IS 301 Chapters 5, 6, 7

Multiplexer

A communications processor that allows a single communications channel to carry simultaneous data transmissions from many terminals. This process is accomplished in two basic ways: in frequency division multiplexing (FDM) and in time division multiplexing (TDM).

Internet Service Provider (ISP)

A company that provides access to the Internet to individuals and organizations.

Logical Data Elements

A conceptual framework of several levels of data has been devised that differentiates among different groupings, or elements, of data. Data may be logically organized into characters, fields, records, files, and databases.

Legacy Systems

A continuing trend is the downsizing of larger computer systems by replacing them with client/server networks. For example, a client/server network of several interconnected local area networks may replace a large mainframe-based network with many end-user terminals. This shift typically involves a complex and costly effort to install new application software that replaces the software of older, traditional main-frame-based business information systems, now called...

Attribute

A data field represents it. It is a characteristic or quality of some entity (object, person, place, or event). An employee's salary is an example.

File

A group of related records is a data... (Sometimes referred to as a table or flat file). Regardless of the name used, any grouping of related records in tabular (row-and-column form) is called a...

Data Resource Management

A managerial activity that applies information systems technologies like database management, data warehousing, and other data management tools to the task of managing an organization's data resources to meet the information needs of their business stakeholders.

Bluetooth

A short-range wireless technology which is rapidly being built into computers and other devices. It serves as a cable-free wireless connection to peripheral devices such as computer printers and scanners. It operates at approximately 1 Mbps with an effective range from 10 to 100 meters. It is a cable replacement technology.

Protocol

A standard set of rules and procedures for the control of communications in a network. However, these standards may be limited to just one manufacturer's equipment or just one type of data communications. Its purpose is to create more standardization and compatibility among communications protocols. One example is a standard for the physical characteristics of the cables and connectors between terminals, computers, modems, and communications lines.

Multidimensional Model

A variation of the relational model that uses multidimensional structures to organize data and express the relationships between data. You can visualize it as cubes of data and cubes within cubes of data. Each side of the cube is considered a dimension of the data. Each dimension can represent a different category, such as product type, region, sales channel, and time.

Computer-integrated Manufacturing (CIM)

A variety of manufacturing information systems, many of them Web enabled, are used to support it. Its overall goal and such manufacturing information systems is to create flexible, agile, manufacturing processes that efficiently produce products of the highest quality. Thus, it supports the concepts of flexible manufacturing systems, agile manufacturing, and total quality management.

Functional Business Systems

A variety of types of information systems (transaction processing, management information, decision support, and so on) that support the business functions of accounting, finance, marketing, operations management, and human resource management.

Telecommunications Software

A vital component of all telecommunications networks. This software may reside in PCs, servers, mainframes, and communications processors like multiplexers and routers. Network servers and other computers in a network use these programs to manage network performance.

External Databases

Access to a wealth of information from these databases is available for a fee from commercial online services and with or without charge from many sources on the World Wide Web. Web sites provide an endless variety of hyperlinked pages of multimedia documents in hypermedia databases for you to access.

Record

All of the fields used to describe the attributes of an entity are grouped to form a... Thus, it represents a collection of attributes that describe a single instance of an entity.

Real-time Processing

Also called online processing, where data are processed immediately after a transaction occurs. All online transaction processing systems incorporate this type of processing system.

Communications Satellites

Also use microwave radio as their telecommunications medium. Typically, high-earth orbit (HEO) communications satellites are placed in stationary geosynchronous orbits approximately 22,000 miles above the equator. Satellites are powered by solar panels an can transmit microwave signals at a rate of several hundred million bits per second. They serve as relay stations for communications signals transmitted from earth stations. Earth stations use dish antennas to beam microwave signals to the satellites that amplify and retransmit the signals to other earth stations thousands of miles away.

Database

An integrated collection of logically related data elements. It consolidates records previously stored in separate files into a common pool of data elements that provides data for many applications. The data stored, however, are independent of the application programs using them and the type of storage devices on which they are stored. It doesn't need to look complex or technical to be one; it just needs to provide a logical organization method and easy access to the data stored in it.

Network

An interconnected or interrelated chain, group, or system. For example, the concept can refer to a chain of hotels, the road system, the names in a person's address book or PDA, the railroad system, the members of a church, club or organization.

Wireless Technologies

Another major trend in telecommunications technology.

Telecommunications Network

Any arrangement in which a sender transmits a message to a receiver over a channel consisting of some type of medium. It consists of five basic categories of components: Terminals, Telecommunications Processors, Telecommunications Channels, Computers, Telecommunications Control Software

Interactive Marketing

Coined to describe a customer-focused marketing process that is based on using the Internet, intranets, and extranets to establish two-way transactions between a business and its customers or potential customers.

Database Management Approach

Conceived as a foundation of modern methods for managing organizational data. It consolidates data records, formerly held in separate files, into databases that can be accessed by many different application programs. In addition, it serves as a software interface between users and databases, which helps users easily access the data in a database.

Local Area Networks (LANs)

Connect computers and other information processing devices within a limited physical area, such as an office, classroom, building, manufacturing plant, or other worksite. These have become commonplace in many organizations for providing telecommunications network capabilities that link end users in offices, departments, and other workgroups.

Coaxial Cable

Consists of a sturdy copper or aluminum wire wrapped with spaces to insulate and protect it. The cable's cover and insulation minimize interference and distortion of the signals the cable carries. Groups of these cables may be bundled together in a big cable for ease of installation.

Hypermedia Database

Consists of hyperlinked pages multimedia (text, graphic and photographic images, video clips, audio segments, and so on). That is, from a database management point of view, the set of interconnected multimedia pages on a Web site is a database of interrelated hypermedia page elements, rather than interrelated data records.

Types of Databases

Continuing developments in information technology and its business applications have resulted in the evolution of several major...

Metadata

Data about data.

Data Dictionary

Database management catalog or directory containing metadata (i.e. data about data). It relies on a specialized database software component to manage a database of data definitions, which is metadata about structure, data elements, and other characteristics of an organization's databases.

Hierarchical Structure

Database structure used in early mainframe DBMS packages, in which the relationships between records form a hierarchy or treelike structure.

Network Interoperability

Ensures that anyone anywhere on one network can communicate with anyone anywhere on another network without having to worry about speaking a common language from a telecommunications perspective.

Network Computing

For many users, "the network is the computer." Also known as networkcentric concept, views networks as the central computing resource of any computing environment.

Middleware

General term for any programming that serves to glue together or mediate between two separate, and usually already existing, programs. A common application is to allow programs written for access to a particular database (e.g., DB2) to access other databases (e.g., Oracle) without the need for custom coding.

Lack of Data Integration

Having data in independent files made it difficult to provide end users with information for ad hoc requests that required accessing data stored in several different files. Special computer programs had to be written to retrieve data from each independent file. This retrieval was so difficult, time-consuming, and costly for some organizations that it was impossible to provide end users or management with such information.

Lack of Data Integrity or Standardization

In file processing systems, it was easy for data elements such as stock numbers and customer addresses to be defined differently by different end users and applications. This divergence caused serious inconsistency problems in the development of programs to access such data. In addition, the integrity (i.e., the accuracy and completeness) of the data was suspect because there was no control over their use and maintenance by authorized end users.

Data Dependence

In file processing systems, major components of a system-the organization of files, their physical locations on storage hardware, and the application software used to access those files-depended on one another in significant ways. For example, application programs typically contained references to the specific format of the data stored int he files they used. Thus, changes in the format and structure of data and records in a file required that changes be made to all of the programs that used that file.

Sales Force Automation

Increasingly, computers and the Internet are providing the basis for it. In many companies, the sales force is being outfitted with notebook computers, Web browsers, and sales contact management software that connect them to marketing Web sites on the Internet, extranets, and their company intranets. This not only increases the personal productivity of salespeople, but it dramatically speeds up the capture and analysis of sales data from the field to marketing managers at company headquarters.

Data Redundancy

Independent data files included a lot of duplicated data; the same data (such as customer's name and address) were recorded and stored in several files. It caused problems when data had to be updated. Separate file maintenance programs had to be developed and coordinated to ensure that each file was properly updated.

Open Systems

Information systems that use common standards for hardware, software, applications, and networking. Like the Internet and corporate intranets and extranets, these create a computing environment that is open to easy access by end users and their networked computer systems.

Cross-functional Enterprise System

Information technology is used to develop an integration with this system, used by many companies today for the purpose of crossing the boundaries of traditional business functions in order to reengineer and improve vital business processes all across the enterprise. It is viewed by organizations as a strategic way to use IT to share information resources and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of business processes, and develop strategic relationships with customers, suppliers, and business partners.

Structured Query Language (SQL)

International standard query language found in many DBMS packages. In most cases, it is the language structure used to "ask a question" that the DBMS will retrieve the data to answer. The basic form of it is: SELECT...FROM...WHERE...

Bandwidth

It classifies the communications speed and capacity of telecommunications networks. It determines the channel's maximum transmission rate. It represents the capacity of the connection. The greater the capacity, the more likely that greater performance will follow.

Targeted Marketing

It has become an important tool in developing advertising and promotion strategies to strengthen a company's e-commerce initiatives, as well as its traditional business venues.

Object-oriented Model

It is considered one of the key technologies of a new generation of multimedia Web-based applications. It consists of data values describing the attributes of an entity, plus the operations that can be performed upon the data. This encapsulation capability allows the object-oriented model to handle complex types of data (graphics, pictures, voice, and text) more easily than other database structures.

Entity

It is object, person, place, or event. For example, an employee of a business.

Field

It is the next higher level of data, or data item. It consists of a grouping of related characters. For example, the grouping of alphabetic characters in a person's name may form a name field and the grouping of numbers in a sales amount forms a sales amount field. Generally speaking, these are organized such that they represent some logical order, for example, last_name, first_name, address, city, state, and zip code.

Network Architecture

Its goal is to promote an open, simple, flexible, and efficient telecommunications environment, accomplished by the use of standard protocols, standard communications hardware and software interfaces, and the design of a standard multilevel interface between end users and computer systems.

Wireless LAN

Its installation is the solution to problems such as those of repairing mistakes in and damage to wiring that is often difficult and costly or major relocations of LAN workstations and other components.

Online Accounting Systems

Its interactive nature calls for new forms of transaction documents, procedures, and controls. This particualrly applies to systems like order processing, inventory control, accounts receivable, and accounts payable.

Enterprise Collaboration Systems

Its purpose is to enable us to work together more easily and effectively by helping us to communicate, coordinate, and collaborate.

Database Administrators (DBAs)

Large organizations usually place control of enterprisewide database development in the hands of ~ and other database specialists. This delegation improves the integrity and security of organizational databases. Database developers use the data definition language (DDL) in database management systems like Oracle 11g or IBM's DB2 to develop and specify the data contents, relationships, and structure of each databse, as well as to modify these database specifications when necessary. Such information is cataloged and stored in a databse of data definitions and specifications called a data dictionary, or metadata repository, which is managed by the database management software and maintained by DBA.

Database Interrogation

Major benefit of the database management approach. End users can use a DBMS by asking for information from a database using a query feature or a report generator. they can recive an immediate response in the form of video displays or printed reports.

Data Mining

Major use of data warehouse databases and the static data they contain. Therefore, the data in a data warehouse are analyzed to reveal hidden patterns and trends in historical business activity. This analysis can be used to help managers make decisions about strategic changes in business operations to gain competitive advantages in the marketplace. It can discover new correlations, patterns, and trends in vast amounts of business data (frequently several terabytes of data) stored in data warehouses.

Order Processing, Inventory Control, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, Payroll, and General Ledger Systems

Management accounting systems that focus on the planning and control of business operations. They emphasize cost accounting reports, the development of financial budgets and projected financial statements, and analytical reports comparing actual to forecasted performance.

Distributed Databases

Many organizations replicate and distribute copies or parts of databases to network servers at a variety of sites. These ~ can reside on network servers on the World Wide Web, on corporate intranets or extranets, or on other company networks. These may be copies of operational or analytical databases, hypermedia, or discussion databases, or nay other type of database. Replication and distribution of databases improve database performance at end-user worksites. Ensuring that the data in an organization's distributed databases are consistently and concurrently updated is a major challenge of ~ management.

Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)

Many organizations use these to establish secure intranets and extranets. It is a secure network that uses the Internet as its main backbone network but relies on network firewalls, encryption, and other security features of its Internet and intranet connections and those of participating organizations. Thus, for example, it would enable a company to use the Internet to establish secure intranets between its distant branch offices and manufacturing plants and secure extranets between its distant branch offices and manufacturing plants and secure extranets between itself and its business customer and suppliers.

Online HRM System

May involve recruiting for employees through recruitment sections of corporate Web sites. Companies are also using commercial recruiting services and databases on the World Wide Web, posting messages in selected Internet newsgroups, and communicating with job applicants via e-email.

Extranets

Network links that use Internet technologies to interconnect the intranet of a business with the intranets of its customers, suppliers, or other business partners. Companies can establish direct private network links among themselves or create private, secure Internet links called virtual private networks (VPNs).

Internet Networking Technologies

Open systems with unrestricted connectivity using it as their technology platform, are today's primary telecommunications technology drivers. Web browser suites, HTML Web page editors, Internet and intranet servers and network management software, TCP/IP Internet networking products, and network security firewalls are just a few examples. These technologies are being applied in Internet, intranet, and extranet applications, especially those for electronic commerce and collaboration.

Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)

Performance-monitoring information systems for factory floor operations. They monitor, track, and control the five essential components involved in a production process: materials, equipment, personnel, instructions and specifications, and production facilities. It includes shop floor scheduling and control, machine control, robotics control, and process control systems. These manufacturing systems monitor, report, and adjust the status and performance of production components to help a company achieve a flexible, high-quality manufacturing process.

Online Transaction Processing Systems

Play a strategic role in Web-enabled businesses. Many firms are using the Internet and other networks that tie them electronically to their customers or suppliers for online transaction processing (OLTP). Such real-time systems, which capture and process transactions immediately, can help firms provide superior service to customers and other trading partners. This capability adds value to their products and services, and thus gives them an important way to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

Data Modeling

Process in which the relationships among data elements are identified. Each data model defines the logical relationships among the data elements needed to support a basic business process.

Telecommunications Processors

Processors such as modems, multiplexers, switches, and routers that perform a variety of support functions between the computers and other devices in a telecommunications network.

Marketing Information Systems

Provide information technologies that support major components of the marketing function. For example, Internet/intranet Web sites and services make an interactive marketing process possible where customers can become partners in creating, marketing, purchasing, and improving products and services.

Analog or Digital

Refers to the method used to convert information into an electrical signal. For example, a microphone must convert the pressure waves that we call sound into a corresponding electrical voltage or current, which can be sent down a telephone line, amplified in a sound system, broadcast on the radio, and/or recorded on some medium.

Network Structure

Represents more complex logical relationships and is still used by some mainframe DBMS packages. It allows many-to-many relationships among records; that is, the network model can access a data element by following one of several paths because any any data element or record can be related to any number of other data elements. For example, departmental records can be related to more than one employee record, and employee records can be related to more than one project record. Thus, you could locate all employee records for a particular department or all project records related to a particular employee.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

Software that is being used by many companies to connect their major e-business applications. It also provides middleware that performs data conversion and coordination, application communication and messaging services, and access to the application interfaces involved.

Metcalfe's Law

States that the usefulness, or utility, of a network equals the square of the number of users. In other words, every time you add a new user to a network, the value of the network, in terms of potential connections amongst its members doubles.

Operational Databases

Store detailed data needed to support the business processes and operations of a company. They are also called subject area databases (SADB), transaction databases, and production databases. Examples are a customer database, human resource database, inventory database, and other databases containing data generated by business operations. For example, a human resource database that would include data identifying each employee and his or her time worked, compensation, benefits, performance appraisals, training and development status, and other related human resource data.

Data Warehouse

Stores data that have been extracted from the various operational, external, and other databases of an organization. It is a central source of the data that have been cleaned, transformed, and cataloged so that they can be used by managers and other business professionals for data mining, online analytical processing, and other forms of business analysis, market research, and decision support. Also, it may be subdivided into data marts, which hold subsets of data from the warehouse that focus on specific aspects of a company, such as a department or a business process.

Financial Management Systems

Support business managers and professionals in decisions concerning (1) the financing of a business and (2) the allocation and control of financial resources within a business. Major categories include cash and investment management, capital budgeting, financial forecasting, and financial planning.

Manufacturing Information Systems

Support the production/operations function that includes all activities concerned with the planning and control of the processes producing goods and services. Thus, the production/operations function is concerned with the management of the operational processes and systems of all business firms. Information systems used for operations management and transaction processing support all firms that must plan, monitor, and control inventories, purchases, and the flow of goods and services. Therefore, firms such as transportation companies, wholesalers, retailers, financial institutions, and service companies must use production/operations information systems to plan and control their operations.

File Processing

Systems in which data are organized, stored, and processed in independent files of data records (that's how end users can be frustrated when an organization relies on it).

Computer-aided Manufacturing (CAM)

Systems that automate the production process. For example, this could be accomplished by monitoring and controlling the production process in a factory (manufacturing execution systems) or by directly controlling a physical process (process control), a machine tool (machine control), or machines with some humanlike work capabilities (robots).

Peer-to-Peer Networking

Technologies and applications for the Internet that is being hailed as a development that will have a major impact on e-business and e-commerce and the Internet itself. These are powerful telecommunications networking tool for many business applications. It consists of two major models: (1) An architecture with a directory of all peers on a central server; and (2) a pure architecture with no central directory server.

Wide Area networks (WAN)

Telecommunication networks covering a large geographic area. Networks that cover a large city or metropolitan area (metropolitan area networks) can also be included in this category. This network is used by many multinational companies to transmit and receive information among their employees, customers, suppliers, and other organizations across cities, regions, countries, and the world.

Telecommunications Media

Telecommunications channels use a variety of these. These include twisted-pair wire, coaxial cables, and fiber-optic cables, all of which physically link the devices in a network. Also included are terrestrial microwave, communications satellites, cellular phone systems, and packet and LAN radio, all of which use microwave and other radio waves. In addition, there are infrared systems, which use infrared light to transmit and receive data.

Inter-network Processors

Telecommunications networks that are interconnected by special-purpose communications processors, such as switches, routers, hubs, and gateways.

Telecommunications

The exchange of information in any form (voice, data, text, images, audio, video) over networks. The Internet is the most widely visible form of it in your daily lives.

Enterprise Application Structure

The inter-relationships of the major cross-functional enterprise applications that many companies have or are installing today. This architecture does not provide a detailed or exhaustive application blueprint, but it provides a conceptual framework to help you visualize the basic components, processes, and interfaces of these major e-business applications, and their interrelationships to each other.

Database Management System (DBMS)

The main software tool of the database management approach because it controls the creation, maintenance, and use of the databases of an organization and its end users. Microcomputer database management packages such as Microsoft Access, Lotus Approach, or Corel Paradox allow you to set up and manage databases on your PC, network server, or the World Wide Web.

Character

The most basic logical data element, which consists of a single alphabetic, numeric, or other symbol. From a user's point of view (from a logical as opposed to a physical or hardware view of data), it is the most basic element of data that can be observed and manipulated.

Modem

The most common type of communications processor. They convert the digital signal from a computer or transmission terminal at one end of a communications link into analog frequencies that can be transmitted over ordinary telephone lines. Then the this processor at the other end of the communications line converts the transmitted data back into digital form at a receiving terminal. This process is known as modulation and demodulation, and its name is a combined abbreviation of these two words.

Relational Model

The most widely used of the three database structures. It is used by most microcomputer DBMS packages, as well as by most midrange and mainframe systems. All data elements within the database are viewed as being stored in the form of simple two-dimensional tables, sometimes referred to as relations.

Accounting Information Systems

The oldest and most widely used information systems in business. They record and report business transactions and other economic events. For example, these record and report the flow of funds through an organization on a historical basis and produce important financial statements such as balance sheets and income statements, forecasts of future conditions such as projected financial statements and financial budgets.

Transaction Processing Cycle

The processing of data describing business transactions, updating organizational databases, and producing a variety of information products.

Process Control

The use of computers to control an ongoing physical process. Process control computers control physical processes in petroleum refineries, cement plants, steel mills, chemical plants, food product manufacturing plants, pulp and paper mills, electric power plants, and so on. A process control computer system requires the use of special sensing devices that measure physical phenomena such as temperature or pressure changes. These continuous physical measurements are converted to digital form by analog-to-digital converters and relayed to computers for processing.

Machine Control

The use of computers to control the actions of machines. This is also popularly called numerical control. The computer-based control of machine tools to manufacture products of all kinds is a typical numerical control application used by many factories throughout the world.

Database Structures

There are five fundamental: hierarchical, network, relational, object-oriented, and multidimensional models.

Network Topologies

There are several basic types, or structures, in telecommunications networks. The three basic ones used in wide area and local area telecommunications networks, a star network which ties end-user computers to a central computer; a ring network ties local computer processors together in a ring on a more equal basis; and a bus network, network in which local processors share the same bus, or communications channel. A variation of the ring network is the mesh network. It uses direct communications lines to connect some or all of the computers in the ring to one another.

Client/Server Networks

These have become the predominant information architecture of enterprisewide computing. In this network, end-user PC or NC workstations are the clients. They are interconnected by local area networks and share application processing with network servers, which also manage the networks. (This arrangement is sometimes called a two-tier client/server architecture.)

VoIP

This approach makes use of a packet-based (or switched) network to carry voice calls, instead of the traditional circuit-switched network. It allows a person to function as if he or she were directly connected to a regular telephone network even when at home or in a remote office. It also skips standard long-distance charges because the only connection is through an ISP.

Open Systems Interconneciton (OSI)

This model is a standard description or "reference model" for how messages should be transmitted between any two points in a telecommunications network. Its purpose is to guide the product implementers so that their products will consistently work with other products.

Duplication

This process, in contrast to the replication process, is much less complicated. It basically identifies one database as a master and then duplicates that database at a prescribed time after hours so that each distributed location has the same data. One drawback is that no changes can ever be made to any database other than the master to avoid having local changes overwritten during this process.

Fiber Optics

Uses cables consisting of one or more hair-thin filaments of glass fiber wrapped in a protective jacket. They can conduct pulses of visible light elements (photons) generated by lasers at transmission rates as high as trillions of bits per second (terabits per second, or Tbps). This speed is hundreds of times faster than coaxial cable and thousands of times better than twisted-pair wire lines. These cables provide substantial size and wight reductions as well as increased speed and greater carrying capacity. It can carry more than 500,000 channels, compared with about 5,500 channels for a standard coaxial cable.

Replication

Using this process for updating a distributed database involves using a specialized software application that looks at each distributed database and then finds the changes made to it. Once these changes have been identified, the replication process makes all of the distributed databases look the same by making the appropriate changes to each one. This process is very complex and, depending on the number and size of the distributed databases, can consume a lot of time and computer resources.

Batch Processing

Where transaction data are accumulated over a period of time and processed periodically.