THE WALLACE E. CARROLL SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
MD240: Management Information Systems

Spring 2002
Comments or Suggestions?  E-mail Prof. Heim



Case Study Questions: Woodstrat: A Support System for Strategic Management
(http://www.wiley.com/college/turban2e/pdf/part1.pdf)
1. Why should modern strategic planning be a dynamic process? How does this differ from traditional strategic planning? How does the Woodstrat system facilitate modern strategic planning?
2. What challenges (data oriented and otherwise) were encountered while developing the Woodstrat system?
3. What side benefits and/or new employee tasks resulted from using Woodstrat?
4. Why was it important for managers to be able to quickly access measures of critical success factors? Do some measures find more acceptance among managers?
5. Was the choice of IT architecture for Woodstrat appropriate for the strategic objectives of Metsa-Serla? How do you think the Woodstrat system should have changed technologically since its development? How would such changes have improved the strategic planning facilitated by Woodstrat?


Case Study Questions: AT&T Wireless Knows Its Customers
(http://www.ncr.com/repository/case_studies/data_warehousing/att_wireless.htm) or (http://www.ncr.com/repository/case_studies/pdf/sp6696.pdf)
1. What were the CRM goals of AT&T Wireless?
2. How did the system allow AT&T Wireless to know who its current customers are? Why is this important to know?
3. What level of detail is needed in CRM data for it to be useful?
4. What are the dimensions/measures along which customers and AT&T will benefit from the CRM?
5. What future activities will AT&T undertake with its system? Are these activities enough (i.e. can you identify additional activities the system might perform to further retain customers)?


Case Study Questions: Nabisco Net Brings Sweet Success
(http://www.wiley.com/college/turban2e/pdf/part3.pdf)
1. Which segments is Nabisco attempting to understand and serve better using intelligent agents?
2. What problems were encountered in developing and deploying Nabisco's intelligent agent system?
3. What data mining activities are done by the intelligent agents?
4. Who are the end-users of such a system? How can the agents track end-user behavior patterns?
5. Why is the system connected to the EIS?
6. What is the role of the expert system in ISIS?
7. How does all this IT (i.e. ISIS) contribute to the phenomenal growth rate of Nabisco? Can smaller companies successfully compete against Nabisco when it has technologies such as ISIS?