As part of the annual report for the fiscal year just ended, Lara is working on a grid that summarizes the major decisions that the small business for which she works made during the year. As part of her review, she is identifying whether a decision was impacted by factors internal to the company, or external. 1. Which of the following does not appear on Lara's list of external factors and why?
A. Users were not satisfied by the current tracking database because it was difficult to learn
and lacked flexibility.
B. The bar code technology that they have always used to monitor the movement of their
products from the factory floor to the retail checkout counter has begun to be replaced by
RFID tags.
C. In-house database users wanted information systems support for new features that did not
exist when the system was first developed five years earlier.
D. The current systems have, over time, become a patchwork of changes and corrections that
cannot support the company's overall sales volume.
2. Which of the following does not appear on Lara's list of external factors?
A. The economy experienced a period of expansion, requiring the company to respond with a
scalable system that could handle the additional volume and growth.
B. Sales reps requested a more powerful sales analysis report.
C. The firm's closest competitor launched a new sales incentive with which Lara's firm
needed to compete.
D. Congress instituted an Internet sales tax.
3. Sam is the analyst with the responsibility for assessing the economic feasibility of the new system that
his team has been hired to develop for Widgets, Inc. Which of the following is not an area in which Sam must estimate costs to determine TCO?
a. licenses
b. facility costs
c. cost of competitors' systems
d. equipment