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IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies: Management Information Systems (MIS)
IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies: Management Information Systems (MIS)
Chapter 5
IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies
IT Infrastructure
Shared technology resources providing platform for specific IS applications
Investment in hardware, software, services (consulting, education, training)
Foundation for serving customers, working with vendors, managing business
process
Set of physical devices and software required to operate enterprise
Set of firmwide services
o Computing platforms providing computing services (e.g desktop
computer, laptop)
o Telecommunications services
o Data management services (+analyzing)
o Application software services (ERP, CRM, SCM, KMS)
o Physical facilities management services
o IT management (plan infrastr. Coordinate with BU), standards (policies),
education (training) , research and development services (future
investments)
“Service platform” perspective more accurate view of value of investments
Evolution of IT Infrastructure
General-‐purpose mainframe & minicomputer era: 1959 to present
o 1958 IBM first mainframes introduced (centralized) – support thousands
online remote terminals connected
o 1965 Less expensive DEC minicomputers (more decentralized)
Personal computer era: 1981 to present
o 1981 Introduction of IBM PC
o Proliferation in 80s, 90s resulted in growth of personal software
o Wintel PC (95%)
Client/server era: 1983 to present
o Desktop clients networked to servers, with processing work split between
clients and servers
o Network may be two-‐tiered or multitiered (N-‐tiered)
o Various types of servers (network, application, Web)
o Smaller, inexpensive machines, costs less, computing power explosion
Enterprise computing era: 1992 to present
o Move toward integrating disparate networks, applications using Internet
standards and enterprise applications
o Free information flow, link different types of hardware, includes public
infrastructures, link applications, web services
Cloud and Mobile Computing: 2000 to present
o Refers to a model of computing where firms and individuals obtain
computing power and software applications over the Internet or other
network (shared pool of computing resources)
o Fastest growing form of computing
4 Management Issues
Operations of a Relational DBMS (Three basic operations to develop useful sets of data)
SELECT: Creates subset of data of all records that meet stated criteria
JOIN: Combines relational tables to provide user with more information than
available in individual tables
PROJECT: Creates subset of columns in table, creating tables with only the
information specified
Object-‐Oriented DBMS (OODBMS)
• Stores data and procedures as objects, can be automatically retrieved and shared
• Objects can be graphics, multimedia, Java applets, not only structured numbers
and characters, integrate from various sources
• Relatively slow compared with relational DBMS for processing large numbers of
transactions
• Hybrid object-‐relational DBMS: Provide capabilities of both OODBMS and
relational DBMS
Designing Databases
• Conceptual (logical) design: Abstract model from business perspective
• Physical design: How database is arranged on direct-‐access storage devices
• Understand relationship among data, type of data, grouping, usage, changes
• Relationships among data elements, redundant database elements
• Most efficient way to group data elements to meet business requirements, needs
of application programs
• Normalization: Streamlining complex groupings of data to minimize redundant
data elements and awkward many-‐to-‐many relationships (small, stable, flexible
data structures)
• Enforce referential integrity rules, ensure relationships remain consistent (e.g. no
parts from nonexistent suppliers)
• Entity-‐relationship diagram: Used by database designers to document the data
model, Illustrates relationships between entities
• Distributing databases: Storing database in more than one place
• Partitioned: Separate locations store different parts of database
• Replicated: Central database duplicated in entirety at different locations
Understand organizations data and how it should be represented in a database to serve
business well with your data model, or the data will be inaccurate, incomplete, and
difficult to retrieve!
Data warehousing
Stores current + historical data from many core operational transaction systems
Consolidates and standardizes information for use across enterprise, but data
cannot be altered
Data warehouse system will provide query, analysis, and reporting tools
E.g. Catalina Marketing largest loyalty database in the world, US Internal
Revenue Service (IRS) with Compliance Data Warehouse consolidating taxpayer
data from different resources into relational structure (find out who cheats)
Data marts
Subset of data warehouse, smaller, decentralized
Summarized or highly focused portion of firm’s data for use by specific
population of users
Typically focuses on single subject or line of business, constructed more rapidly,
lower costs
E.g. Barnes and Noble point-‐of-‐sale, college bookstore, online sales
Business Intelligence
Tools for consolidating, analyzing, and providing access to vast amounts of data
to help users make better business decisions (patterns, relationships, insights)
Principle tools include: Software for database query and reporting,
multidimensional online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining
Data mining
More discovery driven than OLAP: finds hidden patterns, relationships in large
databases and infers rules to predict future behavior
Applications for all functional areas of business, government, scientific work
E.g., Finding patterns in customer data for one-‐to-‐one marketing campaigns or to
identify profitable customers.
Types of information obtainable from data mining
o Associations, occurrences linked to a single event (coke, chips, promotion)
o Sequences, events linked over time (house fridge, oven)
o Classification, inferring set of rules, patterns that describe group item
belongs (discover characteristics of customers who are likely to leave)
o Clustering, similar to classification where no groups defined (partitioning
database into groups of customers based on demographics)
o Forecasting, use series of existing values to forecast what other values will
be (finding patterns to estimate future value of continuous variables)
High level analyses of patterns or trends, can also drill down and provide more
detail when needed
Predictive analysis: Uses data mining techniques, historical data, and
assumptions about future conditions to predict outcomes of events (e.g.
probability a customer will respond to an offer)
Text mining
Extracts key elements from large unstructured data sets (e.g., stored e-‐mails)
80% of organizations useful information
Discover patterns, relationships, summarize
New myriad ways unstructured data is generated by consumers and the business
uses for this data
Web mining
Discovery and analysis of useful patterns and information from WWW (E.g., to
understand customer behavior, evaluate effectiveness of Web site)
Web content mining (Knowledge extracted from content of Web pages)
Web structure mining (E.g., links to and from Web page)
Web usage mining (User interaction data recorded by Web server)
Enterprise Software
• Built around thousands of predefined business processes that reflect
best practices
• Finance/accounting, Human resources, Manufacturing/production,
Sales/marketing
• To implement, firms: Select functions of system they wish to use, Map business
processes to software processes, Use software’s configuration tables for
customizing
• Leading ES vendors: SAP, Oracle, Infor Global Solutions, Microsoft
• Communicate with customers, suppliers, other entities