Employment Test Questions

Instructions

Please see questions with answers below.

Sales

1. How do you stay current with the industry?

I research and study important industry topics on the Internet, in books, technical white papers, and talk with leading industry experts.

2. What is the single biggest trap a sales representative falls into?

Calling too low in the organization. Not reading the situation correctly and not qualifying properly. Offering a discount too soon and not selling value.

Think big, sell high.  It is not only what you say, but how you say it that counts.

3. What is the most important attribute a Sales person can bring to an account?  Why?

Good listening skills. The ability to restate the clients problem and demonstrate how your company can solve the customers problem and show value (cost justify your solution).

4. What are three factors in a Sales Rep's success?

Excellent Listening Skills

Industry Knowledge

Good Time Management

Staying focused on priorities; work hard and smart, have fun.

5. Do you use the Internet? What for?

Yes. I use the Internet for a very wide range of activities, from researching client companies to doing stock market investments and ordering flowers for my wife.

6. Do you have a home PC?

Yes, with a high speed cable modem.

7. What software do you use for business purposes?

MS Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook Express, Netscape, Act, investment software, WinFax, etc.

8. Describe briefly how you manage your territory.

Stay focused on key target accounts. Maximize forecasted opportunities while at the same time developing new leads in target accounts. (E.g. while working with Bank of Hawaii and closing a $500,000 order, I learn though good listening and questioning skills that Bank of Hawaii is buying another bank in California and my contact at Bank of Hawaii is good friends with the CEO of another bank in Hawaii. I have therefore uncovered two new leads to follow up on. In fact, my contact at Bank of Hawaii is going to play golf with the CEO of the other bank and has asked me to join them).

Industry

9. What are the current trends in the industry?

Major shift towards web based and web enabled applications. Many companies in most industries are merging and acquiring their competitors, this causes significant IT problems. One example of a trend caused by these mergers and acquisitions is ECTML (Extract, Cleanse, Transform, and Load).

10. Who are the major influences in the industry today? Why?

Microsoft, Sun, HP, IBM. Also please see number 9 above.

Microsoft due to control of the operating system. Sun with Java and Unix has a major impact on web servers.

Disparate Legacy Systems

11. What are Information Builders key products?

Focus and EDA.

12. Who are HTP Company's primary competitors?

Some of the competitors are: Platinum, Sterling Software, Cognos, Prism, Sagent, SAS, Oracle, ACTA, Constellar, Rational, Select Software, TSI, etc.

I have detailed market analysis information I could share with you if I join IB.

13. Who are the leading application vendors?

Please see above (# 12.)

14. What is BPR?

Business Process Reengineering

Using information technology to improve performance and reduce costs. Its main premise, as popularized by the book "Reengineering the Corporation" by Michael Hammer and James Champy, is to examine the goals of an organization and to redesign work and business processes from the ground up rather than simply automating existing tasks and functions. Reengineering is about radical improvement, not incremental changes.

 Technology

15. What is meant by the term "Thin Client?"

(1) A "thin processing" client in a client/server environment that performs very little data processing. X Windows terminals and Windows terminals are examples. Contrast with fat client.

(2) A "thin storage" client in a network computer environment. The client downloads the program from the server and performs processing just like a PC, but does not store anything locally. All programs and data are on the server.

16. What is:

Internet: "The" Internet is made up of more than 100,000 interconnected networks in over 100 countries, comprised of commercial, academic and government networks. Originally developed for the military, the Internet became widely used for academic and commercial research. Users had access to unpublished data and journals on a huge variety of subjects. Due to the World Wide Web facility on the Internet, it has become commercialized into a worldwide information highway, providing information on every subject known to humankind.

Intranet: An in-house Web site that serves the employees of the enterprise. Although Intranet pages may link to the Internet, an Intranet is not a site accessed by the general public.

Using programming languages such as Java, client/server applications can be built on Intranets. Since Web browsers that support Java run under Windows, Mac and UNIX, such programs also provide cross-platform capability.

Intranets use the same communications protocols and hypertext links as the Web and thus provide a standard way of disseminating information internally and extending the application worldwide at the same time.

Extranet: A Web site that is made available to external customers or organizations for electronic commerce. Although on the Internet, it generally provides more customer-specific information than a public site. It may require passwords to gain access to the more sensitive information.

17. What is the function/purpose of a Relational Database?

A database organization method that links files together as required. In non-relational systems (hierarchical, network), records in one file point to the locations of records in another, such as customers to orders and vendors to purchases. These are fixed links set up ahead of time to speed up daily processing.

In a relational database, relationships between files are created by comparing data, such as account numbers and names. A relational system has the flexibility to take any two or more files and generate a new file from the records that meet the matching criteria.

Routine queries often involve more than one data file. For example, a customer file and an order file can be linked in order to ask a question that relates to information in both files, such as the names of the customers that purchased a particular product.

In practice, a pure relational query can be very slow. In order to speed up the process, indexes are built and maintained on the key fields used for matching. Sometimes, indexes are created "on the fly" when the data is requested.

Edgar Codd, whose objective was to easily accommodate a user’s ad hoc request for selected data, coined the term in 1970.

18. What is the function/purpose of a Multi-Dimensional Database?

Multidimensional views

Looking at data in several dimensions; for example, sales by region, sales by sales rep, sales by product category, sales by month, etc.

19. What is Client Server and why is it important?

Client/server architecture:

An architecture in which the client (personal computer or workstation) is the requesting machine and the server is the supplying machine. Servers can be high-speed microcomputers, minicomputers, mainframes, or supercomputers. The client provides the user interface and performs the application processing. The server maintains the databases and processes requests from the client to extract data from or update the database. In three-tier client/server architecture, some or all of the application processing is performed in a separate server.

20. What are the key components of a DW?

A database designed to support decision-making in an organization. It is batch updated and structured for fast online queries and summaries for managers. Data warehouses can contain enormous amounts of data. OLAP, DSS and EIS are the key components (see #23 below).

21. Name three DW companies and their products.

Red Brick - Warehouse

SAS – ACCESS

ShowCase - STRATEGY

22. Define Middleware. Why is it important?

Software that functions as a conversion or translation layer. The term is used to describe a diverse group of products. It may refer to software that sits between an application and a control program (operating system, network control program, DBMS, etc.) that provides a single programming interface for the applications to be written to. The application will run in as many different computer environments as the Middleware runs in.

23. Describe the following terms:

DSS:

(Decision Support System) An information and planning system that provides the ability to interrogate computers on an ad hoc basis, analyze information and predict the impact of decisions before they are made.

DBMSs let you select data and derive information for reporting and analysis. Spreadsheets and modeling programs provide both analysis and "what if?" planning. However, any single application that supports decision-making is not a DSS. A DSS is a cohesive and integrated set of programs that share data and information. A DSS might also retrieve industry data from external sources that can be compared and used for historical and statistical purposes.

An integrated DSS directly impacts management's decision-making process and can be a very cost-beneficial computer application.

OLAP:

(OnLine Analytical Processing) Decision support software that allows the user to quickly analyze information that has been summarized into multidimensional views and hierarchies. For example, OLAP tools are used to perform trend analysis on sales and financial information. They can enable users to drill down into masses of sales statistics in order to isolate the products that are the most volatile.

Traditional OLAP products, also known as multidimensional OLAP, or MOLAP, summarize transactions into multidimensional views ahead of time. User queries on these types of databases are extremely fast, because most of the consolidation has already been done.

A relational OLAP, or ROLAP, tool extracts data from a traditional relational database. Using complex SQL statements against relational tables, it is able to create the multidimensional views on the fly.

A database OLAP, or DOLAP, refers to a relational DBMS that is designed to host OLAP structures and perform OLAP calculations.

EIS:

(Executive Information System) An information system that consolidates and summarizes ongoing transactions within the organization. It should provide management with all the information it requires at all times from internal as well as external sources.

OLTP: OnLine Transaction Processing

Processing transactions as the computer receives them. Also called online or real-time systems, master files are updated as soon as transactions are entered at terminals or arrive over communications lines.

If you save receipts in a shoebox and add them up at the end of the year for taxes, that's batch processing. However, if you buy something and immediately add the amount to a running total, that's transaction processing.

HTML:

(HyperText Markup Language) The document format used on the World Wide Web. Web pages are built with HTML tags, or codes, embedded in the text. HTML defines the page layout, fonts and graphic elements as well as the hypertext links to other documents on the Web. Each link contains the URL, or address, of a Web page residing on the same server or any server worldwide, hence "WorldWide" Web.

JAVA Applet:

A programming language for Internet and intranet applications from the JavaSoft division of Sun. Java was modeled after C++, and Java programs can be called from within HTML documents or launched stand alone. Java was designed to run in small amounts of memory and provides its own memory management.

Java is an interpreted language. Java source code is compiled into "byte code," which cannot be run by itself. The byte code must be converted into machine code at runtime. Upon finding a Java applet, the Web browser switches to its Java interpreter (Java Virtual Machine) which translates the byte code into machine code and runs it. This means Java programs are not dependent on any specific hardware and will run in any computer with the Java Virtual Machine.

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