IS Applications Flashcards
What are the two types of information systems?
Organisations use information systems for a variety of purposes. We can group information systems into two categories based on their main purposes.
Organisational support systems and decision support systems
What is an organisational support system?
These encompass transaction processing, process control and enterprise collaboration. They handle the day-to-day business of the organisation.
What is a decision support system?
These are designed to support the process by which business decisions are made by providing suitable data and tools that allow the data to be analysed.
What are the three main areas of operational support systems?
Operational support systems provide important assistance to the organisation in handling day-to-day business. They fall into three main areas.
- Transaction processing systemsprocess essential business transactions such as orders, payments and bookings. In many cases, organisation can’t function without them.
- Process control systemsmanage equipment in real time. There are many examples. For example, devices which are networked and programmable (the Internet of Things) often involve some element of process control, such as a control room for an incinerator.
- Enterprise collaboration systemsinclude email, intranets, chat applications and software with social elements such as Yammer and Slack.
What are enterprise systems?
Some information systems can be used throughout an organisation; these are called enterprise systems. Enterprise systems may provide support for the different functional areas of the organisation, including manufacturing, sales, marketing, human resources, accounting and so on.
Early computer systems tended to be used in a more localised way, often by particular departments. As local area networks, corporate databases, and ERP (enterprise resources planning systems such as SAP) were introduced, it became much more common for application systems to be used across the entire organisation, even in very large organisations.
There are many functions in organisations where business processes span multiple departments, and that’s where enterprise systems are particularly useful. They store the organisation’s data in an integrated way, and the system components to handle the work of each functional area are properly integrated with one another.
What are some examples of enterprise systems?
- Supply chain management (SCM) systems
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems
- Customer relationship management (CRM) system
What are functional area systems?
The organisation has many functional areas, each of which can use enterprise systems. For example, in production we have systems that control manufacturing. These processes do not stand alone; they rely on the supply chain. Therefore links are needed to the other systems.
For example, consider the process of ordering the production of parts or products. The warehouse notices that stock of a particular product or part is running low, and therefore asks for more to be produced. The production requires raw materials, and so on.
This business process involves at least the warehousing and the manufacturing parts of the organisation. It illustrates how a processes may span departments, and that’s why we need enterprise systems—they are medium through which the departments control and coordinate the interactions.
What is analytics?
The term “analytics” is used to describe a range of advanced data analysis techniques. Data (or business) analytics may use a combination of statistics, coding, machine learning and other techniques to discover and interpret patterns in data.
Analytics may be:
- Descriptive – analysis of the past and present situation.
- Diagnostic – analysis of why something occurred.
- Predictive – forecasting what will happen.
- Prescriptive – suggesting actions.
What are the four types of analytics?
There are four different types of analytics:
- Descriptive - what has happened
- Diagnostic - why it happened
- Predictive - whats going to happen
- Prescriptive - what should happen
What is business analytics?
The terms “business analytics” and “data analytics” are currently popular and describe a range of data analysis and forecasting activities. Analytics can use a combination of advanced statistics, coding, and operations research techniques to discover and interpret patterns in data.
The terms “business analytics”, “data analytics”, “data analysis” and “business intelligence” are related. There are no clear definitions, but generally speaking, when we’re talking about analytics rather than analysis, we are referring to more technical form of analysis, often with the use of statistical techniques and perhaps machine learning and other advanced tools.
What is data mining?
Data mining is a kind of exploratory data analysis where we don’t necessarily know the questions in advance—or at least, we don’t know how to solve them. It’s about revealing hidden patterns and relationships in data. We can start with a dataset and, as we perform exploratory analysis on the data, we can reveal hitherto unknown patterns, groups, relationships and trends.
Data mining can be used for many different applications. It’s often used in marketing. It’s used by banks for fraud detection; it can be used for credit risk analysis.
There are many techniques that can be used in data mining. Many of them are statistical techniques and they can be used to identify relationships in the data which can be used as the basis for further investigation.
What is a supply chain management system?
Supply chain management (SCM) is the centralized management of the flow of goods and services and includes all processes that transform raw materials into final products. By managing the supply chain, companies are able to cut excess costs and deliver products to the consumer faster.
What is a enterprise resource planning system?
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) refers to a type of software that organizations use to manage day-to-day business activities such as accounting, procurement, project management, risk management and compliance, and supply chain operations.
What is a management information system?
A management information system (MIS) is a computer system consisting of hardware and software that serves as the backbone of an organization’s operations. An MIS gathers data from multiple online systems, analyzes the information, and reports data to aid in management decision-making.
What are the dangers of data mining?
Data privacy
Ethical Dilemmas
Inaccurate data
Overvaluing the output
