Information systems

They are systems formed through coordinated function of people, equipment, procedures, data and other recourse to provide uniform, reliable, accurate information. In effect, an organizational system is tied together with its information elements by the information system.

Examples of information systems are;

Transaction processing system (TPS)

It falls in the low-level management, it support day to day business operating activities (transactions) which is the most important objective of the business. A computer based TPS focuses on the operating level of the business and deals with data from internal sources. The management information produced by TPS usually consist of detail reports of daily transaction (such as items sold or all accounting transaction that have been recorded in various ledgers and registers) or future transactions (such as list of items to be ordered). Typical examples of such systems would be Airline Reservation Systems, Banking Systems, or the Accounting System of almost any large company

A TPS operates only within one functional area of business i.e. accounting and finance, production, marketing and sales, and research and development each has its own TPS. Database management systems (DBMS) were designed to solve the problems involved with sharing computer-based files among the different functional areas of the business hence all the areas are able to communicate.

Transaction Processing Systems are mostly unknown to the world of personal computers, today, many small companies, non-commercial organizations, and even private individuals are discovering applications that can benefit from a Transaction Processing System.

The main problems addressed by Transaction Processing Systems are:

the need to handle hundreds, even thousands of simultaneous Users
the need to allow many Users to work on the same set of data, with immediate updating
the need to handle errors in a safe and consistent manner

Normal time-sharing systems are usually incapable of handling these problems because of the great number of Users. Spawning a unique process for each User having his own copy of all the data simply creates too much overhead for the Operating System.

The World Wide Web easily reaches large numbers of simultaneous Users. Consequently, Web Servers internally work very similar to traditional Transaction Processing Systems, with the exception that they lack database access and state information pertaining to the individual Users.

Transaction Systems handle errors in a safe and consistent manner, but there are certain errors that can not be avoided (e.g. Network errors or Database deadlocks) so a way must exist to handle them when they occur. It is not possible to simply abort a current process. The consequences to a database left in an inconsistent state could render the entire system unusable.

Management information system (MIS)

Falls in the middle level management also called information-reporting system. They provide middle level management with reports that summarize and categorize information derived from all databases i.e. outputs of TPS are its main components for management to spot trends and to get the overview of the current business activities as well as monitor and control operational level activities.

The scope of the report and characteristics of their information vary according to their purpose. I.e. the reports can be periodical ( such as income statements and balance sheets), on demand or event driven and ...

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Management information system (MIS)

Decision support system (DSS)

Falls in the top level management. It’s a set of special computer programs that establishes a sophisticated system to provide tools to assist managers in analyzing information from the two lower management levels and from outside the company. The analyses are used for structured decision making. (DSS) are a class of computerized information system that supports decision-making activities. DSS are interactive computer-based systems and subsystems intended to help decision-makers use communications technologies, data, documents, knowledge and/or models to complete decision process tasks. A properly designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.

DSS combines sophisticated analysis programs with traditional data access and retrieval functions, they can be used by people who are not computer specialist and they emphasize flexibility in decision making.

They are used to analyze unexpected problems and integrate information flow and decision making activities. Although DSS are designed for large computer systems, electronic spreadsheet packages and DBMS are used by many businesses as tools for building a DSS for a microcomputer. Spreadsheet software is popular among managers because it allows them to examine a variety of business situations, that is, to “see what happens” if business conditions changed and make projections on gausses, about future development based on sophisticated computer based data analysis. DSS designed for larger computer systems collect large amount of data and analyze it in more ways and with greater efficiency than microcomputer’s spreadsheet does.

Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present would be:

Accessing all of your current information assets, including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts

Comparative sales figures between one week and the next

Projected revenue figures based on new product sales assumptions

The consequences of different decision alternatives, given past experience in a context that is described

Expert systems

They are systems that support practical application of artificial intelligence, they are designed to be user’s assistants, not replacement. They solve problems that require substantial expertise to understand, the system’s performance depend on the body of fact (knowledge) and the heuristics (rules of thumb) that are fed into the computer. Knowledge engineers gather, largely through interviews, the expert knowledge and heuristics from human expert in the field from which the computer based system is being designed to support decision. Fields such as medicine, engineering or geology (e.g. in the field of medicine, on question that might be asked of an expert system is whether one treatment is better for a patient than a another). The responses recorded during the interviews are codified and entered into a knowledge base that can be used by a computer. An expert system has the capacity to store the collection of knowledge and manipulate it in response to user inquiries, in some cases, it can even explain it’s response to the user.

An example of expert system is the MYCIN, a system that diagnoses infectious diseases and recommends appropriate drugs e.g. bacteremia (bacteria in the blood) can be fatal if it is not treated quickly, traditional tests for it requires 24 – 48 hours to verify while MYCN provides solution in minutes.

Most expert systems are developed via specialized software tools called shells. These shells come equipped with an inference mechanism (backward chaining, forward chaining, or both), and require knowledge to be entered according to a specified format (all of which might lead some to categorize OPS5 as a shell). They typically come with a number of other features, such as tools for writing hypertext, for constructing friendly user interfaces, for manipulating lists, strings, and objects, and for interfacing with external programs and databases. These shells qualify as languages, although certainly with a narrower range of application than most programming languages. For more detailed information on expert system shells, see the "Expert System Shells at Work" series by Schmuller PC AI, (1991, 1992).

Knowledge work systems

These are systems where Knowledge got from interviews is kept so that it can be used by expert systems to make decision. Responses are recorded from professionals about a particular solution to a problem and then they are codified and entered into the knowledge-based system to be used by the expert system in making a decision. There can be as many as 100 solutions for one particular problem and all this are kept in the knowledge based system so as to make it easy for the expert system to make a reliable decision. Knowledge-based systems collect the small fragments of human know-how into a knowledge base which is used to reason through a problem, using the knowledge that is appropriate. A different problem, within the domain of the knowledge base, can be solved using the same program without reprogramming.

This is where we find heuristics “rule of thumb” which encodes a piece of knowledge about how to solve a particular problem in some domain such methods are approximate in that

They don’t require perfect data
The solutions derived by the system may be proposed by varying degrees of certainity

Office automation system

Personal computer-based office automation software has become an indispensable part of election management in many countries. Word processing programs have replaced typewriters; spreadsheet programs have replaced ledger books; database programs have replaced paper-based electoral rolls, inventories and staff lists; personal organizer programs have replaced paper diaries; and so on.

Starting with basic, cumbersome word processing and spreadsheet programs in the 1970s, by the 1990s office automation programs had become very sophisticated. These programs have served to empower ordinary office workers by enabling them to complete tasks in-house that once had to be sent off-site to be completed by specialists.

For example, desktop publishing programs allow relative novices to produce professional-quality publications, where once even the simplest of typesetting tasks had to be sent to professional typesetters and printers. Database and spreadsheet programs running on high-powered personal computers allow ordinary users to input, store and use data in ways that once would only have been possible on large main-frame computers operated by specialist programmers.

Types of Office Automation Software

A typical 'suite' of office automation software could include some or all of the following kinds of programs:

Word processor, spreadsheet, database, desktop publisher, project manager, presentation, computer file manager, email, internet browser, internet publisher, personal organiser, financial system, personnel system

Many books, magazines and web sites can help you choose office automation software suitable for your purposes. In many cases, office automation software will be provided with the appropriate hardware, either as part of the purchase agreement or as part of a government standard.

Using Office Automation Software

It is desirable that all users of office automation software be trained in their use. In most countries external training providers will be available. Some electoral authorities may be able to provide in-house training using its own skilled staff. Most software packages also come with user manuals (paper and/or on-screen) and many come with self-paced on-screen tutorials.

Modern office automation software is very powerful. Skilled users can develop very sophisticated products. For example, an electoral authority could use office automation for:

producing all or most of its publications in-house, including books, brochures, forms and newsletters
composing, editing and printing all correspondence in a standard corporate style, incorporating automatic printing of logos and corporate livery
developing computer-generated presentations for projection on overhead screens for seminars and training purposes
entering, storing and using electoral roll data
automating various parts of the election process, such as issuing and receiving postal votes
capturing and analysing election results data
storing and manipulating employee records
automating large scale personalised mail-outs to clients and staff
keeping inventories
maintaining a corporate web site and an internal intranet
planning and monitoring all aspects of a major project
organising a financial management system
sending individual and grouped electronic mail to internal staff and external clients
sharing files across a network

As the use of office automation software expands, the need to apply standards becomes more and more important. Where many users are sharing systems and files, it is important to ensure that files are stored in logical locations using a standard set of file naming conventions.

Reference

Computers and information systems (1994 –1995 edition) by Hutchinson and Stacey C. Sawyner.
Structured system development, analysis, design and implementation (2nd edition) by Powes, Cheney, and Crow
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