TARC ACCA 2005

exam guidance from BPP ~ paper 3.4

ACCA Paper 3.4 Business Information Management
Dec 2005

Section A

The examiner tends to provide fairly lengthy case studies, which provide information about the business strategy, the IT history to date and the current situation.
As you are likely to be dealing with an organisation that needs to make decisions about its IT systems and strategies, questions are often based on strategic models and approaches from the syllabus.

Questions in the December 2005 exam could ask you to analyse an organisation's current position regarding its IT, perhaps using a model such as Porter's value chain (Q11). In order to tackle this type of question, you need to be able to recognise the relevant business strategy in order to make appropriate IT suggestions. Questions 51 and 52 are excellent ones to practice on this.

A key area that all students must focus on is how to develop a business case for Information Technology. IT facilitates business decisions, and the examiner is likely to ask you to analyse the key business issues. A key model to understand and use is ?Where We Are, Where We Want to Be, Going to Get There?, and it would be useful to review the first BIM exam paper set.

There could also be questions asking you to improve a project or development that is
experiencing problems (Q26, Q28)

Another key area to review would be the human and social issues relating to IT development, and the syllabus lists several change management theories, such as Lewin, which have yet to be examined.

Exam technique is extremely important in this paper, so working through as many case
studies as possible is to be advised. Questions 64-66 are the questions from the examiner's pilot paper.

Also be aware of articles relevant to your paper written near to the time of the exam. Before the June 2005 sitting the examiner wrote an article on Legacy Systems, which then appeared on the exam as a 12 mark question, in section A.

Section B

Section B questions could come from anywhere in the syllabus, and there are often questions which focus on one particular theory. The examiner also uses these questions to get candidates to bring in 'real-life' examples, to illustrate theories, so be sure to have at your fingertips some examples which you can use, either from your own experience, or perhaps from other exam scenarios and questions which you have used. There is also usually one question with a mini-scenario that can be a good one to choose, as you have a context to work with. The examiner also uses section B to test knowledge about specific types of technology.

Key theories that need to be understood are those of Nolan, Parsons, Porter, Earl and
Zuboff, and reviewing past BIM papers can be extremely helpful to see the style of questions on these areas.

Key areas to cover in depth are as follows:

E-commerce is an area that usually appears on information papers (Q8)
The human impact of IT has not yet been examined extensively (Q31 &32)
Knowledge management is an area that may be prominent in future exams (Q5)

ACCA paper 3.4
Business Information Management
Relevant Articles

The adaptability of Strategic Models June 2005
E-Commerce May 2005
Legacy Information Systems March 2005
Big Brother July 2004
Soft Sytems Jan 2004
The 3 C's March 2003
IS Strategy Dec 2002
How to pass Paper 3.4

posted by Unknown @ 12:27 PM