Unit 5: Types of Information

Systems
• Office Automation System

• Executive Support System

• Expert System (ES)

 Office Automation System

❖ Office Automation is the integration of computer ,

telecommunications and office equipment technologies to improve
the execution of business functions through increasing the
productivity ,effectiveness and working conditions of office support
staff.
❖ Office automation is the installation of electronic equipment to
handle office functions more efficiently, but the essence of office
automation is the integration of office processes and the sharing of
control information.
❖ Office automation system are concerned with handling , Controlling
and distribution of the information of the organization.
❖ They aim at increasing business effectiveness by the use of
technology to prove a significant improvements in both the quality
and productivity of work performed in the office by both clerical and
knowledge workers.
❖ Office automation systems combine various technologies to reduce
the manual labor required in operating an efficient office
environment.
❖ The concept of office Automation encompasses the application of
computer and communication technology to improve the productivity
of all types of office workers.
❖ The goal of office automation systems is to improve the productivity
of managers at various levels of management by providing secretarial
assistance and better communication facilities.
The various activities in an office can be classified into two categories :
1. Activities performed by clerical staff(typists,secretaries,clerks). e.g
typing, mailing,retrieving documents,scheduling of meetings and
conferences etc.
2. Activities performed by managers e.g. controlling performance,
production of information such as reports, memos or messages and
conferencing
 CHARACTERISTICS/FEATURES OF AN OFFICE
AUTOMATION SYSTEM

INPUT PROCESSING OUTPUT

● DOCUMENTS ● STORING ● MESSAGES
● SCHEDULE ● MERGING ● REPORTS
● DATA ● CALCULATING ● SCHEDULES
● TRANSPORTING
 Advantages of Office Automation Systems
1. They provide more time to managers to concentrate on their basic
job.
2. They improve the quantity of work in terms of content
,thoroughness , timeliness and accuracy
3. They speed of specific functions and thereby increase the quantity of
clerical output.
4. They use electronics to absorb the normal growth of functions
5. They reduce the time spent on input capture and creation
6. They help in eliminating routine, boring or less desirable tasks.
7. They help in reducing administrative detail overhead.
8. They help in reducing the travelling expenses for discussion
,meetings,e.g teleconferencing
9. They co-ordinate and integrate office tasks
10) They enable more cost-effective and time –effective
communications.
11) They reduce the turnaround time by moving information quickly
and efficiently to the people who need it.Turnaround time is the
time interval between preparation and receipt of messages or
documents.
12) They increase the productivity of office workers at all levels.
 Limitations of Office Automation
1. Cost of Automated office hardware is very high
2. Office Automation can disrupt traditional office work roles and work
environments.
3. Office Automation may lead to security problems . E.g.an inefficient
and unauthorised use of e-mail,fax. May adversely affect the office’s
productivity.
Questions:
1. What is an Office Automation system? What are the objectives of installing
an office automation system?
2. What are the advantages and disadvantages of office Automation system?
3. Discuss in brief applications of Office Automation System and their
functions.
4. List down various features and characteristics of Office Automation system.
5. What is word processing? What are the advantages of using
word-processing equipment?
6. What are the various facilities provided by e-mail?
7. What is electronic filling?
8. Write short notes on
1) Groupware
2) Electronic mail
3) Electronic-filing
4) Image Processing
5) Teleconferencing.
 Executive Support System

❖ Executive Support System (ESS) is a reporting tool (softwareExecutive Support

System (ESS) is a reporting tool (software) that allows you to turn your
organization's data into useful summarized reports.
❖ These reports are generally used by executive level managers for quick access to
reports coming from all company levels and departments such as billing, cost
accounting , staffing, scheduling, and more.
❖ An Executive Support System (ESS) is software that allows users to transform
enterprise data into quickly accessible and executive-level reports, such as those
used by billing, accounting and staffing departments.
❖ An ESS enhances decision making for executives.
❖ ESS is also known as Executive Information System.
❖ In addition to providing quick access to organized data from departments, some
Executive Support System tools also provide analysis tools that predicts a series of
performance outcomes over time using the input data.
❖ The exact reporting tools and outcome of an Executive Support
System completely depends on the ESS developer and it's intended
industry use.
❖ For example, Cambridge Systematics has ESS to support the
investment planning process for the Ministry of Transportation.
❖ The features and functions of this Executive Support System are
entirely different from the Executive Support System developed by
Meditech, which is useful to health care organizations.
❖ Several companies offer pre-designed Executive Support System
packages (usually suited to one particular industry), while others offer
packages which can be customized your your organization's needs.
 Features of Executive Support System
1. Contemporary ESS bring together data from all parts of the firm and
enable managers to select,access and tailor them as needed using
easy to use desktop analytical tools and online data displays.
2. Through their ESS, many managers have access to public data ,
such as news services, financial market databases , and economic
information.
3. ESS has the ability to drill down, moving from apiece of summary
data to lower and lower levels of detail.
4. Well designed ESS also has some facility for environmental
scanning.
5. Executive Support system extract ,filter, compress and track critical
data.
6. A key information requirement of managers at the strategic level is
the ability to detect signals of problems in the organizational
environment that indicate strategic threats and opportunities.
7. Ability to analyze, compares and highlight trends.
8. They access and integrate a broad range of internal and external data.
9. They are user friendly and require minimal or no training to use.
10. These are used directly by executives without intermediaries
11. They present graphical, tabular, and/or textual information.
12. ESS contain statistical analysis tools.
13. ESSs have the ability to solve Business problems
 Advantages of ESS:
❖ Executive information systems help the executives in identifying
options,evaluation of alternative course of action in making informed
choices.
❖ Executive information systems provide data in a very aggregate form.
❖ Easy for upper level executive to use
❖ Ability to analyze trends
❖ Augmentation of managers' leadership capabilities
❖ Enhance personal thinking and decision making
❖ Contribution to strategic control flexibility
❖ Enhance organizational competitiveness in the market place
❖ Instruments of change
❖ Increased executive time horizons.
❖ Better reporting system
❖ Improved mental model of business executive
❖ Help improve consensus building and communication
❖ Improve office automation
❖ Reduce time for finding information
❖ Early identification of company performance
❖ Detail examination of critical success factor
❖ Better understanding
❖ Time management
❖ Increased communication capacity and quality
 Disadvantage of ESS
❖ As the scope of information required by executives is very wide. It
may not always be economically feasible to collect all such
information. Moreover much of the data required for strategic
planning cannot be collected on regular basis, and much of it cannot
be specified in advance.
❖ As executive support system use much of data generated from
external sources, these system are expensive.
❖ It is very difficult and very often almost impossible to make the cost
benefit analysis of using an executive information system. Thus, it
become very difficult to measure the performance of these system.
❖ Functions are limited
❖ Hard to quantify benefits

❖ Executive may encounter information overload

❖ System may become slow

❖ Difficult to keep current data

❖ May lead to less reliable and insecure data

❖ Excessive cost for small company

 QUESTIONS
1) What is an ESS? Why these systems are used in an organization?
2) What are the Features of Executive Support System?
3) What are the advantages and disadvantages of ESS?
Expert Systems
❖ Knowledge based systems are normal database management systems extended with
some kind of knowledge. The most popular form of a knowledge-based system is an
EXPERT SYSTEM.
❖ The Expert systems aim at formalizing expertise and make it available for repetitive
type of business decisions.
❖ They use artificial intelligence tools to generate knowledge out of the information ,
existing theories, belief and experience of managers in various business activities.
❖ The Expert systems have been developed for the purpose of passing expertise from
those with the knowledge to those who need the knowledge in a convenient and
easily accessed manner.
❖ Expert system provide information to managers in the form of Expert advice.
❖ Expert system can be described as programs that help the computer to make
decisions in a similar way as an expert in specific domain, a particular subject area,
of interest.
❖ An expert system is a system that employs human knowledge captured in a
computer to solve problems that ordinarily require human expertise.(Turban)
❖ A computer program that emulates the behaviour of human experts who are solving
real-world problems associated with a particular domain of knowledge. (Pigford &
Braur)
 APPLICATIONS AREAS OF EXPERT SYSTEM
1. Accounting and Finance
• In selecting forecasting models.
• In providing tax advice.
• In credit authorization decisions.
2. Marketing
• In assisting with marketing times
• In establishing sales quotas
• In responding to customer inquiries
• In determining rebate policies.
3. Manufacturing
• In determining whether process is running correctly.
• IN analyzing quality and providing corrective actions.
• In product designing and layout.
4. Others
• In assessing project proposals.
• In educating trainees.
• In recommending acquisition strategies.
 COMPONENTS OF EXPERT SYSTEM

❖ Knowledge base – a set of rules as representation of the expertise, mostly in IF THEN statements.

❖ Working storage – the data which is specific to a problem being solved.

❖ Inference engine – the code at the core of the system which derives recommendations from the
knowledge base and problem-specific data in working storage.

❖ User interface – the code that controls the dialog between the user and the system.
❖ Domain expert – the individual or individuals whose expertises are solving the
problems the system is intended to solve;
❖ Knowledge engineer – the individual who encodes the expert’s knowledge in
a form that can be used by the expert system;
❖ User – the individual who will be consulting with the system to get advice
which would have been provided by the expert.
❖ System engineer – the individual who builds the user interface, designs the
declarative format of the knowledge base, and implements the inference
engine.
 When an Expert System can be used
Expert system can be used for problem solving if following conditions are met:

1. The problem can not be specified in terms of a well-defined algorithm

2. The Problem requires consistency and Standardization.
3. The domain or problem area is narrow or limited.
4. When the task is hazardous
5. There is scarcity of experts in the area
6. The Problem involves complex logic or a large number of rules
7. Human Experts have successfully solved similar problems.
 ADVANTAGES OF EXPERT SYSTEM
❖ It enhances decision quality.
❖ It reduces the cost of consulting experts for problem solving.
❖ It provides quick and efficient solutions to problems in narrow area of specialization.
❖ It offers high reliability of expert suggestions or decisions.
❖ It gathers scarce expertise and uses it efficiently.
❖ It can tackle very complex problems that are difficult for human experts to solve.
❖ It can work on standard computer hardware.
❖ It can not only give solutions, but also the decision logic and how the solution was arrived at.
Hence, the explanation facility permits a review of the decision and its logic.
❖ Expert systems have an ability to work with incomplete or uncertain information
❖ Diagnosis:-Expert systems can be used in Diagnosing different conditions. e.g. in diagnosing
the reasons for malfunctioning of equipment, human diseases in medicines etc. These systems
can also provide the solutions for such malfunctioning.
❖ Monitoring: Expert systems can be used to monitor the processes, activities of employees ,
and cash management etc
❖ Increase the capabilities of other computerized systems.-Integration of an expert system with
other systems results in effectiveness of the other systems. The integrated system cover more
applications , work faster, and produce high quality results.
 LIMITATIONS OF EXPERT SYSTEMS
❖ It is difficult to extract expertise from human experts and hence the knowledge
base may not be complete.
❖ Each problem situation is different from problem to problem. Hence, the
solution suggested by a human expert is bound to be different from expert
system solution.
❖ Expert system is effective in solving specific problems in narrow domains. It
fails in properly analyzing problems in a larger area and in suggesting solutions.
❖ The cost and time required for developing expert system are very high. Hence,
expert system is not affordable for most firms.
❖ Expert systems are expensive to build and maintain. In many cases the system
has to be developed for the organization. If packages are installed they may have
to be customized for the requirement of the organization.
❖ It is impossible to build any useful expert system as the expert system cannot
capture all the assumptions on which real-life decisions are based.
❖ It takes long period of time to develop and fine tune an expert system.
❖ Large expert systems are difficult to develop and maintain.
 QUESTIONS
1) What is Expert System? What is its role in
Organization?
2) Explain the structure and components of Expert
system
3) Illustrate with an example the usefulness of expert
system.
4) What are the advantages and limitations of Expert
System.
5) Explain the working of an Expert system.
6) What is Knowledge base in Expert system? How is
it used in problem solving?