MIS CHAPTER 2

Strategic Level

Managers develop overall business strategies, goals, and objectives as part of the company's strategic plan.

Intelligent Systems

Various commercial applications of artificial intelligence. They include sensors, software, and devices that emulate and enhance human capabilities, learn or understand from experience, make sense of ambiguous or contradictory information, and even use reasoning to solve problems and make decisions effectively.

Virtual Reality

a computer-simulated environment that can be a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world.

Business Process Model

a graphic description of a process, showing the sequence of process tasks, which is a developed for a specific purpose and from a selected viewpoint.

Fuzzy Logic

a mathematical methods of handling imprecise or subjective information.

Benchmarking

a process of continuously measuring system results comparing those results to optimal system performance (benchmark values) and identifying steps and procedures to improve system performance.

Model

a simplified representation or abstraction of reality. *Help managers calculate risks, understand uncertainty, change variables and manipulate time to make decisions.

Drill-down

enables users to view details, and details of details, of information.

Analytical Information

encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performance of managerial analysis or semistructured decisions.

Transactional Informations

encompasses all the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performance of daily operational or structured decisions.

Goal-seeking Analysis

finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal such as a desired level of output.

Business Process Management (BPM) Systems

focus on evaluating and improving processes that include both person-to-person workflow and system-to-system communications.

Streamlining

improves business process efficiencies by simplifying or eliminating unnecessary steps.

Shopping Bot

is software that will search several retailer websites and provide a comparison of each retailer's offerings including price and availability.

Swim Lane

layout arranges the steps of a business process into a set of rows depicting the various elements.

Effectiveness MIS Metrics

measure the impact MIS has on business processes and activities, including customer satisfaction and customer conversion rates.

Efficiency MIS Metrics

measure the performance of MIS itself, such as throughput, transaction speed and system availability.

Metrics

measurements that evaluate results to determine whether a project is meeting its goals.

Decision Support Systems (DSSs)

model information using OLAP, which provides assistance in evaluating and choosing among difference courses of action.

Semistructured Decisions

occur in situations in which a few established processes he;p to evaluate potential solutions, but not enough to lead to a definite recommended decision.

Bottlenecks

occur when resources reach full capacity and cannot handle any additional demands; they limit throughput and impede operations.

Unstructured Decisions

occurring in situations in which no procedures or rules exist to guide decision makers toward the correct choice. *They are infrequent, extremely important, and typically related to long-term business strategy.

Redundancy

occurs when a task or activity is unnecessarily repeated, for example, if both the sales department and the accounting department check customer credit.

Visualization

produces graphical displays of patterns and complex relationships in large amounts of data.

Granularity

refers to the level of detail in the model or the decision-making process. *the greater the granularity, the deeper the level of detail or fineness of data.

As-Is Process Models

represent the current state of the operation that has been mapped, without any specific improvements or changes to existing processes.

Slice-and-Dice

the ability to look at information from different perspectives

Business Process Modeling aka Mapping

the activity of creating a detailed flowchart or process map of a work process that shows its inputs, tasks, and activities in a structured sequence.

Consolidation

the aggregation of data from simple roll-ups to complex groupings of interrelated information.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between enterprises.

Transaction Processing System (TPS)

the basic business system that serves the operational level (analysts) and assists in making structured decisions.

Business Process Improvement

Attempts to understand and measure the current process and make performance improvements accordingly.

Managerial Level

Employees are continuously evaluating company operations to hone the firm's abilities to identify, adapt to, and leverage change.

Operational Level

Employees develop, control, and maintain core business activities required to run the day-to-day operations.

Sensitivity Analysis

a special case of what-if analysis, is the study of impact on other variables when one variable is changed repeatedly. *useful when users are uncertain about the assumptions made in estimating the value of certain key variables.

Intelligent Agent

a special-purpose knowledge based information system that accomplishes specific tasks on behalf of its users.

Executive Information System (EIS)

a specialized DSS that supports senior-level executives and unstructured, long-term, nonroutine decisions requiring judgment, evaluation, and insight.

Project

a temporary activity a company undertakes to create a unique product, service, or result.

Neural Network

also called an artificial neural network, is a category of AI that attempts to emulate the way the human brain works.

Business-Facing Processes

also called back-office processes, are invisible to the external customer but essential to the effective management of the business; they include goal setting, day-to-day planning, giving performance feedback, and rewards, and allocating resources.

Computer-Facing Processes

also called front-office processes, result in a product or service received by an organization's external customer.

Genetic Algorithm

an artificial intelligence system that mimics the evolutionary, survival of the fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem.

Optimization Analysis

an extension of goal-seeking analysis, finds the optimum value for a target variable by repeatedly changing other variables, subject to specified constraints.

Market Share

an external KPI or the proportion of the market that a firm captures. *Calculate it by dividing the firm's sales by the total market sales for the entire industry.

Return on Investment (ROI)

an internal KPI that indicates the earning power of a project

Benchmarks

baseline values the system seeks to attain

What-If Analysis

checks the impact of a change in a variable or assumption on the model.

To-Be Process Models

show the results of applying change improvement opportunities to the current (As-Is) process model. *Ensures that the process is fully and clearly understood before the details of a process solution are decided upon.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

simulates human thinking and behavior, such as the ability to reason and learn. *Ultimate goal is to build a system that can mimic human intelligence.

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)

the capture of transaction and event information using technology to (1) process the information according to defined business rules, (2) store the information, and (3) update existing information to reflect the new information

Critical Success Factors (CSFs)

the crucial steps companies perform to achieve their goals and objectives and implement their strategies.

Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)

the manipulation of information to create business intelligence in support of strategic decision making.

Source Documents

the original transaction record

Automation

the process of computerizing manual tasks, making them more efficient and effective and dramatically lowering operation costs.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

the quantifiable metric a company uses to evaluate progress toward critical success factors.

Cycle Time

the time required to process an order, is a common KPI for operations management

Digital Dashboard

tracks KPIs and CSFs by compiling information from multiple sources and tailoring it to meet user needs.

Structured Decisions

which arise in situations where established processes offer potential solutions. *Made frequently and are almost repetitive in nature; they affect short-term business strategies.