BCS THE CHARTERED INSTITUTE FOR IT

BCS HIGHER EDUCATION QUALIFICATIONS

BCS Level 6 Professional Graduate Diploma in IT

MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Thursday 26th September 2013 Afternoon

Answer any THREE questions out of FIVE. All questions carry equal marks.
Time: THREE hours

Answer any Section A questions you attempt in Answer Book A

Answer any Section B questions you attempt in Answer Book B

The marks given in brackets are indicative of the weight given to each part of the question.

Calculators are NOT allowed in this examination.

Section A
Answer Section A questions in Answer Book A

A1. An MIS feasibility study considers the implementation of an MIS from several
perspectives, one of which is economic.

a) Explain the role of a feasibility study within MIS developments.

(4 marks)

b) With the aid of suitable examples, describe the process you would adopt to
assess the economic feasibility of an MIS project.
(12 marks)

c) Outline THREE perspectives, other than economic, that should be considered

as part of an MIS feasibility study.
(9 marks)

A2. For EACH of the following MIS concepts, provide an explanation and discuss its role,
or roles, within Business Intelligence (BI) systems development:

a) Star Schema.
(6 marks)
b) Applications prototyping.
(5 marks)
c) Meta Data Repository development.
(5 marks)
d) Extract-Transform-Load script.
(5 marks)
e) Interviewing.
(4 marks)

Turn over]
A3.
a) The most popular model for a Decision Support System (DSS) within the MIS
literature is the Data-Dialog-Model (DDM) paradigm model.

i) With the aid of a suitable diagram, describe the DDM paradigm model.
(8 marks)

ii) Define Individual DSS and Group DSS, and show how the DDM
paradigm model applies to both.
(6 marks)

b) Outline a suitable process whereby management could identify strategic DSS

implementations for their company.
(11 marks)
 Section B
Answer Section B questions in Answer Book B

B4. Discuss how organisations could use information from Global Positioning Satellites
(GPS) to develop new MIS.
(25 marks)

B5. An international company with many offices worldwide is about to move to a new
release of a business critical system which will be installed on servers located at
each office. The new release has taken many months to develop and will provide an
improved understanding of how the business is performing; this new information
should help the company, which is currently operating at a loss.

The companys management is considering the following two methods of

changeover:

Direct changeover
Phased changeover

a) Write a report to the management which compares the two changeover methods
being considered.
(12 marks)

b) Identify the changeover method you would recommend and provide the reasons
why you would select that method.
(13 marks)