour Down is managed and owned by events South Australia which
is a division of the South Australian Tourism Commission (About the santos tour down under,
2018).
Santos Tour Down database issues
It is important to note that data plays a very important role to the functioning and
operations of Santos Tour Down. To accommodate the racing events which is an exponentially
growing data, South Australian Tourism Commission started using database management
systems for ease of data storage and better management of the organizational database. One of
the common issues with any database set-up regardless of the organization set-up, is deployment
failures. South Australian Tourism Commission tend to have preliminary tests before deploying
the database but they often fall short in testing it properly. Another common issues is privilege-
based issues; after a database is set-up it is very essential to give the required access or privileges
to the applications and to the users of the database. Most of the database are often resulted by
privilege-based issues like legitimate privilege abuse, unused privilege-based, and privilege

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elevation. The last issue is broken database, each and every data, thousands of issues are being
reported on daily bases regarding database attacks and database exploitations. Other issues are
denial of services.
Mitigation strategies
To solve the below issues one needs to adapt source control or what is known as cluster
services such as VCS. In here South Australian Tourism Commission needs to ensure that all the
database schemas are in source control. Second, it is important to have a snapshot of the data and
needs to deploy the script to a non-production environment first. Also one needs to constantly
monitor the resources for any privilege-based abuses.
Impact of using technology
Usually technology is a combination of predictive analytics and big data. Technology
usually reshapes decision making of an organization. In a database, technology is used to
perform basic processing of database transactions. It specifically simplifies the transaction
processing of an organization. It is used to update any transaction performed on the database. In
addition, technology is used to support decision making which is highly flexible and is designed
to help any organization or agency in its decision making.
How South Australian Tourism Commission uses Business Information Systems
To start with the South Australian Tourism Commission is committed in protecting the
privacy of any information within its systems including even person information which it
collects about any one. This is detailed in its Information privacy policy statement.
A business information system is a set of inter-related procedures which uses IT
infrastructure in an organization so as to disseminate and generate desired organizational
information. Usually a business information get data of the IT infrastructure as input and then

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processes to satisfy the needs which are associated with the organization enterprise. Some if the
components of information system are decisions, information and its flow, functions, and
transactions and processing.
From this case study a business information system is being used to assist in making
routing decision by the South Australian Tourism Commission. In addition, the business
information system is being used to condense large amounts of data of the cycling event. It also
helps the organizers of the cycling events in addressing some of the strategic decisions and also
identify some of long term trends in the firm and its environment. It also addresses non-routing
decisions which require evaluation, insight, and judgment
Some of the cultural, security, ethical and privacy issues of using IS/IT
As much as Santos Tour Down has implemented technology in their organization, it is
facing some serious cultural, security, ethical, and privacy issues. First with some tools such as
the wide area network, attackers has found it easy to hack into the organization database as long
as the database is connected to the internet (Law & Perez, 2010). In here hackers can be able to
use Internet Protocol address. Second, as much as IT/IS has enabled the South Australian
Tourism Commission to share information with the people regarding the cycling information and
also find any relevant information online, it has exploited the freedom of privacy of the event. In
here, there is the use of webcams to access participants’ private life. Also the organizers of the
event have utilized the use of social media to market the event, this has resulted to access of
photos of the event to hackers thus able to spy individual accounts (Gunasekaran & Sandhu,
2010)

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References
About the santos tour down under. (2018). Retrieved from Santos tour down under:
tourdownunder.com.au
Gunasekaran, A., & Sandhu, M. (2010). Handbook on business information systems. Singapore:
John & Wiley Press.
Law, W. K., & Perez, K. (2010). Cross-cultural implementation of information system. Hershey:
Idea group Pub press.