Businesses invest in IT to achieve six important business objectives
Operational excellence
New products, services, and business models
Customer and supplier intimacy
Improved decision making
Competitive advantage
Survival
Three dimensions of information systems
Organizations
People
Technology
Information technology:
The hardware and software a business uses to achieve objectives
Information system:
Interrelated components that manage information to
Support decision making and control
Help with analysis, visualization, and product creation
Data: streams of raw facts
Information: Data shaped into meaningful, useful form
Activities in an information system that produce information:
input
processes
output
feedback
Problem solving: 4-step process
Problem identification
Solution design
Choice
Implementation
Typical organizational problems
Outdated business processes
Unsupportive culture and attitudes
Political in-fighting
Turbulent business environment ,change
Complexity of task
Inadequate resources
Typical technology problems
Insufficient or aging hardware
Outdated software
Inadequate database capacity
Insufficient telecommunications capacity
Incompatibility of old systems with new technology
Rapid technological change
Typical people problems
Lack of employee training
Difficulties of evaluating performance
Legal and regulatory compliance
Work environment, ergonomics
Poor or indecisive management
Lack of employee support and participation
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Four basic business functions
Manufacturing and production
Sales and marketing
Finance and accounting
Human resources
Systems from a Functional Perspective
Sales and marketing systems
Manufacturing and production systems
Finance and accounting systems
Human resources systems
Systems from a Constituency Perspective
Transaction processing systems TPS
Executive support systems ESS
Management information systems MIS
Decision support systems DSS
Five basic business entities
* Suppliers
* Customers
* Employees
* Invoices/payments
* Products and services
TPS،، Major source of data for other systems
ESS ،، Primarily a recipient of data from lower-level systems
DSS ،، Use internal information from TPS and MIS
‫في المقارنة‬
TPS = serve operational managers
ESS = Serve senior managers
DSS & MIS = Serve middle managers
E-business
Use of digital technology and Internet to drive major business processes
E-commerce
Subset of e-business
Buying and selling goods and services through Internet
E-government:
Using Internet technology to deliver information and services to citizens, employees, and
businesses
Enterprice Applications
Enterprice systems
supply chain management systems
Customer relationship management systems
Knowledge management systems
‫ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Types of Computers
PDAs, handheld mobile devices
PCs
Workstation
Servers
Mainframes
Supercomputer
Grid computing
Client/server computing
Client : User point of entry
Servers :Store and process shared data and perform network management activities
IT infrastructure
Computer hardware
Computer software
Data management technology
Networking and telecommunications technology
Technology services
Primary secondary storage technologies
Magnetic disk :Hard drives, USB flash drives
RAID :Can package hundreds of drives for massage storage requirements
Optical disks CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD
Magnetic tape Storage networking :SANs
Connect multiple storage devices on a separate high-speed network dedicated to storage
Operating System Software
The software that manages and controls the computer’s activities
Data warehouse
Database that stores current and historical data that may be of interest to decision makers
Input devices:
Keyboard
Computer mouse
Touch screen
Optical character recognition
Pen-based input
Digital scanner
Audio input
Output devices:
Monitor
Printer
Audio output
Information systems collect and process information in one of two ways
Batch processing: Transactions stored for predefined amount of time ,then processed as
group
Online processing: Transactions processed immediately
* Software packages and desktop productivity tools

Word processing software

Spreadsheet software ( Excel )

Data management software

Presentation graphics

Software suites

Web browsers
HTML ( Hypertext markup language)
XML (extensible markup language)
SOAP (simple object access protocol)
WSDL (web services description language)
UDDI (universal description, discovery, and integration)
SOA ( Service oriented architecture )
TCO ( Total Cost of Ownership )
SaaS ( Software as a Service )
Scalability : Ability of system to expand to serve large number of users
without breaking down .
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
Logical view: How end users view data
Physical view: How data are actually structured and organized
Examples of DBMS: Microsoft Access, DB2, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server,
MYSQL .
SQL ( Structured query language )
Tools for analyzing, accessing vast quantities of data:
Data warehousing
Multidimensional data analysis
Data mining
Utilizing Web interfaces to databases
Types of information obtainable from data mining
Associations: Occurrences linked to single event
Sequences: Events linked over time
Classifications: Patterns describing a group an item belongs to
Clusters: Discovering as yet unclassified groupings
Forecasting: Uses series of values to forecast future values
Poor data quality: Major obstacle to successful customer relationship management
Data quality problems: Caused by
Redundant and inconsistent data produced by multiple systems
Data input errors
Data quality audit: Structured survey of the accuracy and completeness of data
Data cleansing: Detects and corrects incorrect, incomplete, improperly formatted, and
redundant data .
‫ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ‬
What Is a Computer Network?
Two or more connected computers .
Major components in a simple network
Client computer
Server computer
Network interfaces (NICs)
Connection medium
Network operating system
Hub or switch
Routers : Device used to route packets of data through different networks,
ensuring that data sent gets to the correct adder .
The Internet: Largest implementation of client/server computing .
Protocols: Rules that govern transmission of information between two points.
•
Four layers
•
•
•
•
Application layer
Transport ayer
Internet layer
Network interface layer
LANs



( Local-area networks )
CANs ( Campus-area networks)
Peer-to-peer
Topologies: star, bus, ring
WANs
MANs
RSS
URLs
( Wide-area networks )
( Metropolitan-area networks)
(Really Simple Syndication)
( Uniform resource locators )
Physical Transmission Media
• Twisted wire (modems)
• Coaxial cable
• Fiber optics and optical networks
• Wireless transmission media and devices
• Transmission speed (hertz, bandwidth)
Hotspots: One or more access points in public place to provide maximum wireless
coverage for a specific area .
5