Foundation of Information Systems

Foundation of Information Systems

This section on foundations of Information systems in Business presents an overview of the five basic areas of information systems knowledge needed by business professionals given below, including the conceptual system components and major types of information systems. As shown in Figure information systems provide support at all levels of decision making, viz., operational, tactical, and strategic.

Importance of Information Systems

An understanding of the effective and responsible use and management of information systems and technologies is important for managers, business professionals, and other knowledge workers in today’s internetworked enterprises powered by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT).

Information systems play a vital role in the e-business and e-commerce operations, enterprise collaboration and management, and strategic success of businesses that must operate in an internetworked global environment. Thus, the field of information systems has become a major functional area of business administration.

The IS knowledge that a business manager or professional needs to know is illustrated in the above Figure and covered in this lesson. This includes

Foundation concepts fundamental behavior, technical, business, and managerial concepts like system components and functions, or competitive strategies;

Information technologies An IS Framework for Business Professionals concepts, developments, or management issues regarding hardware, software, data management, networks, and other technologies;

Business applications major uses of IT for business processes, operations, decision making, and strategic/competitive advantage;

Development processes how end users and IS specialists develop and implement business/IT solutions to problems and opportunities arising in business; and

Management challenges how to effectively and ethically manage the IS function and IT resources to achieve top performance and business value in support of the business strategies of the enterprise.

System Concepts

A system is a group of interrelated components working toward the attainment of a common goal by accepting inputs and producing outputs in an organized transformation process. Feedback is data about the performance of a system. Control is the component

that monitors and evaluates feedback and makes any necessary adjustments to the input and processing components to ensure that proper output is produced.

System concepts can also be termed as an organized collection, storage, and presentation system of data and other knowledge for decision making, progress reporting, and for planning and evaluation of programs. It can be either manual or computerized, or a combination of both.

Information systems are teleological systems (that is, goal-directed) in which the intention and goals behind the systems determine what to consider information, how informative objects should be selected, labeled, described, organized and retrieved.

An information system as per the above Fig uses the resources of people, hardware, software, data, and networks to perform input, processing, output, storage, and control activities that convert data resources into information products. Data are first collected and converted to a form that is suitable for processing (input).

Then the data are manipulated and converted into information (processing), stored for future use (storage), or communicated to their ultimate user (output) according to correct processing procedures (control).