Management information system

A management information system (MIS) is a system that provides information needed to

manage organizations effectively. Management information systems are regarded to be a subset
of the overall internal controls procedures in a business, which cover the application of people,
documents, technologies, and procedures used by management accountants to solve business
problems such as costing a product, service or a business-wide strategy. Management
information systems are distinct from regular information systems in that they are used to
analyze other information systems applied in operational activities in the organization.
Academically, the term is commonly used to refer to the group of information management
methods tied to the automation or support of human decision making, e.g. Decision Support
Systems, Expert systems, and Executive information systems.

Transaction processing system

A transaction processing system is a type of information system. TPSs collect, store, modify, and
retrieve the transactions of an organization. A transaction is an event that generates or modifies
data that is eventually stored in an information system. To be considered a transaction processing
system the computer must pass the ACID test. The essence of a transaction program is that it
manages data that must be left in a consistent state. E.g. if an electronic payment is made, the
amount must be both withdrawn from one account and added to the other; it cannot complete
only one of those steps. Either both must occur, or neither. In case of a failure preventing
transaction completion, the partially executed transaction must be 'rolled back' by the TPS. While
this type of integrity must be provided also for batch transaction processing, it is particularly
important for online processing: if e.g. an airline seat reservation system is accessed by multiple
operators, after an empty seat inquiry, the seat reservation data must be locked until the
reservation is made, otherwise another user may get the impression a seat is still free while it is
actually being booked at the time. Without proper transaction monitoring, double bookings may
occur. Other transaction monitor functions include deadlock detection and resolution (deadlocks
may be inevitable in certain cases of cross-dependence on data), and transaction logging (in
'journals') for 'forward recovery' in case of massive failures.

Transaction Processing is not limited to application programs. The 'journaled file system'
provided with IBMs AIX Unix operating system employs similar techniques to maintain file
system integrity, including a journal.