1. Chapter 2
IT Support Systems: Concepts
and Management
1

2. Learning objectives
• Define information system
• Types of Information System
• Describe and contrast Transaction Processing
System and Functional Information System
• Identify major enterprise internal support
systems and relate them to managerial functions
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3. • Describe support of IT along the supply chain in using
ERP and CRM
• Discuss information infrastructure and architecture
• Compare client server architecture, mainframe based
legacy systems and P2P architecture
• Describe different types of web based information
systems and their functionalities
3

4. • Describe Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and
software oriented architecture (SOA)
environments
• describe how Information resources are
managed
• Describe roles of ISD and end users
4

5. Information System: concept and definition
• IS- one that collects, processes, stores analyzes and
disseminates data and information for a specific purpose
• Components:
– Hardware
– Software
– Data
– People
– Procedure
– Application Program
• Collection of application programs in a single department is
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usually considered as a departmental Information System

6. Data, Information and Knowledge
• Data
– elementary description of things, events, activities and
transactions that are recorded, classified and stored
– Not organized to convey any specific meaning
• Information
– organized data so that they have meaning and value to
the recipient
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7. • Knowledge
– organized and processed data to convey
understanding, experience, accumulated learning and
expertise as they apply to the current problem and
activity
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8. Classification and types of IS
Classification of
Information System
By By
Organizational Levels type of support provided
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9. Classification by organizational levels
• Can be stand alone but usually they are interconnected
Levels of Information systems 9

10. • Personal and productivity systems
– Small systems built to support many individuals
– Known as Personal Information Management (PIM)
– Intend to support the activities of individuals to ease their
work or life
– Through acquisition, organization, maintenance, retrieval
and sharing of information
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11. – E.g. PDA, calculator
– Designed to increase our productivity and satisfaction
– Abundant in organizations, inexpensive and have
fairly standard capabilities
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12. • Transaction Processing System
– Supports repetitive information processing tasks such
as
– Periodic financial, accounting and other routine
business activities
– Supports the monitoring, collection, storage,
processing and dissemination of the organization’s
basic business transactions
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13. – Provides input to other IS
– Critical to success of any organization since they
support core operations
– collects data periodically or in real time
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14. • E.g. of TPS
– In retail stores, data flows from Point of Sale
to database
– Reduces the level of inventory
– Increases the revenue in company’s cash
position
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15. • Functional & Management Information Systems
– cover some repetitive and some occasional
activities
– Major functional information systems are
• Accounting
• Finance
• Production/operation
• Marketing &sales
• Human resource management 15

16. – FIS ensure that business strategies come to fruition in an
efficient manner
– Provides periodic reports on operational efficiency,
effectiveness and productivity
– Two types of functional Information Systems:
• Those support managers (MIS)
– By providing periodic reports, summaries, comparisons
– Helps to make better decisions
• Those support other employees (analysts, other staff) in
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functional areas

17. • Enterprise Information Systems
– EIS support business processes that are performed by
two or more departments
– Business process is a collection of activities performed to
accomplish a clearly defined goal and may cross
departmental / organizational boundaries
– EIS follows such processes and usually integrate tasks
done in different departments
– E.g. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
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18. Process A:
Typical TPS
Process B:
Procurement
Process C:
Customer
Services
Process D:
Order taking
n fulfilling
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19. • Interorganizational systems
– Connect two or more organizations
– E.g. worldwide airline reservation system
– Most common are those that connect buyers
and sellers
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20. Departmental, enterprise and inter-organizational information systems
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21. • Global Information Systems
– IOS that connect companies located in two or more
countries
– E.g. many e-commerce systems
• Very large and special systems
– Include many subsystems of the previous levels
– Industry specific systems
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22. Classification based on the type of
support provided
• MIS
– Middle managers
– Provides routine information for planning, organizing,
and controlling operations in functional areas
• Office Automation System (OAS)
– Office workers
– Increases productivity of office workers
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23. • CAD/CAM
– Engineers and drafts people
– Allows engineers to design and test prototypes
– Transfers specifications to manufacturing facilities
• Communication and collaboration systems
– All employees
– Enables employees, partners and customers to
interact and work together efficiently
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24. • Desktop publishing systems
– Office workers
– Combines text, photos, graphics to produce
professional quality documents
• Decision support systems (DSS)
– Decision makers, managers
– Combines models and data to solve semi structured
problems with extensive user involvements
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25. • Document management systems
– Office workers
– Automates flow of electronic documents
• Group Support Systems (GSS)
– Supports working processes of groups of people
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26. • Expert systems (ES)
– Knowledge workers, nonexperts
– Provide stored knowledge of experts to non-experts
and decision recommendations based on built-in
expertise
• Knowledge work systems (KWS)
– Managers, knowledge workers
– Supports the gathering, organizing and use of
organizational knowledge
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27. • Neural networks, Data mining
– Knowledge workers, professionals
– Learn from historical cases, even with vague or
incomplete information
• Business Intelligence (BI)
– Decision makers, managers, knowledge workers
– Gathers and uses large amount of data for analysis
by business analytics & intelligent systems
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28. • Mobile computing systems
– Mobile employees
– Supports working outside the physical boundaries of
organization
• Automated Decision Support Systems (ADS)
– Frontline employees, middle managers
– Supports customer care employees and sales people
to make quick real time decisions
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29. Relationship between IS
• Each IS has sufficiently unique characteristics
• There is information flow among these entities and
systems
• E.g. MIS extracts information from TPS and BI
receives information from Data warehouse and MIS
• As the technology changes, interrelationship and
coordination among the different types of systems
continue to evolve
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30. Interrelated Support Systems
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31. How IT supports people and organizational activities
• Organizational activities
– Operational
• Deal with day-to-day activities of an organization
• E.g. assigning task to employees and recording
their working hours
• Short term in nature
• Supporting IS are TPS, MIS and mobile systems
• Used by supervisors, operators and clerical
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employees

32. – Managerial
• Also called tactical activities
• Deal with middle management activities such as
short term planning, organizing and control
• Middle managers can get quick answers to queries
from such systems using BI reporting and query
capabilities
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33. 33

34. – strategic
• Activities or decisions that deal with situations that
may significantly change the manner in which
business is done
• Involve long-range planning
• E.g. introducing new product, expanding business
by acquiring supporting businesses, Moving
operations to the foreign countries
• From such long range planning, companies derive
their short range plans, budgeting and resource
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allocation

35. • Strategic activities help organization in other two
ways:
– Strategic response activities
• React quickly to a major competitor’s action or to
any other significant change in the enterprise’s
environment
• e.g. Kodak could beat Japanese company in
developing the disposable camera
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36. – Innovative strategy (initiator of change)
• Instead of waiting for a competitor to introduce a
major change or innovation, an organization can
be the initiator of change
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37. Who performs what activities and how IT supports them?
37

38. • Executives and Managers
– Responsible for strategic decisions
– Support systems:
• BI (Business Intelligence)
• Corporate Performance Management (CPM)
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39. • Middle Managers
– Tactical decisions
– Support systems:
• Functional Information systems
• MIS
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40. • Staff Support
– Advisors and assistants to top and middle level
managers
– Knowledge workers
– Create information and knowledge as a part of their
work and integrate it into business
– E.g. financial and marketing analysts, production
planners, lawyers, accountants
– Support systems:
• Search engines
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• Expert systems

41. • Lower level managers, frontline employees
– Operational decisions
– Support systes:
• ADS
• Functional IS
• MIS
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42. • Clerical staff
– Use, manipulate or disseminate information
– Data workers
– E.g. bookkeepers, secretaries
– Support systems:
• Office automation
• Communication systems
• Document management
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43. How IT supports supply chain and enterprise systems?
• Supply chain – concept describing the flow of
– materials,
– information,
– money and
– services
from raw material suppliers through factories and
warehouses to the end customers
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44. A simple supply chain
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45. • Supply chain is difficult to manage since it needs to
coordinate
– Several business partners
– Internal corporate departments
– Numerous business processes
– Many customers
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46. • IT support of supply chains is divided according to three
segments of supply chain
– Support of internal supply chain
– Support of upstream supply chain
– Support of downstream supply chain
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47. Support of internal supply chain
• Involves TPS & other enterprise information
systems & functional information systems
• Special SCM softwares are available
– E.g. inventory management, production scheduling
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48. Support of upstream supply chain
• To improve procurement activities and relationships with
suppliers
Support of downstream supply chain
•Supports downstream supply chain in two areas
•Customer relationships
•Order taking and shipments to customers
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49. Information systems infrastructure &
architecture
• Information infrastructure
– Consists of
• the physical facilities, services and management that support
all shared computing resources in organization
• Their integration, operation, documentation, maintenance &
management
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50. – 5 major components
• Computer hardware
• Software
• Network & communication facilities
• Databases and data workers
• Information management personnel
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51. Information technology architecture
• A high level map or plan of information assets in an
organization including the physical design of the building
that holds the hardware
• On the web, IT architecture includes the content and
organization of the site and the interface to support
browsing and search capabilities
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52. • Guide for current operations and blueprint for future
directions
• Creating IT infrastructure is a cyclic process which is
driven by business architecture which describes
organizational plans, visions, objectives and problems
and the information required to support them
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53. Emerging computing environments: SaaS
• SaaS (Software as a Service)
• Popular enterprise model in which computing resources
are made available to the user when they are needed
• Also referred to as SaaS, On demand computing, Utility
computing or hosted services
• Instead of buying and installing expensive and annoying
packaged enterprise applications, user can access them
over a network with a browser
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54. • No need to buy h/w or s/w
• Paid for through a fixed subscription fees or payable per
an actual usage fee
• Offer standardized, componentized, common & lower
cost s/w services which can be sourced at will from
some type of service provider
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55. Why SaaS was needed?
• Enterprises are challenged of being able to meet
fluctuating demands efficiently to become an adaptive
enterprise
• To overcome this challenge, SaaS like models were
developed
• enterprise’s demand on computing resources can vary
drastically from time to time
• Maintaining sufficient resources to meet peak
requirements can be costly
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56. • If enterprises cut the cost by maintaining only minimal
computing resources, there will not be sufficient
resources to meet the peak requirements
• So to balance the increasing requirements & cost of
resources, SaaS is developed
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57. Who should be the provider of these
services?
• Either a s/w developer/host such IBM or Oracle
or
• Third party intermediary such as an application
service provider
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58. Implementing SaaS- a utility computing
concept
• Utility computing is computing that have
– Computing resources available on demand from
virtual utilities around the globe
– Always on and highly available
– Secure
– Efficiently metered
– Priced in a pay-as-you-use basis
– Dynamically scaled
– Self healing
– Easy to manage
58

59. • If utility computing becomes successful, all s/ws will
become a service and be sold as a utility one day
• Limitations
– Cost (can be advantage or disadvantage)
– what the client needs and what the provider offers aren't in
alignment
– Reliability
• utility computing company is in financial trouble or goes out of business
– Hard to do in heterogeneous data centers
– Works better for some applications than for others
– Needs extra security (attractive targets for hackers)
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– Distribution of software is different from distribution of utilities

60. Grid computing
• Conventional networks are designed to provide communication
among devices
• The same n/ws can be used to support the concept of grid
computing in which
– Unused processing cycles of all computers in a given network can be
harnessed to create powerful computing capabilities
• Grid computing coordinates the use of a large no. of servers &
storage, acting as one computer
• Saves money and resources
• Candidates for grid computing
– Companies doing multi-hour-long processing jobs
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– Making complex scientific & mathematical computations

61. Mobile computing & mobile commerce
• Computing paradigm designed for mobile employees and
others who wish to have a real-time connection from
anywhere between a mobile device and other computing
environments
• M-commerce is a commerce in a wireless environment such
as through wireless devices like cellular phones & PDAs
• Enables users to access internet without needing to find a
place to plug-in
– E.g. smart phones
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• Emerging mobile technology: pervasive computing

62. • In pervasive computing, computation becomes
part of environment
• Computation will be embedded in things, not in
computers
• Improves efficiency in work & living tasks
• Enriches the quality of life through art, design &
entertainment 62

63. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
• Enterprises need to be
– adaptive and
– respond more quickly to consumer demands & at the same time
– ensure security, data integrity & regulatory compliance
• Current architecture & infrastructure may not support the
level of flexibility needed in rapidly changing business
environment
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64. • Solution: don’t form a monolithic rigid solution,
• systems are developed as federation or composite
applications which are tied together only at the point of
execution
• This enables alternative s/w components to be
substituted between each use of a system allowing much
greater flexibility
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65. • Thus the basic idea behind the SOA is to reuse &
reconnect existing IT assets/ services rather than more
time consuming & costly developments of new systems
• In SO environment, organizations make resources
available to participants via a n/w as independent
services that can be accessed in a standardized way
using web services
• SaaS at its highest level, must be delivered as a SOA &
must embody web services
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66. • Advantages of SOA
– Reduced integration cost
– Improved business/IT alignment
– Extension & leveraging of existing IT investments
– Faster time to assemble new applications
– Lower IT maintenance cost
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67. Web services
• Self-contained, self-describing business & consumer
modular applications
• Delivered over internet
• User can select and combine through any device (from
PC to mobile phones)
• By using set of shared protocols & standards these
applications share data & services without requiring
human beings to translate the conversion
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68. • Results in real time links among the online processes of
different systems & companies
• Fosters new interactions among businesses & create
more user friendly web for consumers
• Provide inexpensive & rapid solutions for application
integration, access to information & application
development
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69. Components of web services
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70. • Service
– Means by which the needs of consumer are fulfilled with the
capabilities of s/w provided
• Consumer
– Function that consumes the result of a service provided by
provider
• Provider
– Function that performs a service in response to a request by a
consumer
• Registry (directory)
– Contains all the information regarding registered services
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including detailed descriptions

71. Working of web services
• Step 1: providers of services publish (register) their
services in the registry
• Step 2: consumers search them in registry either private
or public
• Step 3: once consumer finds a match
• Step 4: he sends a request to the service provider to get
the specific programmed service
• Step 5: provider provides the services to the customer
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72. Virtualization
• Separates business applications & data from h/w
resources
• This allows companies to pool hardware
resources & assign them to applications as
needed
• Types of virtualization
– Storage virtualization
– N/w virtualization
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– H/w virtualization

73. Storage virtualization
• Pooling of physical storage from multiple
n/w storage devices into a single storage
device
• Which is then managed from a central
console
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74. N/w virtualization
• Combines the available resources in a n/w by
splitting the n/w load into manageable parts
• Each of these parts can be assigned to a
particular server on network
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75. h/w virtualization
• Use of s/w to emulate h/w or a total computer
environment other than the one in which s/w is
actually running
• It allows a piece of h/w to run multiple OS
images at once
• Sometimes called as virtual machine
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76. Advantages of virtualization
• Increases the flexibility of IT assets
• Allows companies to merge IT infrastructure
• Reduce maintenance & administration cost
• Prepares for strategic IT initiatives such as grid,
utility computing and SOA
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77. Managerial Issues
• Which IT resources are managed by whom?
– Responsibility of Information resource management is
divided between two entities
– Information System Department (ISD)
• Responsible for corporate level shared resources
– End users
• Responsible for departmental resources
• The role of the IS Department
– Changing from purely technical to managerial and
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strategic

78. Managerial Issues (contd..)
• The transition to a digital enterprise
• How to deal with the outsourcing and utility
computing trends
• Ethical issues
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