MNG 3204 Information Systems in Digital Age

Business Processes and Information Systems

• Businesses rely on information about suppliers, customers, employees, invoices, payments, and products/services.
• Business performance depends on well-designed and coordinated business processes.
• Businesses are collections of processes; examples include designing, manufacturing, assembling, and revising products.

Examples of Functional Business Processes

• Manufacturing and Production: Assembling products, quality checking, creating bills of materials.
• Sales and Marketing: Identifying customers, creating product awareness, selling products.
• Finance and Accounting: Paying creditors, creating financial statements, managing cash accounts.
• Human Resources: Hiring, evaluating, and enrolling employees in benefit plans.

How Systems Serve Management Groups

• Information systems automate manual tasks and enable broader information access, simultaneous task execution, and faster decision-making.

Types of Information Systems

• Support processes for sales/marketing, manufacturing/production, finance/accounting, and human resources.
• Support decision-making for operational, middle, and senior management.

Transaction Processing Systems (TPS)

• Track elementary activities and transactions like sales, receipts, and payroll.
• Computerized systems record daily routine transactions.

Management Information Systems (MIS)

• Support monitoring, controlling, decision-making, and administrative activities for middle management.
• Provide reports on current performance to monitor and predict future performance.

Decision-Support Systems (DSS)

• Address unique, rapidly changing problems without predefined solutions.

• Types of Analysis:

  • Sensitivity Analysis: Examines how changes in independent variables impact a dependent variable (e.g., market share vs. advertising budget).
  • What-if Analysis: Assesses the impact of different decisions (e.g., cutting advertising and its effect on sales).
  • Goal Seek Analysis: Sets a target and adjusts variables to achieve it (e.g., number of nurses needed to reduce patient waiting time).

Executive-Support Systems (ESS)

• Help senior management make non-routine decisions requiring judgment and evaluation.
• Present data from various sources through user-friendly interfaces, often using portals.
• Incorporate external data (e.g., tax laws) and internal data from MIS and DSS.

Enterprise Systems

• Integrate different systems to work together, spanning functional areas and management levels.
• Coordinate business processes for efficiency in resource management and customer service.

Collaboration

• Working with others to achieve shared goals in business settings.
• Can occur in informal groups or formal teams with specific missions.

Reasons for Collaboration:

• Changing nature of work.
• Growth of professional work.
• Changing organization of firms.
• Emphasis on innovation.
• Changing culture of work and business.
• Increase in remote work.

Benefits of Collaboration

• Increased Productivity: Faster task completion with fewer errors.
• Improved Quality: Faster error communication and correction.
• Enhanced Innovation: Generation of more innovative ideas.
• Better Customer Service: Faster and more effective resolution of customer issues.
• Superior Financial Performance: Improved sales growth and profitability.

Requirements for Collaboration

• Open culture.
• Decentralized structure.
• Use of collaboration technology for implementation, operations, and strategic planning.