ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Organizational Information Systems



Table of Contents

Introduction2

Discussion2

Importance of Information Systems4

Types of Information Systems5

Organizational Decision Making6

IS as Resource of Organization8

Expert Systems11

Conclusions13

References14

Organizational Information Systems

Introduction

A transaction processing system (TPS) receives and processes data generated by the day-to-day transactions of a business: orders, reservations, deposits, and payments. Online transaction processing processes transactions as they occur, such as selling tickets to a scheduled game online or over the phone. Batch processing processes transactions in batches later, as a group, such as the printing of tickets to be mailed to their purchasers (Galliers & Baets, 1998, Pp. 113-143).

Conflicts of interest within and between organizations can be dealt with in different ways. First, a dominant coalition can choose between relevant alternatives of action and assert its own goals and interests. Second, the actors can negotiate a compromise between different interests, which in turn provides the basis for purposeful choice based on knowledge about alternatives and consequences. Third, the competing goals can be addressed sequentially, so as not to come into conflict with one another. Fourth, goals in different parts of an organization, or in different organizations, do not need to be viewed vis-à-vis each other but can be addressed independently. Conflicts of interest can also be dealt with by actors who come to an agreement on means (Pearlson & Saunders, 2004, Pp. 98-107).

Discussion

Decision support systems overlap considerably with management information systems but are not necessarily concerned with the business as a whole. A decision support system is any information system that generates the information an employee needs to make decisions in frequently consulted areas. This can be as simple as tracking sales and inventory in order to alert someone to schedule an inventory restocking, or to estimate a reasonable sales quota for the following year. It can be as complicated as tracking the product and labour costs associated with providing a good or service, like the costs associated with operating a football stadium, in order to inform ticket prices and other decisions (Currie, 1995, Pp. 57-87).

Expert systems are constructed from two primary components: the knowledge base, which consists of the available knowledge on a subject and the experiences in that area of human experts; and the inference rules, a set of logically, ordered rules that are applied to the knowledge base by the program in response to a user's description of a scenario. In the aforementioned chess program, the program looks at the layout of the board and compares its potential moves against the various strategies and past games which have been programmed into it, and selects the move with the greatest chance of success. In selecting a city for a new hockey franchise, the program would look at the demographics of various cities and correlations to those demographics that suggest avid hockey interest (potential or realized), demand, and capacity to fill seats. As with the other information systems, it is not that the software is doing anything that could not be done manually, but rather that it is doing it so much faster (Lucey, 1997, ...