Deck 7: Business Intelligence and Decision Support

Question 1

An executive information system refers to the software tools that support strategic-level decision making for senior managers.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

The market basket analysis examines relationships to reveal customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Stickiness refers to how frequently users move from one related site to another.

Answer 3

False

Question 4

Optimization is an extension of goal seeking, in which a user can change many variables to reach some maximum or minimum target, as long as the changes stay within the constraints the user identifies.

Question 5

A dashboard is a gateway that provides access to a variety of relevant information from many different sources on one screen.

Question 6

Mashup is an approach to aggregating content from multiple internal and external sources on customizable web pages.

Question 7

The online analytical processing system allows users to slice and dice massive amounts of data stored in data warehouses to reveal significant patterns and trends.

Question 8

Mid-level decisions undertaken by managers by drawing upon business intelligence to implement marketing plans and product development are made at the tactical level.

Question 9

Text mining, which monitors web chatter, helps in managing customer relationships and spotting crises early.

Question 10

Text mining is a discovery process in which unstructured text information is the source of business intelligence.

Question 11

Distinctions between management information systems and executive information systems are difficult to make, since their functionalities are rather similar.

Question 12

Data warehouses offer an opportunity to combine the data housed in separate systems into one and then load it to a database optimized for complex queries.

Question 13

Strategic level decisions involve direct interactions with customers and have predetermined policies and procedures that spell out how to handle different situations.

Question 14

Clickstream data refers to every single click by every visitor, along with associated data revealing customer behavior.

Question 15

Building data warehouses often slows down operational systems.

Question 16

Companies use intelligent agents to extract useful business intelligence from private inaccessible Web sites.

Question 17

At the operational level, decision makers need more aggregated information, sorted and tallied in different ways, to monitor success and plan next steps compared to those at the strategic level.

Question 18

What-if analysis allows a user to set a target value for a particular metric and tells the program which variable to change to try to reach the goal.

Question 19

Decisions made at the operational level involve long-term strategy and are undertaken by the leaders of the organization.

Question 20

OLAP systems achieve their speed and their slice-and-dice capabilities by building multidimensional data cubes.

Question 21

Employees working primarily at the ________ decision level deal directly with customers and handle all routine transactions where their decisions follow predetermined policies and procedures that spell out how to handle different situations.

A) strategic
B) tactical
C) operational
D) directional

Question 22

The term ________ refers to tools that support strategic-level decision making for senior managers.

A) executive information system
B) transaction processing system
C) accounting information system
D) content management system

Question 23

People at ________ levels in an organization draw on business intelligence to make decisions related to marketing plans, product development, and departmental budgets.

A) operational
B) tactical
C) strategic
D) top

Question 24

Which of the following is a feature of the executive information system?

A) It involves tools that facilitate decision making for junior-level executives.
B) It involves tools that support strategic-level decision making for senior managers.
C) It consists of tools used for routine transactions in operational processes.
D) It consists of tools used to undertake programmed tasks which deal directly with customers.

Question 25

Which of the following is a difference between operational-level and tactical-level decision making?

A) Operational decisions are undertaken by managers, whereas tactical decisions are made by junior executives.
B) Operational decisions impact the organization and its industry, whereas tactical decisions deal with routine transactions.
C) Operational decisions mostly address issues like product development and marketing, whereas tactical decisions address issues such as investment and hiring policies.
D) Operational decisions require detailed structured information about actual transactions by customers, whereas tactical decisions need more aggregated information to monitor success and plan next steps.

Question 26

Which of the following best describes tactical-level decisions?

A) decisions undertaken at the highest level by the leaders of an organization
B) programmed decisions that involve routine transactions and deal directly with customers
C) decisions that impact the entire organization and sometimes, even the industry
D) mid-level decisions undertaken by managers on issues like product development and membership drives

Question 27

________ decisions affect the organization and beyond and are guided by the leadership of the organization towards a long-term strategy.

A) Strategic
B) Tactical
C) Operational
D) Specific

Question 28

Business intelligence is said to be used at the ________ if companies use it to bring meaningful, performance-related information to all employees.

A) operational level
B) directional level
C) strategic level
D) tactical level

Question 29

Which of the following functions do intelligent agents undertake in business intelligence?

A) extracting useful business information from publicly accessible Web sites
B) tracking the performance of employees in the organization
C) retrieving information from data warehouses whenever required and reducing information overload
D) tracking fraudulent transactions conducted by the employees of the organization

Question 30

Which of the following is a characteristic of decisions made at an organization's strategic level?

A) They involve predetermined policies and procedures that spell out how to handle different situations.
B) They are mostly concerned with routine transactions directly involving customers.
C) They make use of business intelligence to address issues such as product development and marketing plans.
D) They have widespread effects which impact suppliers, customers, and the whole industry.

Question 31

Grey Thompson is the largest advertising firm in Washington. What level of decision making would Josh Lucas, a marketing manager, be involved in if he undertakes decisions on promotional campaigns, guerilla marketing, and brand awareness?

A) operational
B) tactical
C) strategic
D) administrative

Question 32

Intelligent agents that extract business intelligence from publicly accessible Web sites are also known as ________.

A) mashups
B) bots
C) servers
D) androids

Question 33

Clara Thomas is an employee at the Citizens Bank, the largest bank in Texas. What type of decisions will she undertake if her responsibilities include receiving customer queries, fixing appointments for sales representatives of the bank, and tracking potential clients through call records?

A) strategic decisions
B) tactical decisions
C) operational decisions
D) directional decisions

Question 34

Why are distinctions between management and executive information systems difficult to make?

A) The systems always have identical time horizons.
B) The vast difference in the fields of application for these information systems renders any comparison between them inconsequential.
C) The systems offer retrieval capabilities that people cannot customize to their decision making needs.
D) The systems often have similar functionality.

Question 35

Which of the following prevents the slowing down of an operational system?

A) building a data warehouse
B) housing all data on a common server
C) running system queries simultaneously
D) storing critical data on e-mail

Question 36

Which of the following best describes an operational-level decision?

A) decisions undertaken at the highest level by leaders of an organization
B) mid-level decisions undertaken by managers
C) programmed decisions that deal directly with customers
D) decisions that impact the entire organization and beyond

Question 37

Which of the following is a difference between strategic-level and operational-level decision making?

A) Strategic-level decisions involve regular interactions with customers unlike operational-level decision making.
B) Unlike operational-level decision making, strategic-level decision making mostly deals with routine transactions.
C) Unlike operational-level decisions, strategic-level decisions follow predetermined policies and procedures and are programmed in nature.
D) The business intelligence needed to make decisions is less structured at the strategic level than at the operational level.

Question 38

Jonathan, a systems manager at the Unisun Bank of New Jersey, is asked to look into the problem of information overload on the bank's operational systems. Which of the following actions would best help Jonathan get the systems to work faster and prevent information overload?

A) building a data warehouse optimized for complex queries
B) housing all transactional data on a common server
C) creating a process of running system queries simultaneously
D) storing critical data on e-mail or locally on workstations

Question 39

Jane Adams is a director at Wilderness, a travel house in Manhattan. What type of decision does she take in opening another branch of the company in Chicago?

A) strategic-level decision
B) tactical-level decision
C) operational-level decision
D) mid-level decision

Question 40

Which level of decision making does the executive information system support?

A) operational
B) strategic
C) tactical
D) specific

Question 41

________ are used by infomediaries to retrieve current product prices from different vendors.

A) Neural nets
B) Bots
C) Expert systems
D) Dashboards

Question 42

________ is a simulation model, often constructed using Excel, which calculates the relationships between many variables; users can change some variables to see how others are affected.

A) Goal seeking analysis
B) What-if analysis
C) Market basket analysis
D) Data aggregation

Question 43

________ is a discovery process which relies on semantic structures, linguistic relationships, and common phrases to extract meaningful information.

A) Market basket analysis
B) What-if analysis
C) Text mining
D) Goal seeking analysis

Question 44

The process of understanding trends and patterns within the business intelligence that a firm has collected is known as ________.

A) multiprocessing
B) visualization
C) distributed computing
D) data mining

Question 45

________ is a statistical technique that reveals customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items.

A) What-if analysis
B) Competitor analysis
C) Market basket analysis
D) Goal seeking analysis

Question 46

iTicket, an online event-ticketing site, recently discovered that most of its good seats for a widely anticipated concert were preemptively booked in bulk by brokers. This resulted in a shortage of tickets that the public could have bought themselves. Which of the following would have best helped the brokers to book tickets in such large numbers?

A) neural nets
B) dashboards
C) bots
D) mashups

Question 47

Shirley Yearwood is an analyst at a retail outlet and is required to assess customer data to understand buying patterns of customers when they purchase multiple items. What analysis process will best help her to analyze purchasing habits of customers who bought gum boots along with umbrellas, ties along with shirts, and hair clips along with headbands among other related products?

A) online analytical processing
B) market basket analysis
C) what-if analysis
D) goal seeking analysis

Question 48

Which of the following methods categorizes massive amounts of data stored in data warehouses to reveal significant patterns and trends in the data?

A) online analytical processing
B) what-if analysis
C) multiprocessing
D) goal seeking analysis

Question 49

Which of the following is a function of what-if analysis?

A) establishing relationships between many variables and changing some of the variables to see how the others are affected
B) establishing relationships between different variables by keeping them constant
C) encompassing a variety of statistical techniques that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future events
D) establishing a target value for a particular metric and telling the program which variable to change to try to reach the goal

Question 50

Which of the following real-life functions does an intelligent agent perform?

A) classifying and indexing web pages for search engines
B) collecting and sorting a company's sales data
C) tracking Internet usage patterns of a company's employees
D) monitoring the Internet to screen out malicious software and viruses

Question 51

Which of the following is a function of bots?

A) It retrieves information from offline sources.
B) It monitors the productivity of employees in an organization.
C) It builds teamwork and interpersonal skills of employees.
D) It collects data from web pages on behalf of a user.

Question 52

________ systems allow users to interactively retrieve meaningful information from data, examining it from many different perspectives, and drilling it down into specific groupings.

A) Forecasting
B) Online analytical processing
C) What-if analysis
D) Goal seeking

Question 53

Which of the following is an accurate definition of text mining?

A) a discovery process which derives low-quality data from text
B) a discovery process in which unstructured text information is the source of business intelligence
C) a discovery process in which users can change many variables to reach a maximum or minimum target
D) a discovery process which relies heavily on sociograms, pie charts, and spin networks

Question 54

Which of the following is an accurate definition of online analytical processing?

A) creating and using offline data by multiple users
B) mimicking the reasoning of a human expert to arrive at a decision
C) retrieving, examining, and drilling data into specific groups
D) examining data from a single, consistent perspective

Question 55

Which of the following is a function of online analytical processing?

A) mimicking the reasoning of a human expert to arrive at a decision
B) organizing and summarizing information vital to an individual's role in an organization
C) feeding vast amounts of information into data warehouses
D) helping organizations spot suspicious activity

Question 56

James Wood, who works in the marketing department of the Whistlewoods hotel, has been given the responsibility of identifying patterns in the preferences of guests who have repeatedly visited the hotel in the past ten years. Which of the following would best help him categorize the massive amounts of data to reveal preferences of guests, such as type of suite, room service, etc.?

A) online analytical processing
B) goal seeking analysis
C) forecasting analysis
D) what-if analysis

Question 57

Which of the following functions do intelligent agents perform in the context of search engines?

A) classifying and indexing web pages
B) screening out malicious code
C) distributing third-party cookies
D) monitoring information overload

Question 58

Which among the following software tools is commonly used as the front end for data retrieval and analysis in most business intelligence tools?

A) MS Outlook
B) MS Excel
C) MS Word
D) MS Powerpoint

Question 59

Which of the following is a function of market basket analysis?

A) understanding behavior patterns of customers as they buy multiple items
B) helping retailers group customers from a certain geographical area
C) understanding strengths and weaknesses of competitors in the market
D) improving quality of a product after analyzing a competitor's high-in-demand product

Question 60

Which of the following is a statistical technique that reveals customer behavior patterns as they purchase multiple items?

A) risk analysis
B) competitor analysis
C) predictive analysis
D) market basket analysis

Question 61

________ refers to analyzing historical and seasonal trends and then taking into account existing and predicted business conditions to estimate some variable of interest.

A) Optimization
B) What-if analysis
C) Forecasting
D) Goal seeking analysis

Question 62

________ is a test created by software developers to thwart software bots where the visitor must pass before continuing to register or enter the site.

A) HTML
B) CAPTCHA
C) OLAP
D) SMTP

Question 63

Which of the following holds true of neural nets?

A) They borrow a human's approach by using neural signals instead of digital ones.
B) They imitate service robots using neural networks.
C) They borrow the brain's approach, using digital signals in place of neural ones.
D) They aim to achieve higher productivity by imitating robots in domestic operations.

Question 64

Which of the following statements is true of goal seeking analysis?

A) It is a process of setting a target value for a particular metric and telling the program which variable to change to reach the goal.
B) It is a process which analyzes historical and seasonal trends and then takes into account existing and predicted business conditions to estimate results.
C) It is a process which involves software tools that rely on keywords, semantic structures, linguistic relationships, and common phrases to extract meaningful information.
D) It is a process which involves revealing customer behavior patterns by analyzing their purchase of multiple items.

Question 65

Which of the following characteristics would make service robots suitable for use in rescue operations?

A) mobile
B) bulky
C) stationary
D) autonomous

Question 66

Which of the following statements is true of expert systems?

A) They are built with OLAP as the foundational base.
B) It mimics the reasoning of a human expert.
C) An expert system learns from training data selected by humans that contain cases defining the paths from input to output.
D) Expert systems are widely used to detect patterns in data from massive data sets and report such patterns.

Question 67

________ is an extension of goal seeking analysis in which the user can change many variables to reach some maximum or minimum target, as long as the changes stay within the constraints the user identifies.

A) What-if analysis
B) Predictive analysis
C) Forecasting
D) Optimization

Question 68

________ is a decision support tool, often based on an Excel model, in which the user sets a target value for a particular variable, such as profit/ loss, and tells the program which variable to change to try to reach the goal.

A) Goal seeking analysis
B) Data harvesting
C) Market basket analysis
D) Data aggregation

Question 69

Which of the following is a drawback of the growing power of artificial intelligence?

A) It does not facilitate interaction with humans, and learning exchanges are not possible.
B) Its contributions in areas of financial monitoring and customer relationship management are inconsequential.
C) Its techniques are used by scammers to gain access to sites and gather sensitive information.
D) It operates without a built-in operating system with automatic override options.

Question 70

The term ________ refers to every single click by every visitor, along with associated data revealing customer behavior patterns, such as time spent on the page, the URL the visitor just left, and the visitor's IP address.

A) packet data
B) Internet traffic
C) keystroke log
D) clickstream data

Question 71

The term "artificial intelligence" describes ________.

A) the capability of machines that can mimic human intelligence
B) the intellectual development synthetically induced in human infants
C) the ability of humans to imitate machine-like actions
D) the level of pervasion of technologies in everyday human life

Question 72

Escapade Holidays is a travel house in New Jersey which recently created a website to attract travel clientele for the company. It is vital that the company is able to track time spent on each page by visitors, which will help them understand destinations and offers the customers are interested in. Which of the following will best help them understand customer behavior patterns as well as the URL the visitor just left?

A) real-time data
B) keystroke logging
C) clickstream data
D) mangled packets

Question 73

In web metrics, which of the following best describes depth of visit?

A) the forecasted number of page visits estimated around peak hours
B) the number of page views at a competitor's Web site
C) the comparison between page visits made in the past and current year
D) the number of page views per visit

Question 74

Which of the following statements is true of clickstream data?

A) It indicates clicks made by visitors who could not access the site.
B) It indicates clicks made by every visitor in a site.
C) It indicates the total number of links to a site shown in search engine results.
D) It indicates the transfer of data from one Web site to another.

Question 75

Which of the following is a feature of optimization?

A) It enables a user to control the output of a process by changing only a single variable.
B) It analyzes historical and seasonal trends to optimize productivity.
C) It allows a user to change many variables to reach its maximum or minimum target.
D) It allows a user to "slice-and-dice" or drill down massive amounts of data stored into data warehouses.

Question 76

Which of the following is a characteristic of neural nets?

A) They imitate service robots on rescue missions.
B) They imitate the reasoning of a robot in decision making processes.
C) They draw from a base of knowledge about a particular subject area to come to a decision or recommendation.
D) They mimic the way a human brain works.

Question 77

Johanna wishes to enrol for Freemail!'s email service. Which of the following would best help Freemail! establish that Johanna is not a software bot?

A) enter a sequence of letters and numbers from an image
B) provide her contact details and Social Security Number
C) upload her photo and provide visible identification marks
D) provide an alternative email address

Question 78

The analysts at Brittos, a brand of ice-cream, recently were asked to assess revenue generated over the past five years to observe seasonal and historical trends. After extensive analysis, they arrive at the conclusion that the sales were highest during the months of July and August, the summer months in the country, and an all-time low during January, the peak of winter. Which of the following tools would have best helped them arrive at the above conclusion?

A) goal seeking analysis
B) forecasting
C) market basket analysis
D) what-if analysis

Question 79

Which of the following is a function of forecasting?

A) setting a target value and telling the program which variable to change to reach the goal
B) using semantic structures and linguistic relationships to extract meaningful business intelligence
C) calculating relationships between variables and allowing users to change some variables to see how others are impacted by it
D) analyzing seasonal trends to predict the future using statistical decision support tools

Question 80

Which of the following is an accurate definition of CAPTCHA?

A) a tool that helps social bots mine user data
B) a test that a visitor must pass before registering into a site
C) a type of software that tracks user activity on the Internet
D) a tool to assign Internet addresses to various users