Checkpoint 1: Information System Business Problem Dimensions
What are the three dimensions to business problems? Provide examples of each. There are three dimensions to businesses and they are: Organizations, People, and Technology. Organizations use information systems to keep the different levels in their hierarchy separated and organized. Organizations are comprised of different levels from the higher levels of management to the lower levels of operational personnel and have specialty areas from Human Resources to marketing. Information systems are developed for each department at each level in order to keep the different areas clearly defined and organized.
In my organization, I hold the position of Vice-President and I specialize in the web development portion of our business. I have an information system that is completely different from the owner and President of our company because our specialties and tasks are in different areas. Information systems are only as good as the people that run and manage them. It is people that have to understand and use the information in order for the system to achieve the business goals. As of right now, we have hired an external company to keep track of all of our information systems and make sure we are keeping on task.
This will change once I complete school and have a clear understanding on how to run our information systems myself. Technology is the aspect that continuously evolves to allow us to connect to people all over the world with different computers, networks, software, and mobile devices. Data management technology is what makes our particular company run smoothly because it is a employer/employee match-up system. I am learning more and more about managing our data bases, but it is definitely complex and changes constantly as new technology and platforms are created.
This is an exciting time to be a part of technology because of the rapid growth. Question 2: What is the difference between IT and information systems? Describe some functions of information systems. Information technology is the hardware and software that a business needs in order to achieve its goals or objectives. Information systems connect information technology, people, and organizations in order for each individual department or person to be able to perform their jobs effectively and efficiently.
Information systems collects data, processes the data, stores the data, and then sends the data out to different departments so that it can be analyzed to help the business run smoother. An example for me would be our accounting system. Our bank collects all of our banking data, it stores it for us and then it breaks it down for us so that we can see where we are spending too much, where we need to spend a little more money, how much we are making from different services, and of course lets us know if we are making a profit or not.
By utilizing these reports each month, we are able to adjust our pricing points on certain services so that we can sell more and it has also told us we are spending too much on office expenses but that we need to increase our spending on marketing. We scrutinize these reports in order for us to achieve our goals for our company so that we can expand in the future. We also have a marketing system that collects data from each of the marketing strategies we are using so that we can analyze which ones we want to continue to utilize and which ones are not generating any clients so we need to stop using them.
