Information Systems: Impact on Business and Operations
Posted on Feb 24, 2025 in Arabic and Islamic Studies
Chapter 3: Organization and Information Systems
- Routines and Business Processes
- Routines (Standard Operating Procedures)
- Precise rules, procedures, and practices developed to cope with virtually all expected situations.
- Business Processes: Collections of routines.
- Business Firm: Collection of business processes.
Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems
- Recent Cases of Failed Ethical Judgment in Business
- Barclay’s Bank, GlaxoSmithKline, Walmart.
- In many, information systems were used to bury decisions from public scrutiny.
- Ethics
- Principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behaviors.
- Five Moral Dimensions of the Information Age
- Information rights and obligations.
- Property rights and obligations.
- Accountability and control.
- System quality.
- Quality of life.
- Advances in Data Analysis Techniques
- Profiling
- Combining data from multiple sources to create dossiers of detailed information on individuals.
- Nonobvious Relationship Awareness (NORA)
- Combining data from multiple sources to find obscure, hidden connections that might help identify criminals or terrorists.
- Mobile Device Growth
- Tracking of individual cell phones.
Chapter 6: Databases and Information Management
- Non-relational Databases: “NoSQL”
- More flexible data model.
- Data sets stored across distributed machines.
- Easier to scale.
- Handle large volumes of unstructured and structured data (Web, social media, graphics).
- Databases in the Cloud
- Typically, less functionality than on-premises databases.
- Amazon Relational Database Service, Microsoft SQL Azure.
- Private clouds.
- Big Data
- Massive sets of unstructured/semi-structured data from Web traffic, social media, sensors, and so on.
- Petabytes, exabytes of data.
- Volumes too great for typical DBMS.
- Can reveal more patterns and anomalies.
- Business Intelligence Infrastructure
- Today includes an array of tools for separate systems and big data.
- Contemporary tools:
- Data warehouses.
- Data marts.
- Hadoop.
- In-memory computing.
- Analytical platforms.
- Data Warehouse
- Stores current and historical data from many core operational transaction systems.
- Consolidates and standardizes information for use across the enterprise, but data cannot be altered.
- Provides analysis and reporting tools.
- Data Marts
- Subset of a data warehouse.
- Summarized or focused portion of data for use by a specific population of users.
- Typically focuses on a single subject or line of business.
- Hadoop
- Enables distributed parallel processing of big data across inexpensive computers.
- Key services:
- Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS): data storage.
- MapReduce: breaks data into clusters for work.
- Hbase: NoSQL database.
- Used by Facebook, Yahoo, NextBio.
- In-Memory Computing
- Used in big data analysis.
- Uses a computer’s main memory (RAM) for data storage to avoid delays in retrieving data from disk storage.
- Can reduce hours/days of processing to seconds.
- Requires optimized hardware.
- Analytic Platforms
- High-speed platforms using both relational and non-relational tools optimized for large datasets.
- Analytical Tools: Relationships, Patterns, Trends
- Tools for consolidating, analyzing, and providing access to vast amounts of data to help users make better business decisions.
- Multidimensional data analysis (OLAP).
- Data mining.
- Text mining.
- Web mining.
- Online Analytical Processing (OLAP)
- Supports multidimensional data analysis.
- Viewing data using multiple dimensions.
- Each aspect of information (product, pricing, cost, region, time period) is a different dimension.
- Example: How many washers were sold in the East in June compared with other regions?
- OLAP enables rapid, online answers to ad hoc queries.
- Web Mining
- Discovery and analysis of useful patterns and information from the Web.
- Understand customer behavior.
- Evaluate the effectiveness of a website, and so on.
- Web content mining: Mines content of Web pages.
- Web structure mining: Analyzes links to and from Web pages.
- Web usage mining: Mines user interaction data recorded by a Web server.
Chapter 7: Telecommunications, the Internet, and Wireless Technology
- Search Engines
- Started as simpler programs using keyword indexes.
- Google improved indexing and created a page ranking system.
- Mobile Search: 20% of all searches in 2012.
- Search Engine Marketing: Major source of Internet advertising revenue.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Adjusting website and traffic to improve rankings in search engine results.
- Social Search: Google +1, Facebook Like.
- Semantic Search: Anticipating what users are looking for rather than simply returning millions of links.
- Intelligent Agent Shopping Bots: Use intelligent agent software for searching the Internet for shopping information.
- Web 2.0
- Second-generation services.
- Enabling collaboration, sharing information, and creating new services online.
- Features:
- Interactivity.
- Real-time user control.
- Social participation (sharing).
- User-generated content.
- Web 2.0 Services and Tools
- Blogs: Chronological, informal websites created by individuals.
- RSS (Really Simple Syndication): Syndicates Web content so aggregator software can pull content for use in another setting or for later viewing.
- Blogosphere.
- Microblogging.
- Wikis: Collaborative websites where visitors can add, delete, or modify content on the site.
- Social Networking Sites: Enable users to build communities of friends and share information.
- Web 3.0: The “Semantic Web”
- A collaborative effort led by W3C to add a layer of meaning to the existing Web.
- Goal is to reduce human effort in searching for and processing information.
- Making the Web more “intelligent” and intuitive.
- Increased communication and synchronization with computing devices, communities.
- “Web of things.”
- Increased cloud computing, mobile computing.
Chapter 8: Securing Information Systems
- Pharming
- Redirects users to a bogus Web page, even when an individual types the correct Web page address into his or her browser.
- Click Fraud
- Occurs when an individual or computer program fraudulently clicks on an online ad without any intention of learning more about the advertiser or making a purchase.
- Cyberterrorism and Cyberwarfare.
- Internal Threats: Employees
- Security threats often originate inside an organization.
- Inside knowledge.
- Sloppy security procedures.
- Social Engineering:
- Tricking employees into revealing their passwords by pretending to be legitimate members of the company in need of information.
- Types of General Controls
- Software controls.
- Hardware controls.
- Computer operations controls.
- Data security controls.
- Implementation controls.
- Administrative controls.
- Application Controls
- Specific controls unique to each computerized application, such as payroll or order processing.
- Include both automated and manual procedures.
- Ensure that only authorized data are completely and accurately processed by that application.
- Include:
- Input controls.
- Processing controls.
- Output controls.
- Risk Assessment: Determines the level of risk to a firm if a specific activity or process is not properly controlled.
- Types of threat.
- Probability of occurrence during the year.
- Potential losses, value of threat.
- Expected annual loss.
| EXPOSURE | PROBABILITY | LOSS RANGE (AVG) | EXPECTED ANNUAL LOSS |
| Power Failure | 30% | $5K–$200K ($102,500) | $30,750 |
| Embezzlement | 5% | $1K–$50K ($25,500) | $1,275 |
| User Error | 98% | $200–$40K ($20,100) | $19,698 |
Chapter 9: Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy
- Enterprise Systems
- Also known as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.
- Suite of integrated software modules and a common central database.
- Collects data from many divisions of a firm for use in nearly all of the firm’s internal business activities.
- Information entered in one process is immediately available for other processes.
- Enterprise Software
- Built around thousands of predefined business processes that reflect best practices.
- Finance and accounting.
- Human resources.
- Manufacturing and production.
- Sales and marketing.
- To implement, firms:
- Select functions of the system they wish to use.
- Map business processes to software processes.
- Use the software’s configuration tables for customizing.
- Supply Chain
- Network of organizations and processes for:
- Procuring materials, transforming them into products, and distributing the products.
- Upstream Supply Chain:
- Firm’s suppliers, suppliers’ suppliers, and processes for managing relationships with them.
- Downstream Supply Chain:
- Organizations and processes responsible for delivering products to customers.
- Internal supply chain.
- Supply Chain Management
- Inefficiencies cut into a company’s operating costs.
- Can waste up to 25% of operating expenses.
- Just-in-time Strategy:
- Components arrive as they are needed.
- Finished goods are shipped after leaving the assembly line.
- Safety Stock: Buffer for lack of flexibility in the supply chain.
- Bullwhip Effect:
- Information about product demand gets distorted as it passes from one entity to the next across the supply chain.
- Supply Chain Management Software
- Supply Chain Planning Systems:
- Model existing supply chain.
- Enable demand planning.
- Optimize sourcing, manufacturing plans.
- Establish inventory levels.
- Identify transportation modes.
- Supply Chain Execution Systems:
- Manage the flow of products through distribution centers and warehouses.
Chapter 10: E-commerce: Digital Markets, Digital Goods
- Three Major Types of E-commerce
- Business-to-consumer (B2C):
- Example: BarnesandNoble.com
- Business-to-business (B2B):
- Consumer-to-consumer (C2C):
- E-commerce can be categorized by platform:
- Mobile commerce (m-commerce).
Chapter 12: Enhancing Decision Making
- Business Value of Improved Decision Making
- Improving hundreds of thousands of “small” decisions adds up to a large annual value for the business.
- Types of Decisions:
- Unstructured: Decision maker must provide judgment, evaluation, and insight to solve the problem.
- Structured: Repetitive and routine; involve a definite procedure for handling so they do not have to be treated each time as new.
- Semistructured: Only part of the problem has a clear-cut answer provided by an accepted procedure.
- Senior Managers:
- Make many unstructured decisions.
- For example: Should we enter a new market?
- Middle Managers:
- Make more structured decisions, but these may include unstructured components.
- For example: Why is the order fulfillment report showing a decline in Minneapolis?
- Operational Managers, Rank and File Employees:
- Make more structured decisions.
- For example: Does the customer meet the criteria for credit?
- The Four Stages of the Decision-Making Process:
- Intelligence:
- Discovering, identifying, and understanding the problems occurring in the organization.
- Design:
- Identifying and exploring solutions to the problem.
- Choice:
- Choosing among solution alternatives.
- Implementation:
- Making the chosen alternative work and continuing to monitor how well the solution is working.
- Mintzberg’s 10 Managerial Roles
- Interpersonal Roles:
- Figurehead.
- Leader.
- Liaison.
- Informational Roles:
- Nerve center.
- Disseminator.
- Spokesperson.
- Decisional Roles:
- Entrepreneur.
- Disturbance handler.
- Resource allocator.
- Negotiator.
