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Course Code
MS-54
Course Title
Assignment Code :
MS-54/TMA/SEM-I/2015
Coverage
All Blocks
Note: Attempt all the questions and submit this assignment on or before 30th April, 2015 to the
coordinator of your study center.
each time an item is sold, one of that item is removed from the inventory count,
creating a closed information loop between all departments.
Data Management
The days of large file rooms, rows of filing cabinets and the mailing of documents is
fading fast. Today, most companies store digital versions of documents on servers
and storage devices. These documents become instantly available to everyone in the
company, regardless of their geographical location. Companies are able to store and
maintain a tremendous amount of historical data economically, and employees
benefit from immediate access to the documents they need.
Management Information Systems
Storing data is only a benefit if that data can be used effectively. Progressive
companies use that data as part of their strategic planning process as well as the
tactical execution of that strategy. Management Information Systems (MIS) enable
companies to track sales data, expenses and productivity levels. The information can
be used to track profitability over time, maximize return on investment and identify
areas of improvement. Managers can track sales on a daily basis, allowing them to
immediately react to lower-than-expected numbers by boosting employee
productivity or reducing the cost of an item.
Customer Relationship Management
Companies are using IT to improve the way they design and manage customer
relationships. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems capture every
interaction a company has with a customer, so that a more enriching experience is
possible. If a customer calls a call center with an issue, the customer support
representative will be able to see what the customer has purchased, view shipping
information, call up the training manual for that item and effectively respond to the
issue. The entire interaction is stored in the CRM system, ready to be recalled if the
customer calls again. The customer has a better, more focused experience and the
company benefits from improved productivity.
Management information systems are distinct from other information systems in that they are used
to analyze and facilitate strategic and operational activities.
Management information system, or MIS, broadly refers to a computer-based system that provides
managers with the tools to organize, evaluate and efficiently manage departments within an
organization. In order to provide past, present and prediction information, a management
information system can include software that helps in decision making, data resources such as
databases, the hardware resources of a system, decision support systems, people management and
project management applications, and any computerized processes that enable the department to
run efficiently.
Management Information System Managers
The role of the management information system (MIS) manager is to focus on the organization's
information and technology systems. The MIS manager typically analyzes business problems and
then designs and maintains computer applications to solve the organization's problems.
The MIS needs to be a cost-effective and efficient system for gathering information. Most of
these systems are developed internally, creating costs that cannot be passed to clients.
these "dead periods" by queuing up programs so that as soon as one program completed,
the next would start.
The concept was first described publicly in early 1957 by Bob Bemer as part of an article in
Automatic Control Magazine. The first project to implement a time-sharing system was
initiated by John McCarthy in late 1957, on a modified IBM 704, and later on an additionally
modified IBM 7090 computer. Although he left to work on Project MAC and other projects,
one of the results of the project, known as the Compatible Time-Sharing System or CTSS,
was demonstrated in November 1961. CTSS has a good claim to be the first time-sharing
system and remained in use until 1973. Another contender for the first demonstrated timesharing system was PLATO II, created by Donald Bitzer at a public demonstration at Robert
Allerton Park near the University of Illinois in early 1961. Bitzer has long said that the
PLATO project would have gotten the patent on time-sharing if only the University of
Illinois had known how to process patent applications faster, but at the time university
patents were so few and far between, they took a long time to be submitted. The first
commercially successful time-sharing system was the Dartmouth Time Sharing System.
A familiar example of time-sharing is provided by flight-reservation systems for air travel.
A system may have thousands of terminals in offices of airlines and travel agents across the
country. These terminals are tied to a central computer facility through an extensive set of
communication links. A request from a travel agent for space on a certain flight is input
directly to the central computer, where data on all flights are stored in a large hard-disk
memory bank. After the request has been keyed in, the CPU of the computer system
processes the request using the flight information stored on the disk. The output, such as a
flight confirmation, is then transmitted back to the agent. If the agents client buys a ticket,
the ticketing information is transmitted to the computer, which stores it for future use and
subtracts one seat from the space available.
Just as time-sharing systems let one computer work nearly simultaneously at many jobs,
multiprocessing systems have two or more CPUs assigned to a single function.
Multiprocessing systems are used for applications where the breakdown of a single main
computer cannot be tolerated, including flight-reservation systems and the strategic
defense systems used by the military. Often time-sharing and multiprocessing are
combined in the same system, as in the case of flight-reservation systems.
Q3. What are expert systems and how do they help in decision-making?
Can you give examples to illustrate the same? What kinds of decisions
can be appropriately programmed on expert systems? Give examples.
Ans:
In artificial intelligence, an expert system is a computer system that emulates
the decision-making ability of a human expert.Expert systems are designed to
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Decision to be made
Inductive tools
Simple rule based tools
Structured rule based tools
Hybrid tools
Domain specific tools
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rules. The only problem with these tools is that they lack high end editing
facility for design of tools.
Structured rule based tools: They offer context trees, multiple instantiation,
confidence factors, and more powerful editors compared to simple rule based
tools. Here IF-THEN rules are arranged into sets. These rule sets act as
separate knowledge bases. One set of rules can inherit the information
acquired when other rule sets are examined. These tools are more useful
when we need to process large number of rules and rules can be sub divided
into sets.
Example
Ex -sys
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Knowledge Pro
K-Vision
Age
Emycin
KAS
Leonardo
Xi Plus
Savoir
Xpert Rule
these are most useful when you have fully anticipated the use of the represented
data and you are certain that more efficient or query-friendly formats won't ever be
necessary. In this case, you needn't read much further. Your DBMS is encoded in the
standard library of your favorite language: fwrite for C users, BufferedFileStream for
Java users, etc. Ad-hoc databases are very efficient and convenient if all the data is of
low volume, is typically accessed together by an application, and a single application
at that (that is, there is not much current or future need for sharing the data
between applications). However, they become very unwieldy, inefficient and
unmanageable once they grow beyond the size of available memory, as access
patterns change, and if they need to be shared between applications.
Hash-based databases
Early algorithm specialists were quick to attack the problem of inefficient queries by
coming up with systems for creating hashes of data records, which are compact keys
that uniquely identify the record. Hashes are easy to manage and with a key, one can
rapidly retrieve the entire record. Hash-based DBMSes, which use these techniques,
are quite popular because of their simplicity and the fact that they come for free
with most UNIX systems. They are very fast, and almost every programming
language provides APIs for their access, but they tend to be quite bare on features.
They are very well-suited to situations where an application wants to pluck records
one at a time from the database, using a well-defined key. An example is for user
profiles and authentication; where the application looks up a record by user ID, does
its thing with the data, and moves on. They are less well suited to situations where
records need to be cross-referenced, or the information in the records needs to be
sliced and diced in some clever way.
Hierarchical databases
An early development in DBMS was to organize information into regular records
containing other regular records in a more structured way. These are known as
hierarchical databases and have enjoyed a bit of a revival with XML's popularity,
because XML has a general hierarchical structure. Hierarchical databases can be
quite suitable for data such as purchase histories that consist of tightly coupled
records of information, for example, customer information to purchases made to
support calls placed. The problem with hierarchical databases is that they have a
way of accumulating redundant data (which was one of the main claims of relational
databases in their battle to wrest dominance from hierarchical databases in the
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'70s). Another problem is that they can be hard to query flexibly in ways that go
against the tight coupling of the data hierarchies.
Relational databases
Relational databases are, of course, the current king of the hill in database
technologies. This doesn't mean that more data is kept in relational databases than
any other model, but rather that when one goes about asking about what the "real"
database model of choice is, he or she is most likely to be told to get relational
religion. There is some good reason for this. Relational databases are wonderful for
discouraging redundant data and for the speed of complex queries; they also have a
huge number of tools and APIs to support them. They are best used in situations
where a lot of records are being combined and cross-referenced to synthesize
results. An example might be the production data of a manufacturing firm, where
information about inventory, part specifications, personnel availability, costs, sales
and supplies need to be thoroughly analyzed in order to make production decisions.
However, like any power tool, they can be quite dangerous. Relational DBMSes
(RDBMS) are designed to model very highly structured data which has been
modeled with mathematical precision. If one's database design is not up to snuff, not
only might the advantages of the relational model be lost, but the result can actually
be worse for maintainability than with less stringent models. If you do opt for
relational databases, be sure you understand concepts such as normalization and
referential integrity. These days, almost every RDBMS uses the Structured Query
Language (SQL) for description and querying of the records.
Object databases
Object databases emerged as a way to translate the techniques of object-oriented
programming to data storage models. The data are organized as distinct objects,
each of which belongs to a class, which might use inheritance to acquire aspects of
other classes. Each object can have a set of attributes of simple types such as integer
and string, and relationships to other objects. As you can imagine, they provide a
very natural API for access using object-oriented languages such as C++, Java and
Python. Object databases can be a great choice for this reason, but it can also seduce
programmers into poor data design: techniques that make sense when the data lives
in memory can be very slow and resource-intensive when the data is stored on disk.
Semi-structured databases
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The emergence of XML has enlivened another corner of database modeling: semistructured databases. As RDBMS took over the universe, many developers lamented
that their rigorousness made them unsuitable for modeling data designed directly
for human consumption, that is, more loosely organized records including
structured documents and systems that made it easy to make changes in the model.
Efforts to provide DBMSes that accommodated such "semi-structured" data thrived
in academia until XML took them to the mainstream. Most XML formats define semistructured data, and so XML -- whether directly stored in files or in an XML
repository -- provide a great deal of flexibility, especially in web-based systems
where the documents are as important as the structured records. The main
drawback is lack of efficiency. The data typically take up much more of the available
resources than with other database models, and queries can be slow and
cumbersome to set up. Semi-structured databases are very strong where documents
and more structured data coexist, such as Intranets and web-based applications.
Languages
Since most databases a vital organ for a complete application, the interface between
the database and the application development language is quite important. The
DBMS of choice should have a natural and efficient API in your programming
language of choice, and preferably more than one, since competition improves
quality across the board. Because developer effort is usually more expensive than
run-time resources, it is probably most important that you choose a DBMS that
supports the APIs and languages with which you are comfortable. It's often worth
even going to a database model that is less suitable to the data in question if it is
more suitable to the skills of the available developers.
Devices
Of course the DBMS of choice must work on the platform used by the rest of the
application (or must at least be accessible from this platform), but there might be
other platform needs as well. Be sure to consider who might end up using your
system, and choose a DBMS that would run on other important platforms in future.
This is not always directly obvious; for instance, do you think your database might
grow until it is too much for your current hardware to handle? If so, does your
DBMS run on platforms that support clustering? Does it have special features to take
advantage of clustering?
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Features
Probably the most important general features to consider in your DBMS hunt are
security-related. Consider how thoroughly the DBMS requires authentication from
users and keeps an audit trail of the accesses. But security goes beyond keeping out
malicious users. Be sure your backup supports backup and restore, not just by
archiving your raw database files, but also the ability to integrate into incremental
backup regimens. It might be enough to have options to dump to or restore from
structured text (which can be incrementally backed up using tools such as diff), and
of course direct integration into the backup software for the system as a whole is
even better. Structured text dump and restore are also a boon for interchange with
other systems. Examples include comma-delimited formats and dumped sequences
of SQL commands.
finding organizations or companies that are doing something in the best possible
way and learning how they do it in order to emulate them. Organizations or
companies often attempt to benchmark against the best in the world rather than the
best in their particular industry.
OVERRELIANCE COULD LEAD TO
- it may restrict the focus to what is already being done.
-By emulating current exemplary processes, benchmarking is a catch-up
MANAGERIAL tool or technique rather than a way for the organization or company
to gain managerial dominance or marketing share.
-can kill creativity.
-may not generate new ideas.
-may not be a competitive analysis.
-What is best for someone else may not suit you
-Poorly defined benchmarks may lead to wasted effort and meaningless results.
-Incorrect comparisons
-Reluctance to share information
Q5) Differentiate among Trojans, Worms and Viruses. Give one example
for each.Computer virus is a major threat to computer security. Justify
the statement.
Ans:
Trojan: Trojans are malicious programs that perform actions that have not
been authorized by the user. These actions can include:
Deleting data
Blocking data
Modifying data
Copying data
Disrupting the performance of computers or computer networks
Examples:
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In order for a Trojan horse to spread, you must, in effect, invite these
programs onto your computers--for example, by opening an email attachment.
The PWSteal. Trojan is a Trojan .Govware Trojans, Trojan Horse
Trojan viruses are most likely to gain entry into a computer by way of an
email attachment. When a user opens an attachment it executes the code,
allowing it to install. Another way is through various messengers that
create connections between computers.
When the code is executed the virus goes to work infecting file after file.
The virus designer will ultimately gain control over the computer and
will be able to access all available files. An infected computer will begin
to operate slowly and will exhibit pop-ups from time to time. Eventually
the computer will cease to operate, or crash.
Antivirus software is a good way to protect your computer from Trojan
horse and other types of viruses. Regular updates to this software are the
key to preventing viruses. It is also good practice to delete emails from
unknown sources without opening them.
Once a computer is infected, the virus is extremely difficult to eradicate.
The best protection is prevention.
I Love You Virus
One well-known Trojan virus was the "I Love You" virus that infected
millions of computers worldwide. The virus exploited users through a
Visual Basic script that was attached to an email. This virus infected
computers in the United States, Asia and Europe forcing businesses to
completely shut down email servers.
Worms
Computer worms are similar to viruses in that they replicate functional
copies of themselves and can cause the same type of damage. In contrast
to viruses, which require the spreading of an infected host file, worms
are standalone software and do not require a host program or human
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