23-Ind-B4 Design of Information Systems · December 2013
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Exams — December 2013 — 98-Ind-B4, Design of Information Systems. 3 hours; closed book, no calculator permitted. The exam comprises four parts: Part A (select 20 of 40 terms and explain each in a sentence or two, 2 marks each = 40 marks), Parts B and C (select 2 of 5 questions in each part, 11 marks each = 22 marks per part), and Part D (select 1 of 2 questions, 16 marks). Complete answers to every term and every question in all four parts follow below, not only the minimum selection a candidate would submit on exam day.
Reference texts: Laudon & Laudon, Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, 15th ed.; Schwalbe, Information Technology Project Management, 9th ed.
Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.
Open-source software is developed collaboratively by a distributed community, with source code published under a licence that permits free use, inspection, and modification (Linux being the leading enterprise example, alongside projects such as Apache, MySQL, and PostgreSQL). Impact on IS development: it removes per-seat licensing cost as a barrier, so organizations can build production infrastructure at a fraction of the cost of proprietary equivalents; it accelerates innovation because bugs and security flaws are found and patched by a large, distributed community rather than a single vendor's staff; and it shifts an organization's spend from licence fees toward in-house or contracted expertise, since the software is free but competent administration is not.
A web service is a self-contained software module, addressable over standard internet protocols (typically via a defined API), that performs a specific business function and can be invoked by any other application regardless of the platform or language it was built in. SOA is the broader architectural approach of building systems as a set of such loosely coupled, reusable services rather than one large monolithic application. Impact on IS development: it lets development teams reuse an existing service (e.g., a payment-processing or address-validation service) instead of rebuilding that function, it makes it far easier to integrate systems from different vendors or from mergers and acquisitions, and it changes system design itself — architects design around service contracts and interfaces rather than around a single codebase.
Mashups combine data or functionality from two or more existing web sources, usually via public APIs, into one new composite application (e.g., a real-estate site overlaying property listings on a mapping service). Apps are lightweight, purpose-built applications, most visibly on mobile platforms, that typically consume the same kind of web-service APIs. Impact on IS development: both dramatically lower the cost and time of building new functionality, since a development team can compose existing capability instead of building it from scratch; this shifts a growing share of "systems development" toward integration and API-consumption skills rather than ground-up programming, and it also means an organization's own systems are increasingly expected to expose a well-documented API so others (including internal teams) can build on them.
