The Management Process – Exam #2 – Flashcards

As a class project, Senora is working with other classmates to create a company that would market NASCAR memorabilia. Senora's teacher has instructed her to use the traditional approach to create the organization's structure. What should Senora do?

____ is the collection of activities that transform inputs into outputs that customer's value.

The organizational process ____.

While ____ emphasizes jobs and their authority relationships, ____ emphasizes the activities through which work gets done in the organization.

____ departmentalization is defined as organizing work and workers into separate units responsible for particular business functions or areas of expertise.

Kimberly-Clark is subdivided into organizational units called Kimberly-Clark Health Care, which provides products to hospitals, Kimberly-Clark Professional, which sells to businesses, and Kimberly-Clark Consumer, which sells the company's products to customers. From this information, you know that Kimberly-Clark uses ____.

As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and its emphasis on specialization, institutions providing higher education developed strict departments that contained specialized functions. This organizational structure was perceived as a way to enhance the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. Institutions providing higher education have traditionally used ____.

____ is a general term that refers to subdividing work and workers into separate organizational units that are responsible for completing particular tasks.

Which of the following statements about functional departmentalization is true?

Which of the following is NOT a characteristic of functional departmentalization?

Functional departmentalization ____.

Hallmark has four departments. These departments are (1) Flowers and Gifts, (2) Cards and E-cards, (3) Hallmark Collectibles, and (4) Photo Albums and Scrapbooks. Hallmark uses ____ departmentalization.

Disadvantages of ____ departmentalization include slower decision making, the development of managers and workers with narrow experience and expertise, and makes it more difficult for cross-departmental coordination.

A manufacturer of acrylic and latex gloves sells to medical laboratories, to factories where employees handle chemicals, to companies that manufacture micro-tech equipment, and to cleaning services. Because it is organized to better satisfy the needs of each of its four target markets, the manufacturer uses ____ departmentalization.

Large accounting agencies typically have separate departments that deal with households, businesses, and governments. This allows them to better serve the needs of their clients, by using ____ departmentalization.

With divisions that focus on business clients and consumer clients, companies like Sprint, American Express, and others are examples of ____ departmentalization.

The primary disadvantage of customer departmentalization is ____.

Procter & Gamble has divisions for personal and beauty, house and home, health and wellness, baby and family, and pet nutrition and care. These divisions indicate that the company uses ____

Which of the following types of departmentalization does NOT have a problem with the duplication of resources?

With ____ departmentalization, most employees report to two bosses.

The primary disadvantage of geographic departmentalization is ____.

Commerce Insurance Services has five divisions. They are personal; core commercial; Main Street business; major commercial; and benefits. The company is also departmentalized along product lines. Commerce Insurance Services uses ____ departmentalization.

Which of the following statements about matrix departmentalization is true?

The primary advantage of ____ departmentalization is the fact that it allows companies to manage large, complex tasks efficiently by minimizing duplication.

In a(n) ____, managers from different parts of the matrix report to matrix managers who help them sort out problems and conflicts

A(n) ____ is a form of matrix departmentalization in which managers in different parts of the matrix negotiate conflicts and resources directly.

____ departmentalization is notorious for confusion and conflict between project managers in different areas of the organization.

Of all types of departmentalization, ____ departmentalization requires the highest level of management skill for successful implementation.

Because of problems associated with conflicts over schedules, budgets, and available resources (including employees), ____ departmentalization often evolves from a simple form to a more complex form.

Honeywell Inc. reorganized its European operations along customer lines to prepare for a unified European Union. In doing so, it abandoned matrix departmentalization. Why would Honeywell engage in such restructuring?

In terms of the chain of command, ____ authority is the right to command immediate subordinates, while ____ authority is the right to advise but not command others who are not subordinates.

Organizational authority is traditionally characterized by ____.

Robert Strickland works in the legal department at a large consumer products manufacturer. It is his job to craft warnings on package labels. This is Strickland's ____.

As a result of their structures, matrix organizations automatically violate the principle of ____.

One of the key assumptions underlying the chain of command is ____, which means that workers should report to just one supervisor.

A(n) ____ function is an activity that contributes directly to creating or selling the company's products.

Jennifer Lee works in the public relations department of a large pharmaceutical company. It is her job to write speeches for the company's top managers, to issue press and video releases, to host plant tours, and to be involved in community affairs. Lee has ____.

An international distribution company has a shipping division, a warehouse division, a computer hardware and software distribution center, as well as, a marketing research department, a human resources department, and an accounting department. A salesperson who works in the shipping division is told by the accounting department that he must turn in a weekly expense account. His supervisor in the shipping division wants expense accounts submitted monthly. The salesperson is likely experiencing a problem with ____.

The chain of command ____.

Which of the following positions most likely performs a staff function?

____ involves assigning direct authority and responsibility to a subordinate to complete tasks for which the manager is normally responsible

When managers delegate work, three transfers occur. The three transfers are responsibility, authority, and ____.

The marketing manager of a company that manufactures church furniture has been given the job of increasing corporate profits by 5 percent during the upcoming year. The manager decided to give his assistant the full responsibility and authority for developing a mailing campaign to target churches on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. In other words, the marketing manager has ____.

____ is the process of solving problems by consistently applying the same rules, procedures, and processes.

Like most large U.S. hospitals, University Health Care System spends an enormous amount on patient supplies. The hospital has more than 15,000 individual products that are purchased on a routine basis. Its purchasing manager instituted a hospital-wide purchasing policy that gave a specific code to each individual item. In other words, the purchasing manager engaged in ____.

An Indian Catholic Cardinal's call for local church leaders to have more power and for papal authority to be distributed to lower levels within the Catholic hierarchy has elicited agreement from other church leaders in India. He also asserted that bishops should not have "to run to Rome for everything" and that canon law should be modified to allow the pope to share his authority. Vithayathil is calling for ____.

According to an Indian Cardinal by the name of Varkey Vithayathil, the greatest weakness of the Catholic Church is the way papal authority is exercised without the participation of those concerned. His eminence Cardinal Vithayathil is criticizing the fact that the Catholic Church relies on ____.

Decentralization ____.

Where standardization is important, it is appropriate to ____.

____ is characterized by simple, easy-to-learn steps; low variety; and high repetition.

Job specialization can result in ____.

____ determines the number, kind, and variety of tasks that individual workers perform in their jobs.

An organization that has increased the number of different tasks that a worker performs within one particular job has engaged in ____.

The Ryerson University Library is organized in a hierarchy with six unit heads reporting to a chief librarian. Within these units are fifteen librarians and forty-seven full-time library staff. One of the tools used in the organizational development of the library was to systematically move employees from one job to another to give them an opportunity to learn and use different skills. The Ryerson University Library used ____.

The job design approach associated with ____ involves increasing the number of different tasks that a worker performs within one particular job and giving workers the authority and control to make meaningful decisions about their work.

The central concern of the job characteristics model (JCM) is ____.

Which of the following approaches to job redesign entails more than simply providing additional variety in job tasks?

Which of the following is NOT one of the core job characteristics in the job characteristics model (JCM)?

Elena works in a data processing department for a large credit reporting service and is bored. She spends her days inputting an endless stream of monotonous data into much larger data bases. According to the job characteristics model (JCM), one of the primary reasons for her boredom is ____.

____ is the degree to which a job gives workers the discretion, freedom, and independence to decide how and when to accomplish their jobs.

____ is the degree to which a job is perceived to have a substantial impact on others inside or outside the organization.

According to the job characteristics model, ____ means pushing some managerial authority down to workers

A(n) ____ organization is one that is characterized by broadly defined jobs and responsibilities; loosely defined, frequently changing roles; and decentralized authority and horizontal communication based on task knowledge.

According to an electronics CEO, the first requirement of management is that it should make the fullest use of the capacities of its members. Thus any individual's job should be as little defined as possible so that it would 'shape itself' to the person's special abilities and initiative. This electronics company more than likely had a(n) ____ organization.

In a(n) ____ organization, the normal procedure for dealing with any matter lying outside the boundaries of one individual's functional responsibility is to refer it to the point in the system where such responsibility is known to reside, or, failing that, to lay it before one's superior.

When higher management in a(n) ____ organization admits there is a need for better communication, the response is to tether subordinates to their jobs and to appoint newly hired employees who specialize in establishing liaison relationships.

Which of the following statements about the organic form of organization design is true?

A(n) ____ organization is an organization that is characterized by specialized jobs and responsibilities; precisely defined, unchanging roles; and a rigid chain of command based on centralized authority and vertical communication.

Which of the following statements about mechanistic organizations is true?

____ is a fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, and speed.

In recent years, the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) has undergone a radical change in how it determines and shares local weather conditions with pilots. Before the local base weather station was responsible for warnings. The quality of this information varied. Now AFWA provides the same high standard of weather information to all pilots. This is an example of ____?

LexisNexis realized that its ability to serve new Web-based customers was severely straining its customer service department after thousands of small and midsize law firms representing a huge business opportunity had to wait 48 hours to have their Web accounts activated after signing up. Clearly, LexisNexis needed to revamp its customer sign-up and order-fulfillment processes, which were designed for large law firms and the ordering of hardcover legal tomes. LexisNexis would most likely use ____ to radically change its business practices.

____ is a feeling of intrinsic motivation, in which workers perceive their work to have meaning and perceive themselves to be competent, having an impact, and capable of self-determination.

The three types of task interdependence are

Zara clothing stores has developed a system that can order new fashions and deliver them to the store in only three weeks. It uses ____ to pass information to the next person in the line of development.

A military expert describes how the military forces were organized for Operation Desert Storm as pooled interdependence. This means that each branch of the military that took part in the operation ____.

Leaders during any disaster need to give their employees a sense that everyone is participating in the relief effort. The Gap gave its employees the authority to transfer their paid time off to some 1,300 employees affected by Hurricane Katrina. The Gap used ____ to allow its employees to gain a feeling of intrinsic motivation.

Roughly 70 percent of all reengineering projects fail because ____.

Novo Nordisk is a European manufacturer of pharmaceuticals. An employee , Rikke NedergaardBischoff, who is a clinical-development scientist, contends that Novo upholds the standards expected of public institutions without the stifling bureaucracy. She says, "There's a great deal of empowerment at Novo Nordisk." Novo Nordisk provides NedergaardBischoff with ____.

In essence, reengineering changes organizations by ____.

Which of the following is an approach to managing interorganizational processes?

Except for the core business activities that they can perform better, faster, and cheaper than others, ____ outsource all remaining business activities to outside companies, suppliers, specialists, or consultants.

Modular organizations ____.

A(n) ____ organization is part of a network in which many companies share skills, costs, capabilities, markets, and customers with each other.

A park, recreation, and open space (PROS) cooperative is a recognized association of park, recreation, open space, and related entities united voluntarily. PROS cooperatives conserve the diversity of valued resources and recreation opportunities for the benefit these afford individuals, communities, the economy, and the environment. A PROS cooperative is an example of a ____ organization.

In the automobile industry, three car manufacturers and a variety of suppliers and distributors have formed a network to create economies in production through outsourcing. It is intended for this ____ to cut as much as $3,000 from the costs of producing one car.

The composition of a ____ organization is always changing.

The basic control process of business begins with ____.

____ is the regulatory process of establishing standards that will achieve organizational goals, comparing actual performance to those standards, and then, if necessary, taking corrective action to restore performance to those standards.

____ are a basis of comparison for measuring the extent to which organizational performance is satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

The objective of the company that manufactures liqueur is to grow its international business. To determine its success, it compares its current export sales to 1998, the first year it had double digit growth in exports. For this company, the 1998 exporting data provide a(n) ____.

In October 2005, Cadbury Schweppes losses caused it to scale back its financial projections for the remainder of the year. These financial projections were ____ for the beverage company.

Companies may determine standards by ____.

A report calling for a company to set clear targets to improve fuel economy and to cut factory emissions would want the company to establish emission control ____.

____ allows a trucking company not only to compare its safety performance with other companies but to also adopt those practices found to be superior.

When Marriott decided to improve the quality of service offered to customers, it asked special corporate guests to comment on the good and bad issues of their stay and also to tell what the competition is doing that is better than Marriott. The Marriott acted accordingly. In other words, it used ____.

A chain of specialty fashion stores has interviewed a sample of its female customers and learned that a customer can be expected to visit the store looking for new merchandise on average every two weeks. The chain of stores was able to set this standard through ____.

Control is a(n) ____ process.

Control is a cybernetic process because it ____.

The three basic control methods are ____.

A manufacturer of automatic locking devices shipped 20,000 devices to a car manufacturer that was unable to use them because of a design flaw. If the manufacturer of the devices waited until the parts were returned before determining why it created unusable component parts, it would be using ____ control.

Caterpillar announced plans to cut its production of construction equipment due to forecasted increases in steel prices. By discovering the problem with product inputs and letting customers know that its output will fall short, Caterpillar used ____ controls.

An accident at a U.S. refinery killed two workers. By gathering information about how the men died in order to prevent a recurrence, the company used ____ control.

A car manufacturer ordered 20,000 window assemblies from a supplier. To make sure the assemblies were made to specifications, the supplier of the window assemblies shipped a sample to the car manufacturer for testing. This is an example of ____ control.

____ control is a method of gathering information about performance deficiencies after they occur.

____ control is a method of gathering information about performance deficiencies as they occur.

____ control is a method of gathering information about performance deficiencies before they occur.

Which approach to control monitors inputs rather than outputs?

____ costs are the costs associated with implementing or monitoring control.

McDonald's fast-food restaurants have a well-designed training program for all new employees. Each new employee is supposed to learn how to perform standardized tasks. Due to labor shortages in some areas, these new employees begin work as soon as they are hired and do not receive any off-the-job training. This nonconformity to standards creates ____.

Which of the following factors can help managers determine whether more or different control is worthwhile?

Imagine a manufacturer that has a 99 percent error-free production rate and decides it wants 100 percent error-free production. Its management needs to examine ____ to determine if the costs of increased controls outweigh the benefits of error-free production.

____ is the extent to which it is possible to implement each step in the control process.

According to the text, which of the following factors can help managers to determine whether more control is possible?

Which of the following is a method managers can use to achieve control in their organizations?

____ control is top-down control in which managers try to influence employee behavior by rewarding or punishing employees for compliance or noncompliance with organizational policies, rules, and procedures.

Companies that rely on bureaucratic control tend to ____.

When the local fast-food restaurant manager caught one of her employees giving free food to his friends, she fired him on the spot. When another employee stayed late after work one night to help a woman start her car, the manager rewarded him. What type of control did the restaurant manager use in these two instances?

An organization that relies heavily on ____ controls is likely to be highly resistant to change and slow to respond to customers and competitors.

The two types of objective controls managers use are ____.

A sales manager requires each member of his sales force to make three calls per day on current customers, to call on two potential customers every week, and to sell a minimum of $10,000 worth of merchandise weekly. Which of the following control methods does this indicate the sales manager is using?

____ control regulates workers' actions and routines on the job, while ____ control measures the results of their efforts.

Marriott's top management decided that there was need for a serious effort to "put democracy back in the company" and make employees feel "involved in the success of the company." Employees asked special corporate guests to comment on the good and bad issues of their stay and also to tell what the competition is doing that is better than Marriott. Then the employees acted accordingly. Marriott adopted ____ control.

Which of the following statements about normative control is true?

____ control is associated with autonomous work groups.

Ironically, ____ control may lead to even more pressure for workers to conform to expectations than ____ control.

Instead of individual sales people calling on its business customers, Cedartree Tech uses sales teams. The sales team is given complete responsibility for developing long-term partnering relationships with each customer. What kind of control would the company's sales managers most likely approve?

A manager has instructed Ralph and his fellow workers to develop a daily theme such as patience, empathy, and kindness. Each day, the workers are to try to emphasize the theme as they work with customers, suppliers, and each other. What kind of a control system is Ralph's manager using?

____ is a control method that encourages managers to look beyond traditional measures to evaluate four different perspectives on company performance.

Which of the following is NOT one of the four perspectives measured in the Balanced Scorecard approach to control?

A provider of computer technical support that is using the Balanced Scorecard approach to control would look at ____.

Which of the following statements about the Balanced Scorecard approach to control is true?

____ should be used when it is difficult to create good measures of worker behavior and output and when organizational culture, values, and beliefs are strong.

Normative controls should be used when ____.

____ controls should be used when it is necessary to standardize operating procedures and establish limits.

____ occurs when performance improvement is attained in one part of an organization but only at the expense of decreased performance in another part.

A large university library has decided to make it nearly impossible for all but the most renowned Civil War experts to access their Civil War collection. The librarian in charge of this collection feels that this new policy will adversely influence the use of the collection in research on the experiences of everyday people during the war. This is an example of the use of control creating ____.

One of the advantages the Balanced Scorecard has over traditional control processes that rely solely on financial measures is that it ____.

The Balanced Scorecard approach to control ____.

When implementing the financial perspective, managers would use ____.

In the traditional control systems used at most companies, ____ measures are used to assess performance.

The traditional approach to controlling financial performance does NOT examine ____.

Which of the following statements about economic value added (EVA) is true?

When it comes to finances, the Balanced Scorecard focuses on one simple question. That question is ____.

Economic value added (EVA) is so important because it ____.

An article on public libraries contained the following statement: "The Balanced Scorecard helps organize and run the library according to a specific strategic plan, while demonstrating the library's value to the community as a whole." When dealing with the customer area of the Balanced Scorecard, the article advised librarians to use customer surveys. Why might this be a poor strategy to use?

Quality is typically defined and measured in three ways. They are ____.

____ is a performance assessment in which companies identify which customers are leaving and the rate at which customers are leaving.

An article on public libraries contained the following statement: "The Balanced Scorecard helps organize and run the library according to a specific strategic plan, while demonstrating the library's value to the community as a whole." When dealing with the ____ area of the Balanced Scorecard, the article advised librarians to ask, "How can the library continue to improve and create value?"

An article on public libraries contained the following statement: "The Balanced Scorecard helps organize and run the library according to a specific strategic plan, while demonstrating the library's value to the community as a whole." Standards suggested to use with the ____ area of the Balanced Scorecard include how quickly and effectively a new service can be offered and how the training staff responds to its introduction

When a company emphasizes ____ as its quality goal, managers must simultaneously control excellence, price, durability, or other features of a product or service that customers strongly associate with it

A company makes only one product. The company is carefully evaluating what it learned in becoming such a success to see if it could use the same strategy to expand internationally. Which perspective of the Balanced Scorecard is this manufacturer emphasizing?

According to the text, which of the following levels produces the greatest minimization of waste?

Several extended-stay hotel chains ask guests to hang their towels so they can be reused as a way to help the environment. This request reflects which stage of waste minimization?

Process modification, material/product substitution, and ____ are the three strategies used for waste prevention and reduction.

According to ____, the cost of computing will drop by 50 percent as computer-processing power doubles every 18 months.

The term ____ refers to facts and figures that are in an unusable form.

The first company to use new information technology to substantially lower costs or differentiate products or services often gains ____.

Pages listing all of the felony crimes perpetrated in a given city during the last decade would be an example of ____.

Why is information strategically important for organizations?

A table showing the order frequencies as well as the average dollar value of the orders of different segments of a catalog retailer's market would be an example of ____.

Understanding that consumers wanted clean, convenient food when they were away from home was the information the first fast food restaurant founder used to ____.

Which of the following is one of the critical issues companies need to address in order to sustain a competitive advantage through information technology?

The key to sustaining competitive advantage is ____.

When Billy Ingram founded White Castle, much of the public thought that hamburgers were made from rotten beef and not fit for human consumption. Ingram ground fresh beef in front of customers to prove it was safe and was the first to successfully sell hamburgers to the middle class. Today Ingram is credited as the founder of the fast-food industry. Yet, today White Castle has 330 locations, and McDonald's has 25,000 stores. From this information, you know ____.

According to the resource-based view of information technology, sustainable competitive advantage ____.

The two basic methods of capturing information are ____.

The manual capture of information is ____.

Because they are inexpensive and easy to use, ____, which convert printed text and pictures into digital images, have become an increasingly popular method for capturing data electronically.

Text and pictures that have been digitized cannot be searched or edited like text and pictures found in word processing software. ____ can be used to convert digitized documents into ASCII code that can be edited by word processing software.

In the process of capturing information, ASCII text is generated by ____.

The three methods of tracing products through a distribution system are paper records, bar codes, and radio frequency identification tags. Which of the following statements about the tracing of products is true?

____ is the process of discovering unknown patterns and relationships in large amounts of data.

Using ____ data mining, the user usually begins by telling the data mining software to look and test for specific patterns and relationships in a data set.

Using ____ data mining, the user simply tells the data mining software to uncover whatever patterns and relationships it can find in a data set.

The two major types of data mining are ____.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) could use data it has collected from millions of suspected drug-related adverse event reports and other electronic medical information to identify a pattern of adverse drug events in a specific population. This data collected by the FDA would be held in a(n) ____.

By examining checkout data, supermarkets have learned that people who are buying beer typically also buy a bag of salty snacks. As a result of this finding from ____, supermarkets often place displays of beer near the chips and pretzel aisle.

By examining checkout data, supermarkets have learned that people who are buying beer often also buy a bag of salty snacks. The use of data mining led to the discovery of a(n) ____ pattern.

Data mining is the ____.

The data used in data mining typically come from ____ that store huge amounts of data that have been prepared for data mining analysis by being cleaned of errors and redundancy.

Unsupervised data mining is particularly good at identifying ____.

Have you ever purchased a book or CD on Amazon.com and noticed that as soon as you put your selection in the shopping cart, you were offered a series of other items that people who made the same purchase as you did also bought? This would be an example of ____ data mining.

____ occur in data mining when two or more database elements occur together in a significant pattern, with one of the elements preceding the other.

Unsupervised data mining can be used to recognize ____ patterns.

Baseball management discovered that its sales increased by almost 100 percent in those seasons when it held an open house prior to the opening game and allowed people to see the box seats and examine the view of the stadium from those seats. In terms of data mining, the management discovered a(n) ____ pattern.

Which of the following statements about data mining is true?

____ is the process of ensuring that data are reliably and consistently retrievable in a usable format for authorized users, but no one else.

For the purposes of data mining, ____ patterns are just the opposite of association patterns.

Data clusters ____.

To properly secure data and data networks, a manager should use all of the following EXCEPT ____.

Which of the following is NOT an example of a security problem that may threaten data and data networks?

Two critical steps are required to make sure that data can be accessed by authorized users and no one else. They are ____.

Which of the following statements about firewalls is true?

A system that requires employees to scan their thumbprints as they start work is called a(n)___________.

Although firewalls can protect personal computers and network services connected to the corporate network, people away from their offices who interact with their company networks via the Internet face a safety risk. Which of the following technologies has proven to be an inexpensive solution to this problem?

Although firewalls can protect personal computers and network services connected to the corporate network, people away from their offices who interact with their company networks via the Internet face a safety risk. Which of the following technologies has proven to be a viable solution to this problem?

The goal of an executive information system (EIS) is to ____.

The establishment of ____ is an information security procedure that encrypts Internet data at both ends of the transmission process.

Three kinds of information technology are used by executives, managers, and workers inside the company to access and share information. They are ____.

A(n) ____ is a private company network that allows employees to easily access, share, and publish information using Internet software

____ are a hybrid of executive information systems and intranets.

____ allow managers and employees to use a Web browser to gain access to customized company information and to complete specialized transactions.

Which of the following are included in intranets?

A company developed a(n) ____ to allow its more than 50 department heads and executive managers to use a Web browser to view sales results and distribution plans with a single click..

A(n) ____ uses internal and external sources of data to provide managers and executives the information they need to monitor and analyze organizational performance.

Intranets are ____.

Which of the following statements about intranets is true?

A manufacturer of pharmaceuticals can access information about its sales and share new product information with drug store chains through the use of ____.

____ is the direct electronic transmission of purchase and ordering information from one company's computer system to another company's computer system.

The goal of an executive information system is to provide information that is accurate, complete, relevant and ____.

A(n) ____ allows companies to exchange information and conduct transactions by purposefully providing outsiders with direct, Web browser-based access to authorized parts of a company's intranet.

Companies that use electronic data interchange, extranets, and the Internet to gain a competitive advantage have experienced ____.

A company has built a(n) ____ that will automate its purchasing transactions and other e-commerce activities with its small- to mid-size suppliers. It will provide thousands of the company's suppliers with secure access to critical trading partner information and will facilitate trading partner automation.

Which of the following statements about knowledge is true?

Unlike an executive information system, a decision support system (DSS) ____.

A decision support system (DSS) ____.

Just a teaspoon too much or too little of a single ingredient can turn a great cake into a mediocre cake. The ability to know just how much to add, how long to stir, and how the cake should smell when it is cooked is a skill that a long-time baker would have. Through the use of ____, others can capture this specialized knowledge.

A system that is designed to manage farm field irrigation and farming pest management decisions, based on 20 years of scientific research and data then advise farmers how much to irrigate and when to check soil temperatures is called a(n) _______.

A(n) ____ is an information system that helps managers understand problems and potential solutions by acquiring and analyzing information with sophisticated models and tools.

Most ____ work by using a collection of "if-then" rules to sort through information and recommend a course of action.

____ is a measure of performance that indicates how many inputs it takes to produce or create an output.

At their core, companies are ____ systems that combine inputs such as labor, raw materials, capital, and knowledge to produce finished products and other types of output.