23-Ind-B4 Design of Information Systems · December 2017
Nivaar worked solution (AI-drafted; not reviewed by a licensed engineer)
National Exams — December 2017 — 98-Ind-B4, Design of Information Systems. 3 hours; closed book, no calculator permitted. The exam comprises four parts: Part A (select 20 terms from the list given and explain each in a sentence or two, no more than 50 words, 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.
1. Hardware — servers, client devices, and networking equipment purchased or leased. 2. Software — licence fees, or subscription cost for SaaS. 3. Telecommunications — network circuits, bandwidth, and connectivity charges. 4. Facility/site preparation — power, cooling, and physical space for the system. 5. Implementation labour — consulting, integration, and internal staff time to install and configure the system. 6. Training — the direct cost of formal training programs for users and administrators. 7. Ongoing maintenance and support — annual licence/support fees, and the operational staff needed to run the system.
8. Lost productivity during transition — the period in which staff are less efficient while learning a new system, rarely captured as an explicit line item though it is very real. 9. Business disruption during conversion — the risk and cost of a rocky cutover (Question 1, term 13-style conversion), including potential lost sales or service failures during the changeover window. 10. Organizational resistance/change-management cost — the effort needed to overcome legitimate political resistance (Question 8's discussion of how IT redistributes power), which a purely technical budget rarely accounts for at all.
11. Increased productivity — measurable output per employee-hour after the system is in steady use. 12. Lower operational costs — reduced labour, materials, or overhead cost directly attributable to the new system. 13. Reduced workforce — fewer staff hours needed for the same volume of work (or the same staff handling greater volume). 14. Lower computer expenses — when the new system genuinely replaces more expensive legacy infrastructure. 15. Reduced clerical/error-correction cost — fewer errors and the rework/correction labour those errors used to require.
16. Improved decision-making — better, faster, more accurate information available to management (Question 8's third example), whose financial value is real but not directly measurable in a line-item way. 17. Improved asset utilization — equipment, inventory, or capacity used more efficiently, which shows up across many accounts rather than one. 18. Improved organizational learning — knowledge captured and retained (Question 1's knowledge management) rather than lost when an employee leaves. 19. Increased organizational flexibility — the ability to respond faster to a future, currently unknown change in the market or regulatory environment, which by definition cannot be priced against a specific known future event. 20. Improved employee goodwill and customer satisfaction/loyalty — a better user experience for staff and customers alike, which affects retention and reputation without appearing as a distinct financial figure at all.
A traditional financial analysis (payback period, simple ROI, NPV using only readily quantified figures) is built almost entirely from the tangible cost and tangible benefit categories above, because those are the ones with a clear, defensible dollar figure to plug into the model. The intangible items — lost productivity during transition, organizational resistance cost, improved decision-making, organizational flexibility, employee/customer goodwill — are exactly the categories most often left out entirely, not because they are less real or less financially significant, but because no straightforward accounting convention assigns them a dollar value. This systematically biases a purely tangible-only financial analysis toward under-valuing projects whose main payoff is strategic or organizational (improved decision-making, flexibility) relative to projects whose payoff is a direct, easily quantified cost reduction, even when the intangible-heavy project is genuinely the higher-value investment.
