IT Passport ExaminationStudy guide

Cover the basic mechanisms that run a company: forms of corporate organization, the OODA situational-judgment cycle, and the PDCA improvement cycle. In accounting and finance, learn the difference between the income statement (P/L) and the balance sheet (B/S), the break-even point, and inventory valuation. Also cover human resource management and OR/IE techniques that capture productivity and quality numerically (seven QC tools, linear programming, statistical testing).

Cover the legal systems that support corporate activity: intellectual property rights (copyright and industrial property rights—patent, utility model, design, and trademark rights). Security-related law covers the Unauthorized Computer Access Law and the Act on the Protection of Personal Information; labor and trade law covers the Worker Dispatch Act and the Act on Ensuring the Proper Conduct of Subcontracting Transactions with SMEs. Also touch on compliance and the role of standardization such as ISO/JIS.

Cover competitive strategy (SWOT analysis, the PPM, core competence)—how a company competes in the market; marketing (the 4Ps, segmentation)—how it reaches customers; business strategy and goal evaluation (KGI, KPI, the BSC)—how it measures targets; and management systems (CRM, SCM, ERP, the value chain)—the mechanisms that put strategy into practice.

Cover technology development strategy (MOT, innovation, open innovation, design thinking)—how a company puts technology to work for the business—and technology development planning (the technology roadmap), which charts the path of development. The key perspective is connecting technology to business goals rather than treating it as R&D in isolation.

Cover IT use specific to industries: business systems (POS, EDI, IoT applications), engineering and production management (JIT, the kanban system), e-business (e-commerce, the long tail, fintech), and IoT/embedded systems. Also cover AI use (machine learning, generative AI, hallucination, AI ethics), an increasingly important area.

Cover information systems strategy (EA, BPR, BPM)—how to connect management and IT; business processes (modeling, RPA)—how to review day-to-day operations; solution business (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, cloud computing)—how to use external IT services; and promoting IT use (DX, data utilization)—how to embed IT use across the organization.

Cover the first stage of building an information system: systems planning (setting the overall direction for what to build and how) and requirements definition (organizing user requirements into specifications), which makes the plan concrete. Also cover procurement planning and execution (RFI, RFP, competitive quotation) for requesting development from external vendors.

Learn the flow of system development (requirements definition -> design -> implementation -> testing -> acceptance), the difference between functional requirements and non-functional requirements, and the idea of module decomposition. We also cover the stages of testing (unit test, integration test, system test, operational test) plus white-box testing, black-box testing, and the purpose of review.

Learn representative development models: the waterfall model versus agile (Scrum, XP, pair programming), the Common Frame that standardizes work processes, and estimation techniques that quantify scale (function point method, effort).

Learn the PMBOK body of knowledge for running projects methodically, and its management areas: scope management, schedule management (WBS, arrow diagrams, critical path), cost management, quality management, risk management, and stakeholder management.

Learn ITIL, the framework for delivering IT services continuously and stably; the service-quality agreement SLA and its ongoing management SLM; incident management, problem management, and change management; the service desk as the user contact point; and facility management such as UPS and redundancy.

Learn the purpose and flow of system audits (audit planning -> audit execution -> audit reporting -> follow-up), internal control (IT controls, segregation of duties), and the independence required of auditors.

Learn how computers represent numbers with binary and base conversion, combine true/false values with logical operations (AND, OR, NOT, XOR), diagram relationships between ranges with sets and Venn diagrams, capture trends in data with basic probability and statistics (correlation, regression, the normal distribution), the units of information bit and byte, character encoding, and the basics of AI such as machine learning and neural networks.

Learn how to represent processing steps with flowcharts, ways of holding data (data structures) such as arrays, lists, last-in-first-out stacks, first-in-first-out queues, and hierarchical trees, search algorithms for finding data and sorting algorithms for ordering it, computational complexity as a measure of efficiency, and programming languages, markup languages (HTML, XML), APIs, and low-code development.

Learn about the processor (CPU)—the "brain" of a computer—and its clock speed, the cores that let it process work in parallel, main memory (RAM) as the working desk and read-only ROM, the cache that bridges the speed gap between the CPU and main memory, and input/output interfaces (USB, HDMI, Bluetooth) that connect external devices.

Learn about ways of combining multiple computers—system configuration (centralized processing, distributed processing, client-server systems, virtualization, the cloud), performance metrics that describe speed (response time, throughput, benchmarks), and reliability metrics that describe how resistant a system is to failure (availability, RASIS, MTBF, MTTR, fault tolerance, dual systems, duplex systems).

Learn the role of the OS (operating system) in managing the whole computer (task management, virtual memory), organizing files with file management (directories, absolute paths, relative paths, backups), everyday spreadsheet software (relative reference, absolute reference, functions), and OSS (open source software) that can be freely used and modified.

Learn about types of computers (desktop, laptop, servers, embedded systems, etc.), input/output devices (keyboards, mice, displays, printers, etc.), long-term storage devices (HDD, SSD), the basics of electrical/electronic circuits, IoT devices that sense their surroundings with sensors and act on the world with actuators, and the idea of power saving.

Learn about universal design, which aims to be usable by everyone regardless of age or disability; UX (user experience), which designs the overall experience, and UI (user interface), which designs the screen itself; web accessibility, which makes websites usable by everyone; structuring screens (sign-in, navigation) so users do not get lost; and pictograms that convey information with symbols, plus color universal design that accounts for differences in color vision.

Learn about multimedia, which combines still images, video, and audio; compression—lossless compression and lossy compression—that encodes data to shrink file size, along with representative formats (JPEG, MPEG, MP3); VR (virtual reality), which creates a virtual space on a computer; AR (augmented reality), which overlays information on the real world; the metaverse that builds on both; and the basics of CG (computer graphics).

Learn about relational databases, which manage data in tables (tables, rows, columns, primary keys, foreign keys); normalization, which reduces duplication and inconsistency; the basics of SQL for querying and manipulating data (SELECT, WHERE); transactions, which treat multiple operations as one unit (ACID properties, concurrency control, commit, rollback); and data warehouses, which accumulate large volumes of data for analysis, along with data mining, which discovers patterns in it.

Learn about LAN, which connects a limited area, and WAN, which connects wide areas; TCP/IP, the standard protocol suite of the internet; IP addresses that identify devices; DNS for name resolution; DHCP, which automatically assigns IP addresses; communication devices such as routers and hubs; cable-free wireless LAN; SMTP/POP/IMAP used for sending and receiving email; and calculating communication speed.

Learn about the three elements information security must protect—confidentiality, integrity, and availability; threats such as malware, phishing, targeted attacks, and social engineering; cryptography that protects data with keys (symmetric-key cryptography, public-key cryptography, digital signatures, PKI); identity verification via multi-factor authentication and biometric authentication; and organizational defenses such as firewalls, zero trust, ISMS, and risk management.