Question

MultiTech Interview Situation:

You have an interview for an IT position with MultiTech, a large telecommunications company, and you want to learn more about the firm and its organizational structure. To prepare for the interview, you decide to review your knowledge about corporations, including the following questions:

1. What are the four organizational levels in a typical company?

2. How can you classify companies based on their mix of products and services?

3. What is empowerment?

4. What types of information systems might a large company use?

Rainbow’s End Interview Situation: Your MultiTech interview seemed to go well, but you did not get the job. During the meeting, the interviewer mentioned that MultiTech uses structured analysis and relies heavily on modeling, prototyping, and CASE tools. Thinking back, you realize that you did not fully understand those terms. As you prepare for an interview with Rainbow’s End, a large retail chain, you decide to review some IT terms and concepts. You want to be ready for the following questions:

1. What are the main differences between structured, O-O, and agile development methods?

2. What is a CASE tool and what does it do?

3. What is business process modeling and how is it done?

4. What is prototyping and why is it important?

Answer 1

multi tech interview :

1a)

The four (4) organizational levels in a typical company are:

1. Top Management

2.Middle Management

3. Lower Management

4. Operational Management

Top Management :

Top managers develop long-range plans, called strategic plans that define the company’s overall mission and goals. Strategic planning focuses more on issues that affect the company’s future survival and growth, including long-term IT plans. Top managers focus on the entire business enterprise and use information systems to set the company’s course and direction. To develop strategic plan, top managers also need information from outside the company, such as economic forecasts, technology trends, competitive threats, governmental issues and shareholder concerns.

2.Middle Management :

Middle managers focus their goals on a shorter time frame, usually ranging from one month to one year. They develop plans to achieve business objectives in a process called tactical planning. Middle managers delegate authority and responsibility to team leaders or supervisors and then provide direction, necessary resources, and feedback on performance as tasks are completed. They need more detailed information than top managers do, but somewhat less information than team leaders and supervisors. They also use business support systems, knowledge management systems, and user productivity systems to perform their jobs.

3. Lower Management :

Supervisors and team leaders oversee operational employees and carry out day-to-day operational plans. They coordinate operational tasks, make necessary decisions, and ensure that the decision support information, consults knowledge management systems, and relies on user productivity systems to carry out their day-to-day responsibilities.

4. Operational Management :

Operational employees primarily use TP systems to enter and receive data they need to perform their jobs. In many companies, operational employees also need information to handle tasks and make decisions that were assigned to supervisors. This trend, called empowerment, gives employees more responsibility and accountability.

  

2a)

The plan for how the business determines which products it will make or stock May develop completely new products May expand or modify their current product lines. If you are in business you will have gathered very quickly that the customer is king (or queen). Unless you have a total monopoly of a product or service there are plenty of other suppliers that your customers can turn to because the strength of your products or services forms the foundation for your entire business.

A strong product or service is one that lots of people want, or even better – must answer the question:

Does your product or service solve a problem?
Does your product or service deliver some amazing benefits?

3a)

EMPOWERMENT

It is the process of increasing the capacity of individuals or groups to make choices and to transform those choices into desired actions and outcomes. Central to this process are actions which both build individual and collective assets, and improve the efficiency and fairness of the organizational and institutional context which govern the use of these assets.

4a)

4. Types of Information Systems:

a. Office Information Systems ( OIS)

b. Transaction Processing Systems (TPS)

c.Management Information Systems (MIS)

d.Decision Support Systems (DSS)

e. Executive Suport Systems (ES)

: The most common information systems might large company use are the major types these are the ESS, DIS and MIS.

The MIS refers to nearly all of the Computers and their various components along with the Software that is used to run these systems. TPS refers to a system that collects, stores, modifies and retrieves transaction of an organization. ESS are the needed tools and information for Top Management to make the proper decisions to run the company. Decisions at this level are never capricious. TPS generally are the methods and systems developed so that companies can keep an eye on their supply chain.

Rainbow’s End Interview Situation:  

1a)

Agile software development refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.
Object-oriented programming (OOP”’) is a programming paradigm that uses “objects” – data structures consisting of data fields and methods together with their interactions – to design applications and computer programs.

2a)

CASE, stands for Computer Aided Software Engineering. To put it simply they are tools to help you design software systems. Anywhere from simple applications to complex multiple component distributed systems.

Typically they provide support for a variety of design methodologies from simple flowcharts, to state diagrams, etc. You use them to “draw” out your system and it’s components. Some can even go so far as to generate code based on how detailed your definition is.

You can draw the objects in your system, identify their attributes and behaviours, and relationships with other objects in the system. When I say objects these code me low level classes within an application or system components (whole applications, databases, etc.).

3a)

Business Process Modeling (BPM) in systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current process may be analyzed and improved. BPM is typically performed by business analysts and managers who are seeking to improve process efficiency and quality. The process improvements identified by BPM may or may not require information technology involvement, although that is a common driver for the need to model a business process, by creating a process master. Business process modeling results in the improvement of the way tasks performed by the business. They can pick up errors or cons about the way processes are currently being performed and model an improved way of carrying out these processes.

4a)

In the Systems development Life Cycle (SLDC), Prototyping refers to the creation if a rudimentary working model of an Information System (IS). That is built to test out the concepts and the functionality of the IS. It is reworked as needed, to allow for changes in functionality as well as demands if the IS. This is important as the IS are deemed as Dynamic until the correct SLDC is nailed down and set.

A prototype is basically a mock-up. In the database world you can use software to simulate a situation or even build a mock-up database. A Mock-up database will be a ‘simple’ version of the intended end product. It will not have all of the tables that the finished product would have, or all of the fields in the tables it does have.An example might be a billing engine that you are building. If you are going to embed busines logic into the database you might put together a functional mock-up of a certain core component of this system, say the tables that contain computed interest and Billing rule logic. From there you might write stored procedures that are to computer these values; and run it to verify the results.

This is important because if you have some ideas or thoughts on how to handle a given situation you can produce a mock-up of a couple implementation strategies and test these for best result.

If you simply build out your entire database and application without testing some of your concepts you will often find yourself with a completed project that is less than optimal in functionality, scale, and performance.

Always consider your implementation options and test each (or your top two or three methods) to determine your best of breed approach. You may know in your head what will work best but you would be surprised at the results when tested; at times.