1. (a) Explain what Business-Information Technology alignment is and why is it important for
organizations’ success? Bring an example to support your answer (2 marks)
(b) Consider Porter’s five Strategies for Competitive Advantages. Firstly, explain why do you
think an organization’s choice of these strategies involves ‘trade-offs’?
Secondly, refer to Budgetdirect.com.au. Critically analyze which strategies seem to be
adopted by BudgetDirect, and what trade-offs BudgetDirect may have been made in
choosing particular strategies over others from Porter’s five strategies for competitive
advantage (4 marks)
(6 marks in total)
2. Australian Taxation Office (ATO) is the main Government organization in Australia for
collection of tax money from individuals and businesses. Suppose ATO suffers from several
IT inefficiencies at the moment, and they believe their IT services and operations need an
overhaul without significant disruptions to their service to the community. Given this, would
you recommend a Business Process Reengineering (PRR) or a Business Process
Improvement (BPI) approach? (1 mark) Support your answer with two reasons (4 marks)
(5 marks in total)
3. In a recent interview with CBNC’s Squawk Alley, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said
Facebook is addictive like cigarettes and should be regulated like big tobacco. He said: “I
think that you do it exactly the same way that you regulated the cigarette industry. Here’s a
product: Cigarettes. They’re addictive. You know, they’re not good for you…There’s a lot of
parallels,”
(a) Do you agree or disagree with the above statement? Why (2 mark)
(b) Conduct a research on the Internet and discuss four negative effects social media sites
such as Facebook can have on users’ well-being (4 marks).
(6 marks in total)
4. (a) What is design thinking and why it is increasingly being adopted by organizations? (2
mark)
(b) Using an example of a real-world company’s experience with design thinking, express
whether and why you agree or disagree with the following statement. Why? (2 marks)
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“The key in design thinking is the hard skills of design, Photoshop, CAD, or database
engineering, and other outcomes like beautiful software code. Design thinking has very firm
and a specific deliverable, like a user interface or the consumer messaging”
(4 marks in total)
(Use references to support your answer)
5. One challenge of small organizations is a shortage of available fund and money for IT
investment and for acquiring state of art IT resources and infrastructure. Grid computing can
help small organizations to tackle this challenge. Explain four benefits of grid computing for
small organizations in accessing IT resources
(4 marks).
6. (a) Differentiate between blog and wikis. (2 marks)
(b) Why influential people or CEOs (like Bill Gate’s Gatesnotes.com) may use Blogs and not
Wikis to share news and developments? (2 marks)
(4 marks in total)
7. (a) Explain three reasons that show how Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platforms as a
Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service are similar? (3 marks)
(b) Discuss how are they different? (3 marks)
(6 marks in total)