Chapter 1: Exam
The activities an Information System produces
- Input - processing - Output
Six Strategic Business Objectives businesses achieve by investing heavily in Information systems:
1. Operational Excellence 2. New products, services, and business models 3. Customer and supplier intimacy 4. Improved decision making 5. Competitive advantage 6. Survival
3 Dimensions of technology
1. Technology 2. Organization 3. Management
Survival
Business firms also invest in information systems and technologies because they are necessities of doing business. Sometimes these "necessities" are driven by industry-level changes
input
Captures raw data from organization or external environment
processing
Converts raw data into meaningful form
technology
Hardware, software, data, telecommunications and networks, IT infrastructure
Improved decision making
In the past decade, information systems and technologies have made it possible for managers to use real-time data from the marketplace when making decisions.
New products, services, and business models
Information systems and technologies are a major enabling tool for firms to create new products and services as well as entirely new business models.
Operational Excellence
Information systems and technologies are some of the most important tools available to managers for achieving higher levels of efficiency and productivity in business operations, especially when coupled with changes in business practices and management behavior.
management
Management's job is to make sense out of the many situations faced by organizations, make decisions, and formulate action plans to solve organizational problems. aka: Sense makers, decision makers, planners, innovators of new processes and leaders.
feedback
Output returned to appropriate members of organization to help evaluate or correct input stage
organization
The key elements of an organization are its people, structure,business processes, politics, and culture.
Customer and supplier intimacy
This lowers costs. How to really know your customers or suppliers is a central problem for businesses with millions of offline and online customers. When a business really knows its customers and serves them well, the customers generally respond by returning and purchasing more.
output
Transfers processed information to people or activities that use it
Competitive advantage
When firms achieve one or more of these business objectives—operational excellence; new products, services, and business models; customer/supplier intimacy; and improved decision making—chances are they have already achieved a competitive advantage Doing things better than your competitors, charging less for superior products, and responding to customers and suppliers in real time all add up to higher sales and higher profits that your competitors cannot match
data
are streams of raw data in contrast to information, are streams of raw facts representing events occurring in organizations or the physical environment before they have been organized and arranged into a form that people can understand and use.
information system
can be defined technically as a set of interrelated components that collect (or retrieve), process, store, and distribute information to support decision making and control in an organization.
information:
is data shaped into meaningful form. Information systems contain information about significant people, places, and things within the organization or in the environment surrounding it. data that has been shaped into a form that is meaningful and useful to human beings.
Digital Firm
is one in which nearly all of the organization's significant business relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees are digitally enabled and mediated. simpler version: is a company in which almost all significant business relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees are digitally enabled and automated.
levels in a firm
senior management: middle management: scientist and knowledge workers operational management: production and service workers data workers.
