MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM

QUESTION 1
Explain why Information system are so essential in business today (5mks)
The reasons to why the information system is essential are:
1. Operational excellence
2. New products, services, and business models
3. Customer and supplier intimacy
4. Improved decision making
5. Competitive advantage
6. Survival
the emergence of a global economy, transformation of industrial economies, transformation of the business enterprise, and the emergence of digital firm make information systems essential in business today. Information system is a foundation for conducting business today. In many businesses, survival and the ability to achieve strategic business goals is difficult without extensive use of information technology. There are six reasons or objectives why businesses use information system:
1. Operational excellence. Business improve the efficiency of their operations in order to achieve higher profitability. Information systems are important tools available to managers for achieving higher levels of efficiency and productivity in business operations. A good example is Wal-Mart that uses a Retail Link system, which digitally links its suppliers to every one of Wal-Mart's stores. As soon as a customer purchase an item, the supplier is monitoring the item, knows to ship a replacement to the shelf.
2. New products, services, and business models. Information system is a major tool for firms to create new products and services, and also an entirely new business models. A business model describe how a company produces, delivers, and sells a product or service to create wealth.
Example: Apple Inc. transformed an old business model based on its iPod technology platform that included iPod, the iTunes music service, and the iPhone.
3. Customer/supplier intimacy. When a business serves its customers well, the customers generally respond by returning and purchasing more. This raises revenue and profits. The more a business engage its suppliers, the better the suppliers can provide vital inputs. This lower costs. Example: The MANDARIN ORIENTAL in Manhattan and other high-end hotels exemplify the use of information systems and technology to achieve customer intimacy. They use computers to keep track of guests' preferences, such as their preferred room temperature, check-in time, and television programs.
4. Improved decision making. Many managers operate in an information bank, never having the right information at the right time to make an informed decision. These poor outcomes raise costs and lose customers. Information system made it possible for the managers to use real time data from the marketplace when making decision. Example: Verizon Corporation uses a Web-based digital dashboard to provide managers with precise real -time information on customer complains, network performance... Using this information managers can immediately allocate repair resources to affected areas, inform customers of repair efforts and restore service fast.
5. 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. Example: Toyota Production System focuses on organizing work to eliminate waste, making continues improvements, and TPS is based on what customers have actually ordered.
6. Day to day survival. Business firms INVEST in information system and technology because they are necessities of doing business. This necessities are driven by industry level changes. Example: Citibank introduced the first automatic teller machine to attract customers through higher service levels, and its competitors rushed to provide ATM's to their customers to keep up with Citibank. Providing ATMs services to retail banking customers is simply a requirement of being in and surviving in the retail banking business. Firm turn to information system and technology to provide the capability to respond to these.

Information systems are the foundation for conducting business today. In many
industries, survival and even existence without extensive use of IT is
inconceivable, and IT plays a critical role in increasing productivity. Although
information technology has become more of a commodity, when coupled with
complementary changes in organization and management, it can provide the
foundation for new products, services, and ways of conducting business that
provide firms with a strategic advantage.
QUESTION 2
To describe any five information systems supporting the major business functions
An information system (IS) is a system composed of people and computers that processes or interprets information. The term is also sometimes used in more restricted senses to refer to only the software used to run a computerized database or to refer to only a computer system.
Information systems is an academic study of the complementary networks of hardware and software that people and organizations use to collect, filter, process, create and also distribute data.
Any specific information system aims to support operations, management and decision making. An information system is the information and communication technology (ICT) that an organization uses, and also the way in which people interact with this technology in support of business processes.
The "classic" view of Information systems found in the textbooks in the 1980s was of a pyramid of systems that reflected the hierarchy of the organization, usually transaction processing systems at the bottom of the pyramid, followed by management information systems, decision support systems, and ending with executive information systems at the top. Although the pyramid model remains useful, since it was first formulated a number of new technologies have been developed and new categories of information systems have emerged, some of which no longer fit easily into the original pyramid model.
Some examples of such systems are:
Data Warehouses
Enterprise Resource Planning
Enterprise Systems
Expert Systems
Search Engines
Geographic Information System
Global Information System
Office Automation.
A computer (based) information system is essentially an IS using computer technology to carry out some or all of its planned tasks. The basic components of computer based information system are:
Hardware- these are the devices like the monitor, processor, printer and keyboard, all of which work together to accept, process, show data and information.
Software- are the programs that allow the hardware to process the data.
Databases- are the gathering of associated files or tables containing related data.
Networks- are a connecting system that allows diverse computers to distribute resources.
Procedures- are the commands for combining the components above to process information and produce the preferred output.
QUESTION 3
Evaluate the role played by systems serving the various levels of management in business and their relationship to each other
There are four major types of information systems in contemporary organizations
serving operational, middle, and senior management. Systems
serving operational management are transaction processing systems (TPS), such as payroll or order
processing, that track the flow of the daily routine transactions necessary to conduct business.
MIS and DSS provide middle management with reports and access to the
organization’s current performance and historical records. Most MIS reports
condense information from TPS and are not highly analytical. DSS support
management decisions when these decisions are unique, rapidly changing, and not specified easily in advance. They have more advanced analytical models and data analysis capabilities than MIS and often draw on information from external as well as internal sources.
ESS support senior management by providing data of greatest importance to senior management decision makers, often in the form of graphs and charts delivered via portals. They have limited analytical capabilities but can draw on sophisticated graphics software and many sources of internal and external information describe the information systems supporting the major business functions: sales and marketing, manufacturing and production, finance and accounting, and human resources. At each level of the organization, information systems support the major functional areas of the business. Sales and marketing systems help the firm identify customers
for the firm’s products or services, develop products and services to meet customers’ needs, promote the products and services, sell the products and services, and provide ongoing customer support. Manufacturing and production systems deal with the planning, development, and production of products or services, and control the flow of production. Finance and accounting systems keep track of the firm’s financial
assets and fund flows. Human resources systems maintain employee records; track employee skills, job performance, and training; and support planning for employee compensation and career development.
QUESTION 4
Evaluate the impacts of information systems on organizations and society in general
The adoption of information technology (IT) in organizations has been growing at a rapid pace. The use of the technology has evolved from the automation of structured processes to systems that are truly revolutionary in that they introduce change into fundamental business procedures. Indeed, it is believed that “More than being helped by computers, companies will live by them, shaping strategy and structure to fit new information technology.” While the importance of the relationship between information technology and organizational change is evidenced by the considerable literature on the subject, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis of these issues from the economic perspective. The aim of this article is to develop an economic understanding of how information systems affect some key measures of organization structure.
QUESTION 5
Evaluate tools and technologies for providing information from database to improve business performance and decision making
Most organizations still experience a lack of Business Intelligence (BI) in their decision-making processes when implementing enterprise systems, such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Supply Chain Management (SCM). Consequently, a model and techniques to evaluate and assess the intelligence-level of enterprise systems can improve decision support. This proposes an expert tool to evaluate the BI competencies of enterprise systems, and combines a comprehensive review of recent literature with statistical methods for factor analysis. A statistical analysis has identified six factors for the evaluation model: “Analytical and Intelligent Decision-support”, “Providing Related Experimentation and Integration with Environmental Information”, “Optimization and Recommended Model”, “Reasoning”, “Enhanced Decision-making Tools”, and finally, “Stakeholder Satisfaction”. Utilizing the extracted loads of each unique criterion, the intelligence of the work systems can be measured and depicted on six dashboards, based on corresponding factors, actualizing an expert tool that can diagnose the intelligence level of enterprise systems. Enterprises can use this approach to evaluate, select, and buy software and systems that provide better decision support for their organizational environment, enabling them to achieve competitive advantage. Decision Management Systems are agile, analytic and adaptive. They are agile so they can be rapidly changed to cope with new regulations or business conditions. They are analytic, putting an organization’s data to work improving the quality and effectiveness of decisions. They are adaptive, learning from what works and what does not work to continuously improve over time.
Decision Management Systems are built by focusing on the repeatable, operational decisions that impact individual transactions or customers. Once these decisions are discovered and modeled, decision services are built that embody the organization’s preferred decision-making approach in operational software components. The performance of these components, and the impact of this performance on overall organizational performance, is tracked, analyzed and fed back into improving the effectiveness of decision-making.
Decision Management Systems offer high ROI because they improve the management of risk and the matching of price to risk; because they reduce or eliminate fraud and waste; because they increase revenue by making the most of every opportunity; and because they improve the utilization of constrained resources across the organization.

REFERENCE
Management Information Systems, 2nd Edition
            R. Kelly Rainer, Hugh J. Watson, Brad Prince
            August 2013, ©2013
Wikipedia