BSAD 8020 / ISQA 8060 - RESEARCH IN MIS

1. Your company spends approximately 75% of the IT budget on application software. The industry average is 66%. The head of the IS department has asked you to develop a proposal for a study to determine why applicaiton software is such a large percentage of the IT expenditures in your firm. Present your proposal for such a study.

2. Your company hired a consulting firm to make recommendations on how to decrease turnover in the IS department. The consulting firm has completed its study and submitted a report to your supervisor, the head of the IS department. Your supervisor has asked you to critique the report and put in writing your comments on the report's quality. Discuss in detail how you will determine the quality of the research report

1. How is object-oriented programming related (or not related) to the earlier programming paradigms of unstructured programming, structured programming and information hiding? Develop your answer around the characteristics of each of the three disciplined paradigms that contribute to ease of development, reuse, and maintainability.

2. To achieve the benefits of object technology, changes in MIS's internal management have been recommended. What are these management changes and what contributions will these managers make at each stage in the development life cycle?

3. How is object-oriented programming related (or not related) to the earlier programming paradigms of unstructured programming, structured programming and information hiding? Develop your answer around the characteristics of each of the three disciplined paradigms that contribute to ease of development, reuse, and maintainability.

4. To achieve the benefits of object technology, changes in MIS's internal management have been recommended. What are these management changes and what contributions will these managers make at each stage in the development life cycle?

• Describe Boehm's Spiral Model in detail; focus on the influences that following this model will have on project management. Be sure to address the planning, monitoring and control, and communications aspects of project management in your answer.

1. Answer both of the following:
   • List at least four application layer protocols developed under the TCP/IP architecture and fully describe the functionality of each protocol.

   • Discuss the layers of TCP/IP standard architecture and also describe the characteristics of representative protocols in the Transport and Internet layer of TCP/IP.

2. Discuss the Internet so that readers of your manuscript can have a clear picture on the important issues of the Internet. Hint: Discuss it from the perspectives of history, governance, Internet access mechanism, addressing, standard protocols, and existing and emerging business applications.

1. Trace the evolution of corporate applications as the computing industry has grown to embrace the client/server paradigm of computing. In doing so, identify the principal ways in which applications and the supporting infrastructure have changed, the factors driving this change, the challenges that have arisen, and the solutions that have evolved to meet the challenges. What are the current dominant trends in client/server computing? To what extent do they reflect a continuation of past trends, or the emergence of something new?

2. Discuss object-orientation as it relates to client/server computing. (Hint: a short answer is an incomplete answer. This is a broad question.)

1. The Employment Manager's Preference (TEMP, Inc.) is a company that places temporary workers in companies during periods of peak business. The following is an abbreviated description of the business. TEMP keeps files of candidates who have applied for temporary employment, which includes their name, SSN, address, work and home phone numbers, a list of reference names and telephone numbers, and the date on which they submitted an application. With each file, TEMP records their qualifications. The following table shows examples of qualification codes used and their descriptions:

   SEC45	Secretarial skills, 45 words per minute typing skill
   SEC60	Secretarial skills, 60 words per minute typing skill
   SYSOP-Novell	Systems Administrator with skill in Novell Netware
   SYSOP-WinNT	Systems Administrator with skill in Windows NT
   DBA-Oracle	Database Administrator with skill in Oracle

   A candidate can have several qualifications.

   TEMP also maintains data on available positions. Each opening is given a unique identifier, and TEMP keeps track of the company posting the opening, the company contact person, the company address and phone number, the qualification(s) sought, the starting date, approximate ending date, hourly pay, and the current number of people sought for it. (If more than one person is sought for the opening, this number is decremented as individuals are hired. When the full number have been hired, the opening is considered filled). TEMP maintains the status of the opening: open, filled, withdrawn. Each opening may have several qualifications associated with it.

   TEMP keeps track of the history of an individual's employment through them. That is, TEMP maintains data on the company in which the individual was a temporary worker, the start and end dates, the pay rate, the average number of hours per week, and the overall rating given to the employee by the company (excellent, good, fair, poor). The job history also includes a reference to the job opening that the individual's employment filled.

   1. Draw an entity-relationship diagram for this scenario, including entities, attributes, and relationships with cardinality indicators. If you need to make assumptions, please do so and write them down.
   2. Design appropriately normalized tables for this database.
   3. Formulate SQL queries to answer each of the following questions.
      1. List the job history of 'John McHenney'
      2. List the name and SSN of all individual's who have worked at "Belinsky's Ball Bearing Plant"
      3. For each company, list the number of unfilled openings posted by that company.
      4. List the total number of temporary workers sought.
      5. For each open opening, list the candidates who meet at least one of the desired qualifications.

2. Your database has slowed to a crawl, and users are getting irate. What could be causing the problems? List the possible causes. For each cause, indicate possible solutions. If you need to make assumptions, please do so and write them down.