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.
IT infrastructure comprises seven major components. Computer hardware platforms — servers and client devices (vendors: Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple). Operating system platforms — the software managing hardware resources for applications (Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, Linux distributions, macOS/iOS, Android). Enterprise software applications — large cross-functional systems (Question 1, term 25; vendors: SAP, Oracle, Salesforce). Data-management and storage — database software and physical storage infrastructure (Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, EMC/Dell storage systems). Networking/telecommunications platforms — the hardware and services connecting everything (Cisco, telecommunications carriers). Internet platforms — hardware and software supporting a company's internet presence (web servers, hosting). Consulting and systems-integration services — the expertise needed to implement and integrate all of the above (Accenture, Deloitte, IBM Global Services).
Cloud computing delivers computing resources as an on-demand, elastically scalable, metered service over the internet rather than as owned on-premises infrastructure. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provides virtualized compute, storage, and networking, with the customer managing their own OS and applications on top (e.g., Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure VMs). Platform as a Service (PaaS) adds a managed runtime and development tools, so developers build and deploy applications without managing the underlying servers or OS patching (e.g., Google App Engine, Azure App Service). Software as a Service (SaaS) delivers a complete, ready-to-use application, with the provider managing every layer beneath it (e.g., Salesforce, Microsoft 365).
1. Computer hardware platforms. Organizations increasingly rent compute capacity from cloud vendors (Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) instead of purchasing and depreciating their own servers, converting a capital expense into an operating expense and shifting hardware-refresh and capacity-planning risk onto the vendor entirely. 2. Data management and storage. Managed database-as-a-service offerings (Amazon RDS, Azure SQL Database) let an organization consume a fully managed relational or non-relational database (Question 2) without operating the underlying servers itself, and cloud object storage (Amazon S3) has become a default location for unstructured data at a cost per gigabyte far below most organizations' own storage economics at scale. 3. Enterprise software applications. Enterprise systems once deployed on an organization's own servers are now predominantly consumed as SaaS (Salesforce for CRM, Workday for HR, NetSuite for ERP), which removes the customer's own patching, upgrade, and infrastructure-scaling burden entirely, at the cost of reduced customization control and a recurring, rather than capitalized, cost structure.
