Question 1
a) Information Systems for an Airline: Airline industry has been utilizing the merits of computer based information systems to provide a better class of service for its customers, since the 1970s. These industries had invested a lot in transaction processing systems and management information systems since then. Even though decision support information systems is still at its infancy in Airline industry, latest studies have revealed their importance in fixing business related parameters of Airlines (such as Airfares) in improving their business value without making unnecessary compromises in profits . Integration of decision support systems with either of the aforementioned information systems categories can tremendously improve the outcomes of any strategic decisions taken by airline industries.
Example of such a system, where MIS (Management Information System) and DSS (decision support system) are integrated to predict and fix viable ticket charges and freight fares has been detailed in the study by . In this technique, the organization’s MIS shall collect and store data in its data warehouse. These data are then subject to various yield management algorithms to find 1.Optimal price for next sold ticket (marginal calculus model) 2.Perfect combinational prices for optimal profit for each flight (using optimization and stimulation model).
An improvement to the traditional Online Transactional Processing Systems (OTPS) used for various operations such as ticket booking was proposed by in 2000. This scheme, named Operational Information System, forgoes the limitation of traditional OTPS that had only little provisions for flexibility in incorporating more and more applications that can be completed online. This facility takes into consideration the emerging business nature of airline travel and makes efforts to improve customer satisfaction and business value with each transaction.
Question 2
a) Categories of Information Systems: The two main categories of information systems include 1.Transaction Processing systems and 2.Decision Support Information systems. The transaction process information system has been in circulation since1960 (as American Airlines SABRE) which was initially capable of processing up to 80,000 transactions per day. In 1976, Online Transaction Processing was introduced as an integration of both software and hardware components. Transaction processing systems are used to automate processing activities that are repetitive in nature (such as online purchases, ticket bookings, etc).
The second type is the Decision Support Information System. They are a broader classification containing a range of information systems such as Management information Systems (MIS), Decision Support Systems, and Executive Information Systems. They are all used for data processing and performing heuristic analysis to help the management or executive officers to make sound and consistent decisions for an organization. Management Information Systems collect data by utilizing various methods (such as Transaction Process Systems) and use these data to help an organization to maximize its profits by exploiting every investment opportunities while making only little compromises.
b) Cloud Computing: Developments in Information Technology such as Cloud Computing have facilitated unprecedented growth of many companies with little or negligible increase in capital investments. Cloud computing have enabled organizations to forgo their need for networking hardware and servers and large data warehouses. For simplification purposes, Cloud computing services have been dissected into different layers. Each of these layers encompasses one or more kinds of cloud services depending on their level of abstraction . The simplest of this cloud computing ontology classifies them into three layers 1.Infrastructure 2.Platform and 3.Application as a service. Another brief cloud computing ontology dissects cloud computing services into five layers 1.Application Environment 2.Software Environment 3.Software Infrastructure 4.Software Kernel and 5.Hardware.
Question 3
a) Transaction Processing Systems: Transaction processing systems are used to automate processes that are repetitive in nature (such as payroll). Using such a system can eliminate unnecessary resource wastage. Some of the characteristics of Transaction Processing Systems are 1.Rapid Response 2.Reliability 3.Inflexibility and 4.Controlled Processing. The rapidity in response can prove to be advantageous for a company in a competitive environment. A well kept transaction processing system can improve customer satisfaction by being prompt and efficient.
Organizations rely extensively on transaction processing systems to improve response time and also for ease of operation. If at any time, these systems break down then the company will have to suffer huge losses and/or cause the complete stoppage of business operations. Therefore, a TPS should have a very low failure rate. This characteristic, in integration with a quick recovery module, can make a TPS very reliable. Any good TPS would also be inflexible. As it is meant to automate repetitive processes, it is mandatory that the TPS do not process two different transactions differently (should be inflexible). Similarly, a TPS should also be controllable. That is, the organization should be able to control the functionality of a TPS according to organizational needs.
b) Customer Analytics: Most organizations or companies that have to directly deal with the end consumers, as opposed to organizations that only deal with other enterprises (such as crude oil extractors dealing with refineries), do so in large numbers. Understanding the needs of such a large collection of customers and subsequently improving customer satisfaction shall become rather difficult in such situations. Therefore, the organization shall need a strategic plan to analyze customer behavior for bringing the best possible results such as 1.Improved customer satisfaction 2.Increased number of customers and/or 3.Increased product or service sales. With the use of information systems, an organization can collect data related to consumer behavior such as their likes and dislikes pertaining to a particular time or location. This data can be analyzed to formulate patterns of consumer behavior (using market segregation) and predict their future buying habits. Companies can use consumer analytics to improve customer interactions and business value by creating products that their customers want. Such data can also help a company pitch products specific for a group of customers.
Question 4
a) Data Warehouse: Data warehouses, for their better performance and utility, should be 1.Subject Oriented 2.Time Variant 3.Integrated and 4.Non-volatile. Data warehouses shall group all of the information collected in its database in accordance with a particular subject. This subject oriented nature of data warehouses is especially important for efficient data analysis and data mining applications. Another important characteristic of data warehouses is its revision tracking. Data warehouses shall keep a track of revisions done on existing data with respect to its time of revision. And through data integration all the operational data of an organization shall be available in the data repository (warehouse). Also, through the non-volatility nature of the data stored in Data Warehouses, it is made sure that no data is written over or deleted during the course of time. All of the data contained in the warehouse shall be preserved for the required period of time.
b) Master data management: Master data includes lists or hierarchies of customers, suppliers, accounts, or organizational units which is shared across various systems of an organization . For instance, an organization may need to share its sales record of a particular product to another department (such as an analytical department) for different purposes (for instance, analysis of customer behavior). And now consider a situation where this shared data is inconsistent or redundant. That is, if a particular consumer appears twice in the same data sheet or a particular customer does not appear in the sales data but appears in the payment data, such inconsistencies can set back the reliability of the analysis completed by the analytics department of the organization. Unless and until the organization has an integrated master data management system, this data sharing process shall become inconsistent with the needs of an organization.
Some viable steps to ensure the integrity and consistency of master data (steps for master data management) are 1.Assigning business responsibility for each master data domain (products, customers, suppliers, etc) 2.Extract master data from a domain and store it on a central server (such as policy hub) 3.Apply quality checks to eliminate data redundancy and inconsistency 4.Make master data compatible with each other and also simplified to the most significant form possible and 5.Monitor changes and updates to master data in each domain .
Question 5
a) Business Process Management and Service Oriented Architecture: A business process management is the method by which a company or organization can integrate the operations or functionality of different sectors together. For instance, consider the situation of a performance management system where the HR unit is trying to determine the performance of an employee in sales department. In this system, the HR unit, probably located far from the sales unit, shall need access to data related to the employee sales records. This can be made possible through business process management where all organizational data is made available to necessary departments through various communication protocols (HR can request data from sales department). And in this regard, Service Oriented Architecture is a pattern in software design where two or more services can communicate with each other (through various network communication protocols) without human intervention. This architecture ensures that various services run by a system, such as data collection related to employee performance, can communicate or transfer this information to other services such as performance management system (PMS) without human intervention. That is, the HR unit shall not have to make a request or manually download all related data from the sales point server to data hub for the sake of company PMS.
a) Three-tier software architecture: The three-tier software architecture implements and/or develops the user interface, application logics, data collection and data storage needs of aa system as separate functional units or modules. The three-tier architecture comprises of 1.User-interface layer (Presentation tier) 2.Application logic layer (Application tier) and 3.Database layer (Data tier) . The middle layer may be formed from another bundle of layers (forming n-tier architecture). The three-tier software architecture brings an additional advantage over traditional modular software architectures. This architecture is flexible to changes or updates that may arise in the future. In such situations, for instance, to update the user-interface of a system, only the code of that particular unit or module (User-interface tier) need to be changed thus preserving the simplicity of the replacement or update process.
Question 6
a) Business Intelligence: As the complexity of the operations of an organization increases with the expansion of its businesses, the capability of the management to make sound decisions based on available business data decreases. This is simply because of the incapability of a handful of people to transform raw structured and unstructured data into meaningful information that can be used for decision making. This is where Business Intelligence and Decision Support Systems find its usability. For instance, BI technologies can collect unstructured or semi-structured data such as text files, power-point files, excel sheets, emails, etc and categorize them or group them according to associated metadata (such as file type, subject, author of the file, etc that are usually associated with these files) without human intervention. This can also facilitate easy data mining while retrieving useful information. Therefore, Business Intelligence is the perfect technology to forgo the difficulties of data overload, unstructured or semi-structured data, and data redundancy.
b) Information systems in manufacturing and production within an organization: Information systems can facilitate the automation of various processes of an organization. Many functions that needed extensive effort and resources can now be easily completed using information systems. In manufacturing and production departments, similar interventions of information systems has enabled organizations to make changes to their systems according to current market trends, technological changes, and even upscale the operational functionality of a production unit, without difficulty. Many manufacturing companies already use Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to collect, organize and interpret data according to their needs. For instance, ERP can be used to collect sales data and profit margins to determine the target production for next quarter. Using these data, ERP can show whether there is a negative trend in the demand and supply of this particular product. The company can utilize this data to produce lesser number of products to avoid incurring losses in the next quarter. In conclusion, IS can reduce the efforts needed to 1.Add, cancel or improve existing capabilities of a manufacturing unit 2.Change production depending on customer demands 3.Make use of technological developments faster, etc .
Question 7
Enterprise Information Systems: Enterprise information systems are used in very large organizations to manage all their organizational data such as finance, human resources, sales, employee performance etc. They are formed by very large and complex software systems that process thousands of transactions that occur in a business or organization at a time. Enterprise information systems have both operational and informational functionalities . Operational functionalities of an Enterprise Information Systems include the processing of various business transactions of a particular organization. And informational functionality of EIS is responsible for data storage, retrieval and reporting operations of the organization.
The functionality of a very large organization is extensively dependent on the capability of the organization in making decisions that are consistent with all its departments as well as in all the geographical locations where it is located. In this regard, an EIS can be used to improve the business productivity and value of an organization by integrating all of the data collected from all functional levels and management of the organization in one place. This can help in improving the consistency of decisions made by the management. An EIS is specifically designed to affect the business outcomes of an organization. And therefore, they can be used to improve organizational effectiveness and eliminate unnecessary resource wastages. For instance, an EIS can be used to calculate the necessary changes needed to make a transformation from one performance management system to another. This can help the management avoid resource wastage during the program design and implementation processes. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is an example of an Enterprise Information System which is used extensively in many large organizations that stretch across a significant part of the globe (IBM and Oracle are currently the leading ERP developer in the world).
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