In-Class Discussion Questions
In-class discussion questions – Week 13 (Dec 5)
- What is a jobless recovery?
- What are the causes of a jobless recovery?
- What kind of jobs are increasingly being replaced by computers and robots?
- What kind of jobs are increasingly being outsourced abroad?
- What kind of jobs will be neither replaced by technologies nor outsourced abroad in the next 30 years?
- What kind of skills do these jobs require?
- What does it take for you to survive challenges in the job market?
- In a job interview, how would you answer this question – “Why should we hire you?”
- If the interviewer asks what you’ve learned in MIS 3534, what would you say?
- What would it take to be a great CIO like Mr. Barton?
- What should be your competitive advantages as an MIS major that differentiate yourself from other majors?
- What should be your core competencies?
In-class discussion questions – Week 12 (Nov 28)
- Why have Airbnb or Uber been growing so fast?
- Without potential guests, hosts would not list their apartments at Airbnb. Without apartments listed, guests would not try Airbnb. How did Airbnb solve this problem?
- Why is there a “Girls Free Night” at a night club?
- What happened to EJ, an Airbnb host?
- What would happen if Airbnb did nothing in response to EJ’s incident?
- What are the policies in Uber to manage the pool of drivers?
In-class discussion questions – Week 11 (Nov 14)
- What is eChoupal? With eChoupal, what is ITC trying to accomplish?
- How did the old supply chain of soybean work? Who are the losers and the winners?
- What are the “choke points” in the old supply chain of soybean?
- What are the benefits of eChoupal to farmers?
- What is the other information from eChoupal to farmers?
- Is ITC a charity? Why is it concerned about farmers’ lives and well-being?
- What bottleneck do Amazon.com and Netflix eliminate?
- How do FreshDirect, Uber, Airbnb, and Khan Academy disrupt the existing industries by address which bottlenecks?
In-class discussion questions – Week 10 (Nov 7)
- What would be the ramifications of the incident in IT Adventures Ch. 10? (Imagine the worst.)
- Why did Mr. Wells, IVK VP of Legal, demand to pull the plugs?
- How would you explain “wipe production servers clean, and rebuild the production configuration” (p. 170) to Mr. Williams?
- Among the three options in Ch 11, What is the least costly option? What is the most costly option?
- What is the most conservative option? What is the most risky option?
- What are the reasons to disclose the security incidents? What would be the reasons not to disclose?
In-class discussion questions – Week 9 (Oct 31)
- If you were Mr. Barton, how would you explain the situation in Chapter 10 to your CEO, Mr. Carl Williams, in English?
- If you were Mr. Barton, how would you explain the situation in Chapter 10 to Wall Street analysts you’re scheduled to meet today?
- Did an attacker or attackers intrude inside of IVK’s systems?
- How would you explain the difference between a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and an intrusion?
- How would you explain “transaction is jammed up” or “the database is corrupted” (p. 164-165)?
- What does it mean by “Apparently a database index file had been somehow renamed, and another substituted in its place”? (p. 167)
- Why can’t IVK figure out whether an intrusion occurred or something else happened?
- What is the “rush-a-change-into-production” thing? (p. 166)
- For Cho to find evidence of an intrusion, what does he need?
- What would be the ramifications of this crash? (Imagine the worst.)
- Why did Mr. Wells, IVK VP of Legal, demand to pull the plugs?
- How would you explain “wipe production servers clean, and rebuild the production configuration” (p. 170) to Mr. Williams?
- Among the three options in Ch 11, What is the least costly option? What is the most costly option?
- What is the most conservative option? What is the most risky option?
- What are the reasons to disclose the security incidents? What would be the reasons not to disclose?
In-class discussion questions – Week 8 (Oct 24)
- Do you fix your car by yourself or have a mechanic do maintenance? Why?
- How do you choose your mechanic? Based on what?
- Why does Apple outsource the entire manufacturing operations to offshore vendors?
- Why would a company outsource IT operation and development to an external vendor?
- What would be the reasons that Otis DID NOT outsource the development of e*Logistics?
- What’s a doctor-patient confidentiality?
- What is the Infrastructure Replacement (IR) project for at IVK?
- Why is this project not going well?
- Why did IVK select NetiFects for the IR project vendor?
- When selecting NetiFects, what homework did IVK do?
- How do you choose your mechanic? Based on what?
- If you did not do “due diligence” in finding an outsourcing vendor, what would happen to you?
- What would be your choice among the three vendors in Ch. 14?
In-class discussion questions – Week 7 (Oct 17)
- Which government spending do you want to cut – military, education, highway?
- Is there a reason not to cut military spending? Is there a reason not to cut education?
- Who controls the IT budget at IVK?
- On what basis do the business units at IVK pay for IT?
- Why had Mr. Davies, the former CIO, had to set up “slush funds”? How did he secure the slash funds?
- The slush fund is technically what? from accounting standpoint?
- Why is Mr. John Cho requesting an immediate funding on IT security?
- Why has the request for IT security funding kept being denied?
- What’s the consideration and decision of Mr. Barton in terms of IT budget funding and controls? What’s his rationale?
- If he controls the entire budget, will all the problems go away?
- What does Maggie, Mr. Barton’s girlfriend/consultant, mean by “one neck in the noose”?
- Suppose that you pay income tax and can live in any house you want for free! (Your government provides housing for you.) What would happen?
In-class discussion questions – Week 7 (Oct 10)
- Why does an IT system need maintenance? It does not become rusty!
- On Page 58 of the textbook, it reads “we’ve run closer to 5 to 6 percent of sales on IT spending. Which, by the way, Davies thought wasn’t enough to keep IT assets from degrading over time..” Why does Mr. Davies mean by degrading?
- If it needs to spend money in maintaining IT systems, how much does a company need to spend on it?
- What happens with too little spending in maintenance? What happens with too much?
- Spending in IT maintenance should depend on what?
In-class discussion questions – Week 5 (Oct 3)
- How can we justify a large amount of investments in e*Logistics or Common Digital Platform?
- Why is security a concern at an airport?
- Which individuals should an airport manage for security?
- Which information does a security system have to maintain? Which process does the security system have to handle?
- What are the risks from the current manual, inefficient processes in managing airport employee credentials?
- What could be the WORST-CASE scenarios from a security failure at SFO?
- What is your recommendation for SAFE Project at SFO? Go or no go? How certain are you? Are you certain that everything will pan out as predicted?
- Which assumption or prediction is most sensitive (critical)?
- What are the problems with the ROI analysis we just did? What does this fail to account for?
In-class discussion questions – Week 4 (Sep 26)
- What is a Unified Service Organizations (USO) (Trinity case p. 3)?
- Why does Trinity implement a “Common Digital Platform”?
- Why is IT important in hospitals?
- What kind of standards do we enjoy in our daily life?
- Why do many European nations use Euro as a common currency?
- Why do the U.K. and some others refuse to adopt Euro?
- What are the benefits from a standard?
- What would be the costs in having a standard? By having a standard, we are losing what?
- Why does the U.S. refuse to adopt the Metric System?
- Why do states adopt E-Zpass for a common standard payment system?
- Why have IT systems at IVK gotten so complex?
- When there is freedom, employees and business units are using different kinds of ITs, whatever they want. What are the problems in this case?
- What does it mean by coupling in IT systems?
- Can the collections system at IVK be up-and-running without communicating with the loan operation system or the financial/accounting system?
In-class discussion questions – Week 3 (Sep 19)
- What were the problems before e*Logistics in Otis’ business processes?
- How does e*Logistics address these problems and what are the improvement achieved by it?
- Who would be unhappy with the changes in the business processes caused by e*Logistics?
- How do you think Otis managed and overcame these challenges? Who do you think played a key role?
- Why does a company acquire and merge another?
- Why does Trinity Health acquire and merge other hospitals?
- What is the different between fee-for-service and fee-for-value in healthcare?
We will discuss these questions in-class on Monday, Sep 19.
In-class discussion questions – Week 2 (Sep 12)
We will discuss the following questions in-class on Monday, September 12.
- What does it mean by a bargaining power of buyers? When would buyers have a strong bargaining power?
- Any example of switching costs for buyers?
- Suppose you’ve got $300 millions from winning a lottery. You want to start a new airline company. What does it takes for you to make the first flight take off?
- What would be substitutes for a travel by flight? Wha would be substitutes for grocery stores?
- According to the Otis case, which business is more profitable? Elevator manufacturing or service?
- In the Otis case, “The service market attracted many participants because of its steady demand, low barriers of entry, and high profitability.” (p. 3) Doesn’t it mean that the service market is not profitable for Otis?
- How often do you change your doctor? Why?
- Will Otis customers (building owners or managers) change an elevator service company often? Why or why not?
- Can you think of an example of bundle around us? Why do firms sell a bundle?
- Why would bundling up an elevator (product) and maintenance services together (i.e. total solutions) be more profitable than selling an elevator and services individually?
- How were things going before OTISLINE? How now are things going after OTISLINE?
- What are the improvements in customer service from OTISLINE?
Online discussion questions – Aug 29
- What should be qualifications for a position of a Chief Information Officer?
- Why do Mr. Carl Williams and the board of directors at IVK choose Mr. Jim Barton for a new CIO?
- Should a CIO be chosen among technically-trained managers or business-background managers?
- Which skill is easier to learn? IT or Management? Why?
- What does it take for you to become a successful CIO?
What do you think? Leave your thoughts that you couldn’t share in-class.
In-class discussion questions – Week 1 (Aug 31)
We will discuss these questions in-class on Aug. 31.
- How would you explain about the job description of a chief information officer (CIO)? What does he or she do?
- What kind of person do you think a CIO would be?
- How important is IT at IVK Corporation, a fictional company in our textbook? Can IVK function without IT?
- What is the current situation (financial, stock market) that IVK is at?
- Should a CIO be chosen among technically-trained managers or business-background managers?
- What does it mean by “IT management is about management” (Textbook p. 10)?
- What does it mean by “IT department is positioned to understand how the business works better than any other department” (p. 11)?