How can information be used to solve real life problems?

Information is needed to make practical and informed decisions in reality. For example, If a child
tried to harm a teacher before sending him on suspension, it would be best to find out how his
behaviour is from other teachers to see if he will require some sort of counselling instead.

When making decisions there are certain criteria that should be used for rejecting or accepting a
piece of information:

 Bias,
 Accuracy
 Cultural context
 Completeness
 Currency of information
 Refereed and unrefereed sources
 Characteristics of information on the Internet.

How is information used in an organization?

Information is used in a variety of ways in an organization or by an individual. Information used in

decision-making and problem-solving and to capitalising on opportunities. The information
used in the decision making process must be accurate and reliable hence the reason for the
criteria listed above on rejecting and accepting information. To make a
practical/informed/good decision one must have sufficient and relevant information about
the situation/topic.
In order for businesses to survive and achieve competitive advantage, they must capitalize
on opportunities. In order to do this managers must have the relevant information on hand
and prior knowledge of the situation in order to identify opportunities and thereby making
decisions to capitalize on them.

Dataflow Diagrams

The Data Flow Diagram (DFD) is a graphical representation of the flow of data through an
information system. It enables you to represent the processes in your information system from the
viewpoint of data. The DFD lets you visualize how the system operates, what the system
accomplishes and how it will be implemented, when it is refined with further specification.

Data flow diagrams are used by systems analysts to design information-processing systems but also
as a way to model whole organizations. You build a DFD at the very beginning of your business
process modeling in order to model the functions your system has to carry out and the interaction
between those functions together with focusing on data exchanges between processes. You can
associate data with conceptual, logical, and physical data models and object-oriented models.

There are two types of DFDs, both of which support a top-down approach to systems analysis,
whereby analysts begin by developing a general understanding of the system and gradually break
components out into greater detail:
  Logical data flow diagrams - are implementation-independent and describe the system,
rather than how activities are accomplished.
 Physical data flow diagrams - are implementation-dependent and describe the actual
entities (devices, department, people, etc.) involved in the current system.

DFDs can also be grouped together to represent a sub-system of the system being analyzed.

A data flow diagram can look as follows:

The table below shows the symbols used to create a DFD. There are two sets of symbols that can be
use Gane & Sarson or Yourdon.

Concept Gane & Sarson Yourdon Description

Process Location where data is
transformed. See Process.

Flow Oriented link between

objects, which conveys
data. See Flow.
Data store Repository of data. See
Data store.

External entity Source or destination of

data. See External entity.

Split/Merge Splits a flow into several

flows or merges flows from
different sources into one
flow. See Split/merge.