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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.