Is535 Key Concepts

Explain why information systems are so essential in business today:

Information systems are a foundation for conducting business today. In many industries, survival and the ability to achieve strategic business goals are difficult without extensive use of information technology. Businesses today use information systems to achieve six major objectives: operational excellence, new products, services, and business models, customer/supplier intimacy, improved decision making, competitive advantage, and day to day survival

Define an information system from both a technical and a business perspective.

From a technical perspective, an information system collects, stores and distributes information from an organization’s environment and internal operations to support organizational functions and decision making, communication, coordination, control, analysis, and visualization. Information systems transform raw data into useful information through three basic activities: input, processing and output.

From a business perspective, an information system provides a solution to a problem or challenge facing a firm and represents a combination of management, organization and technology elements. The management decision of information systems involves issues such as leadership, strategy, and management behavior. The technology dimension consists of computer hardware, software, data management technology and networking/telecommunications technology (including the internet). The organization dimension of information sytems involves issues such as the organizations hierarchy, functional specialties, business processes, culture and political interest groups.

Identify and describe the three dimensions of information systems:

Organizations

Key elements of organizations – people/structure/business process/politics/culture

-orgs have structures – different levels and specialties

Upper – managerial/professional/technical

Lower – operational personnel

Senior...