THE INSTITUTE OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS OF SRI LANKA CERTIFICATE IN ACCOUNTING & BUSINESS - II EXAMINATION INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PILOT PAPER

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1 Copyright Reserved No. of Pages = 06 No. of Questions = 08 THE INSTITUTE OF CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS OF SRI LANKA CERTIFICATE IN ACCOUNTING & BUSINESS - II EXAMINATION INFORMATION MANAGEMENT PILOT PAPER Time allowed : 3 hours Marks : 100 marks Instructions to candidates: (1) Part A : All two (2) questions are compulsory and must be answered. Part B : Answer any four (4) questions out of the six (6) questions (2) Begin each answer on a separate page. (3) All answers should be in one language, in the medium applied for, in the answer booklets provided. PART A Case Study for Question No. 01 and 02 (both questions must be answered) The hot air balloon is the oldest successful human-carrying flight technology. On November 21, 1783, in Paris, France, the first untethered manned flight was made by two Frenchman. Anyhow the techniques of ballooning have changed slightly since the first adventurers braved the elements and scaled the heights. 1

2 Sky Magic is a recently established hot air ballooning company in Sri Lanka and has enjoyed increasing popularity since the inception in At the start the company only offered balloon rides taking off from a School Ground in Elpitiya. With the increase in the demand from both locals and tourists alike, Sky Magic now offers more rides at a number of new locations across the country such as Kandalama, Galle, Sigiriya, Dambulla, Jaffna and Yala. At present Sky Magic operates from a small office in Nawala. The hot air balloon ride schedules and bookings are managed with the help of simple software tools such as MS Excel and MS Access. Customers have to visit the office to do the reservations by filling a form and making the full payment. Apart from direct sales Sky Magic also attracts a lot of customers through various tour operators and hotels that the company has affiliated with. With the increase in the demand, this semi manual process has become difficult to manage and is resulting in long queues, mistakes in the bookings and a lot of customer dissatisfaction. To overcome this situation and to improve the market reach and the visibility, the Management of Sky Magic has decided to launch its own Corporate Web Site with the facility for Online Bookings by both the Customers and affiliated partners. As the first step the company has recruited an experienced Information Technology Project Manager to provide the necessary consultation to the management and to oversee the successful implementation of this Project. Question No. 01 (a) Suppose you are the Information Technology Project Manager of Sky Magic and the company asks you to launch a Corporate Website with the facility for Online Bookings by both direct customers as well as affiliated partners such as tour operators and hotels. Your first key decision in this project would be to choose the mode of implementation Build, Buy or Outsource. Which mode would you select and why? (4 marks) (b) Using a diagram Illustrate and briefly describe the steps involved in the Information System Development Process. (c) Apart from the Online Booking facility propose four (4) other features that you can provide through the Website to add value to the Customers. Question No. 02 (Total 20 marks) (a) As the Information Technology Project Manager of Sky Magic you are required to develop a Business Case for a fully-fledged e Commerce (Online Booking / Payment) 2

3 Solution to the management. List two typical advantages and two typical disadvantages to either the buyer or the seller of an e Commerce Solution of this nature. (4 marks) (b) When various organizations go online, they have to decide which e Business models best suit their goals. Briefly describe four most adopted e Business models. (c) What are the Information Systems security threats that you will have to safeguard the System from? Briefly describe four such security threats. (Total 20 marks) Answer any four (04) questions Question No. 03 PART B (a) All information is not useful and helpful to a business. Information requirements should be analyzed very carefully to ensure the usefulness of such information. There are number of characteristics of good information. Briefly describe three such characteristics. (b) A Computer based Information System is an information system that relies on computer hardware and software for processing and disseminating information. Briefly describe three components of a Computer based Information System. Question No. 04 (a) Business organizations consist of different levels of management and hierarchies. An important determinant of the manager s job is the hierarchical level the manager works in. Using a suitable diagram Illustrate and briefly describe each of these management levels. 3

4 (b) There are different kinds of Information Systems which serve different levels of the organizations. Briefly describe three such Systems. Question No. 05 (a) Understanding the characteristics of different types of communication media and how they relate to other aspects of a network is necessary for the development of a successful network. Network communication media can be divided into two categories : a. Guided (wired) media b. Unguided (wireless) media Briefly describe three types of media from each of the above two categories. (b) Many people use the terms Internet and World Wide Web (WWW), or just the Web, interchangeably, but the two terms are not synonymous. The Internet is made up of various services that provide functionality. It is a type of an infrastructure through which various services are facilitated. Apart from World Wide Web, list five other services facilitated through the Internet and briefly describe two of them. Question No. 06 (a) There are various software development approaches which are adopted during the software development process. These approaches are also referred to as "Software Development Process Models". Each process model follows a particular life cycle in order to ensure successful outcome in the process of software development. List out six (6) of these processes and briefly describe two of them with diagrams if necessary. (10 marks) (b) The aim of obtaining user requirement is to provide an accurate requirement specification for a project. To produce the specification, Business Analyst will have to obtain requirements from the users. There are various requirements gathering methods adopted by the Business Analyst. List five (5) such methods. (5 marks) 4

5 Question No. 07 (a) Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance, accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP Systems automate this activity with an integrated software application. Most ERP Systems are module based to permit automating only a selected set of functions in an organization. Imagine you are an ERP consultant for a shoe manufacturing company. i. What are the advantages of implementing an ERP System that you would use to convince the management of the company of the need to implement an ERP? Give five advantages. ii. List five ERP System Modules that you would recommend implementing at this company. (10 marks) (b) At its lowest level, everything in a computer s memory is represented by numbers whether the information consists of letters, numerals, punctuation marks, symbols or computer commands. The computer represents these numbers with just two symbols 0 or 1 rather than with the ten numeric symbols with which we are familiar from the base 10 number system. In other words, the computer uses binary numbers (0 and 1) instead of decimal numbers. Today, the amount of information stored and transferred through a computer ranges into many millions of bytes. Starting with 1 byte which comprises of 8 bits, state four (4) such units of higher magnitude and their numerical relationships. (5 marks) Question No. 08 (a) The OS is one of the most fundamental parts of a computer. In a sense, it s an integral part of the machine, and is as important to know about as the computer itself. The purpose of an operating system is to organize and control hardware and software so that the device it lives in behaves in a flexible but predictable way. There are five (5) basic components of an Operating System. Using a diagram illustrate and briefly describe the functionality of each of these components. 5

6 (b) Both Compilers and Interpreters are used in executing programs written in high-level Languages in a PC by converting them into machine understandable low-level instructions. Describe how Compilers and Interpreters operate. 6