Chap 1: IS Foundation

1. What is information and why is it important to businesses?

● Information is a piece of something that will make sense when conveyed to some means.
● Data that have been shaped in a form that is meaningful and useful to human beings.
● Data are streams of raw facts representing events occurring organizations or the physical
environment before they have organized and arranged into a form that people can understand to
make sense.
2. What is information system and how is it relevant in information technology age?
● A set of inter related components that collect and store data process and present data in the form of
information to support decision making, control, analyze problems, visualize complex subjects and create
new products.
3. Strategic Advantages of IS
a. Operational Excellence:
● Improve efficiency of business operations in order to achieve higher profitability, for which IS and
technologies are major tools available to managers, when coupled with changes in business practices &
management behaviors.
b. New products, services and business models:
● IS & technologies enables to create new products and services as well as new business models.
● Business model describes how a company produces, delivers and sells a products & service to create wealth
c. Customer & suppliers intimacy:
To serve and respond to rapidly changing customer demand
d. Improved decision making:
To facilitate improved decisions making at different levels by having right information at right time
e. Competitive advantage:
By operational excellence, better and new products and services, and business models, customer/supplier intimacy
and with improved decision making – help in achieving competitive advantage
f. Survival:
Giving the firm more flexibility to survive in turbulent times
Offering extraordinary opportunities to firms to become global organization
Enable managing key cooperate assets – IP, core competencies, financial & human assets with better efficiency &
security.
4. Dimensions of IS (that contribute to IS development: Management, organization and technology)
 ● Senior Management: ​- take long range strategic decisions about product and services as
well as ensures financial performance of the firm
● Middle Management:​ - carry out programs & plans of senior management
● Operational Management:​ monitoring daily activities of business
● Knowledge workers:​ - engineers, scientist, or architects design products or services and
create new knowledge for the firm
● Data Workers:​ - secretaries or clerks, assist the scheduling and communications at all
levels of firm
● Production & service workers:​ - produce the product & deliver the service

5. Contemporary approach to IS (Technical, Behavioral):

● Technical Approach: ​mathematically based models to study information system​ ​as
well as physical technology and formal capabilities of
Disciplines contributing to technical approach:
1. Computer science:
● Establish theories of computability
● Methods of computation
● Methods of efficient data storage & access
2. Management science:
● Development of models for decision making and management practices
3. Operational research:
● Mathematical techniques for optimizing parameters of organization – such as
transportation, inventory control, transaction cost
● Behavioral Approach: concerned with behavioral issues arise in the development
and long term maintenance of IS
Discipline contributes to:
1. Sociology - groups, teams, individuals in organization are studied
2. Psychologists – study of IS regarding have decision making are done
3. Economists – influence of IS in cost structures, dynamics of digital markets
etc.

Chap 2: Business Processes, Management Information Systems and

Collaboration
1. What are business processes?
● Business processes refer to the manner in which work is organized, coordinated
and focused to produce a valuable product or service
● Business processes are the collection of activities required to produce a product
or service
● These activities are supported by flows of material, information and knowledge
among the participants in business processes.
2. Different types of business processes
 ➢ Transaction Processing Systems (TPS):
A transaction processing system is a computerized system that performs and records the daily
routine transactions necessary to conduct business, such as sales order entry, hotel reservations,
payroll, employee record keeping and shipping.
➢ Business Intelligence:
Is a contemporary term for data and software tools for organizing, analyzing and providing
access to data to help managers and other enterprise users make more informed decision.
Marketing Information Systems:
➢ HR Information Systems:
➢ Financial Information Systems:
➢ Decision Support Systems(DSS): -
● Focuses on problems that are unique and rapidly changing for which the procedure for
arriving at a solution may not be fully predefined in advance.
● Although DSS use internal information from TPS and MIS, they often being in information
from external sources such as stock prices or product prices of competition.
➢ Executive Support Systems(ESS): -
Helps senior management make decisions on strategic issues and long term trends
They address non-routine decisions requiring judgment, evaluation and insight because there is
no agreed on procedure for arriving at a solution.
• Systems for linking enterprises:
➢ Supply Chain Management Systems(SCMS): -
● Firms use supply chain management system to help manage relationships with
their supplies.
● These systems help suppliers, purchasing firms, distributors and logistics
companies share information about orders, production, inventory levels, and
delivery of product and services so they can source, produce, and deliver goods
and services efficiently.
➢ Customer Relationship Management Systems (CRMS): -
● Firms use CRM systems to manage their relationships with their customers.
● CRM systems provide information to coordinate all of the business processes that deal
with customers in sales, marketing, and service to optimize revenue, customer
satisfaction, and customer retention
● This information helps firms identify, attract, and retain the most profitable customers,
provide better service to existing customers, and increase sales.
➢ Knowledge Management Systems (KMS): -
● Some firms perform better than others because they have better knowledge about how
to create, produce, and deliver products and services.
● This firm knowledge is unique, is difficult to imitate and can be leveraged into long term
strategic benefits.
● KMS enable organizations to better manage processes for capturing and applying
knowledge and management decisions.
3. Technologies for collaboration:
Collaboration: - collaboration is working with others to achieve shared and explicit goals.
 ● It focuses on task or mission accomplishment and usually takes place in a business or
other organization and between businesses.
➢ Email & Instant Messaging(IM) : -
Email and instant messaging have been major communication and collaboration tools for
interaction jobs.
● Operates on mobiles, computers and other wireless devices and features like file sharing
● In recent years, email has declined with messaging and social media becoming preferred
channels of communication
➢ Virtual meetings: -
In order to reduce the travel expenses and enable people in different locations to meet and
collaborate, many companies are adopting videoconferencing & web conferencing
Allows two or more individuals to communicate simultaneously through video and audio
transmissions.
Enables sharing documents and presentations with audio conferencing and live video via
webcam
➢ Google tools: -

➢ IBM Notes: -
MS SharePoint
4. IS department in an organization