Chapter 10 Exercises

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Chapter 10 Exercises

Chapter 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

Principles of MIS

© 2005 by Jerry Post

McGraw-Hill/Irwin

Talk with managers or use research to identify three expert systems (that are not described in the textbook). What tools were used to build the expert system? What problem is it designed to solve?

A marketing manager has asked you to help design a DSS for the marketing department. Every month marketers need to evaluate the effectiveness of their advertising campaigns and decide how to allocate their budget for the next month. They advertise only in the local area and have four basic choices: radio, television, local newspapers, and direct mail. Each month, they conduct random phone interviews to find out who sees their advertisements. They can also purchase local scanner data to determine sales of related products. Each month, the media salespeople give them the Arbitron ratings that show the number of people (and demographics) who they believe saw each advertisement. They also receive a schedule of costs for the upcoming month. As a first step in creating the DSS, identify any relevant assumptions and input and output variables, along with any models that might be useful.

Interview an expert in some area and create an initial set of rules that you could use for an expert system. If you cannot find a cooperative expert, try researching one of the following topics in your library: fruit tree propagation and pruning (what trees are needed for cross-pollination, what varieties grow best in each region, what fertilizers are needed, when they should be pruned), requirements or qualifications for public assistance or some other governmental program (check government documents), legal requirements to determine whether a contract is in effect (check books on business law).

A government official recently noted that the government is having difficulty processing applications for assistance programs (welfare). Although most applications are legitimate, several facts they contain have to be checked. For instance, welfare workers have to check motor vehicle and real estate records to see whether the applicants own cars or property. The agency checks birth, death, and marriage records to verify the existence of dependents. They sometimes examine public health data and check criminal records. It takes time to check all of the records, plus the agency needs to keep track of the results of the searches. Additionally, a few applicants have applied multiple times—sometimes in different localities. The office needs to randomly check some applications to search for fraud. Every week, summary reports have to be sent to the state offices. A key feature of these reports is that they are used to convince politicians to increase funding for certain programs. Describe how a DSS could help this agency. Hint: Identify the decisions that need to be made.

Obtain an expert system (e.g., Jess and CLIPS are free). Create a set of rules to evaluate a simple request for a car loan.

Identify a problem that would be well suited for a neural network. Explain how the system would be trained (e.g., what existing data can be used). Explain why you think the problem needs a neural network and what benefits can be gained.

For the following problems identify those that would be best suited for an expert system, decision support system, or a more advanced AI system. Explain why.
1. Helping students create a degree program.
2. Determining how many cooks are needed each night at a large restaurant.
3. Identifying potential criminals at an airport.
4. Investing in the stock market.
5. Hiring an employee for a technical job.
6. Troubleshooting the cause of power problems on a ship.
7. Predicting the impact of government economic policies.
8. Evaluating crime trends within a city.

Who will pay for the creation of software agents? What about the use of the agents? Should (or could) users be charged every time their agent calls another one? What about network usage? What would happen if your agent used your telephone to connect to thousands of other agents?

Use a spreadsheet to create the example from the HRM section. Fill in the market adjustment column so that raises match the performance appraisals. Remember, total raises cannot exceed $10,000.

DeptStor.mdbYou are a midlevel manager for a small department store. You have collected a large amount of data on sales for 2004 Your transaction system kept track of every sale (order) by customer. Most customers paid by credit card or check, so you have complete customer data. Walk-in customers who paid cash are given a separate customer number, so you still have the sales data.
You are trying to determine staffing levels for each department. You know that the store becomes much busier during the end-of-the-year holiday season. For summer months, you have thought about combining staff from the departments. From conversations with experienced workers, you have determined that there is a maximum number of customers that can be handled by one person in a department. These numbers are expressed as monthly averages in the table.
You are thinking about combining workers from some of the departments to save on staffing—especially over the spring and summer months. However, working multiple departments makes the sales staff less efficient. There are two considerations in combining staff members. First, if any of the departments are reduced to a staff of zero, sales in that department will drop by 10 percent for that month. Second, total staffing should be kept at the level defined by the monthly averages. If average staffing (total across all departments) falls below the total suggested, then sales in all departments will fall by 2 percent for each tenth of a percentage point below the suggested average.