MIS101 Management Information Systems Proof Reading Services

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Information technology plays an important role in acquiring competitive dominance in the rapidly changing technical environment. Organisations are playing a great effort in implementing the most advanced information system for managing and accomplishing organisational goals. The essay will critically analyse the article of Nicholas Carr from the Harvard business review. The essay will analyse the importance of management information system in organisation along with the basic terminologies of the information systems.  The essay will also describe various types of management information system its competitive opportunities for the growth of business. The essay will also explain the concepts of World Wide Web and object oriented technologies. This essay will also focus on various phases and techniques of software development and the role of information systems in decision making of organisation. The essay will also include the current trends of e-commerce and its associated security related threats and digital forensic concepts.

Management information systems

Management information system (MIS) is a computerized system, which is use by the organisation to store, process, integrates their organisational data. With the effective MIS, organisation can store information from wide range of sources and can easily compile it for solving the organisational goals. These information systems also allow organisation to create the comprehensive analysis of all information and to accomplish the appropriate decision making step. It is possible for the management of the organisation to review the entire performance of organisation and to create routine reports of work analysis for all departments with the help of MIS (Laudon.et.al. 2011).

Importance of MIS in organisation:

1.MIS systems are necessary to make effective decisions, which can compete in this competitive and globalisation environment.

2.For handling huge amount of data with increasing operational exposure of organisation these systems are mandatory to handle data with low expenses and in faster manner than the manual approaches of data handling.

3.These systems provide different platforms for planning, processing, implementation, payments and other organisational objectives so that these objectives are accomplish with high efficiency (Galliers and Leidner, 2014).  

Figure 1: Management information system

Basic concepts of Information Technology   

Information systems have become an integral part of the organisational working. These systems are effectively implement in organisation for performing various tasks ranging from data storage, information exchange, processing, accounting, marketing and for operational activities including processing of products or services. Without establishment of effective information system, organisation cannot even predict its existence. The information technology (IT) has following basic concepts:

Hardware: Organisation requires various hardware components for its operational activities such as printers, data cables, Ethernet card for internet etc. These hardware components make it possible to use the information systems easily (Sucaet and Waelput, 2014).

Software: Non-physical components, which are, define as software components such as enterprise planning software for planning and implementation, customer’s management software, database related software, operating systems are essential for organisation.

Computer systems: For enhancing, the productivity organisation must have computers with efficient processing systems, which can allow high security features, and easy information sharing.

Information sharing and data processing: For achieving the competitive advantage, organisation must be able to share information from its worldwide sources so that it can implement only best strategies for its projects (Robertazzi, 2011).

Figure 2: Information system

Different types of MIS

Depending on the future objectives and requirements of organisation, there are various types of management information systems such as:

Financial MIS:These information systems organise the financial resources of the organisation. With the appropriate implementation of these systems organisation can regularly monitor their

Routine expenses and can prepare reports about financial gains and losses. Thus, it is easy for the organisation to work within its budget boundaries.

Resource MIS:Organisation must ensure supply demand chain for dominating in the business world. These systems allow organisation to monitor that resources are properly use by the organisation. These information systems also include management of highly skilled human resources.

Figure 3: Types of MIS

Data processing MIS: For easy data handling and information sharing, with worldwide-expanded branches of organisation, it is necessary that organisation must have effective data processing systems.  Data processing systems must be highly secures systems to prevent information from cyber threats such as unauthorised accessing or information leakage.

Behavioural MIS:To retain customers for long time and for leading ahead from other competitor’s organisation must understand the requirements and expectations of customers. This type of MIS tries to assure high quality product or services, which meet the customer requirements.

Basic Internet and World Wide Web concepts

Internet is the combination of various computer networks that are connect with the equipments such as routers and apply common set of rules for information transferring called as TCP/IP (Transmission control protocol/ Internet protocol). The main objective of the internet is to offer the function of information sharing (O’Neill, 2014). Some of the popular tools such as emails, telnet, FTP, WWW are use to share the information.

WWW is the compilation of all the internet websites that can be view by applying hypertext interface. The various WWW concepts are as follows:-

Browser: It is the software application on the system, which allows user to access the WWW. Example: Netscape navigator.

Hypertext and hypermedia: Hypertext are the text links that provides the links with other related text and the files which incorporate more than text i.e. it includes image, graphics is hypermedia.

HTML: This function develops the WWW documents.

URL: Links between files are record by addressing scheme.

HTTP: protocol enables for transferring the hypertext or hypermedia (Choo et.al. 2013).

Homepage: The homepage the first page where the user type his requirement at WWW site

Clients and server: if the system has browser installed for web then it is client and the main computer that is providing data is server.

Importance of databases, data warehouses and business intelligence for an organisation

Importance of Databases:

It is crucial as it manages the information easily and offer user to function multiple task simultaneously. It also provides the reliable method for managing multiple kinds of data from every field. It stores, allocate and manipulate the data within the single hand software application that enhances the business operations of the business and proves to be cost effective. Employee record, accounting, project management, inventory can be managed in the organisation (Zikmund et.al. 2013). Every employee in the organisation can be assigned the password to access his or her information. In the absence of DBMS activities to be manage manually, that consumes more time.

Importance of Data Warehouse:

Data warehouse is important for the businesses as it helps in making the decisions faster. As big organisation will never make the judgement based on limited information and statistics, it requires vast quality and quantity of data that can be provide by data warehouse. It also offers quick accesses to data as the information is already arrange in the data warehouse that provide competitors advantages (Kimball et.al. 2013). Data standard and consistency are maintain as it collects the data from distinct sources and integrate it into single information.

Importance of business intelligence:

Good business intelligence will provide the gain insights into consumer behaviour; it improves visibility and transparency, to turn the information into actionable information, to manage the efficiency, to gain sales and marketing intelligence and lastly is helps in gaining the competitive intelligence (Laursen and Thorlund, 2016).

Figure 1: Importance of business intelligence

Object-Oriented Technologies  

Object oriented technologies (OOP) are the software development technologies, which are use in the development of information systems. Object oriented technologies handle complexities of information system and contributes the following major features to the information system:

Data abstraction:Data abstraction concept of software development explains only meaningful data. Thus, abstraction allows to filter the unnecessary details of information and to describe only necessary information (Object-Oriented concepts,2017).

Encapsulation: With encapsulation feature of OOP, objects keep the data and its associated functions within class only. For instance, organisation keeps product specifications, design and other details within organisation only. Their functionality does not reveal outside the organisational environment (Bashir and Goel, 2012).

Figure 4: Object oriented programming technology

Polymorphism: With polymorphism feature in software, development objects are process depending on their class but they can have same attributes. This feature allows the reusability concept in software development of information system.  

Inheritance: With inheritance characteristic, objects can inherit features and functions from existing objects to reduce redundancy and to make software development more efficient.

Classes and objects: Classes are user-define data types, which consist of its data members and member functions. Object can defined as the variable of class.

Information systems and technologies for supporting decision-making

Organisation can use multiple information systems for supporting decision making in various aspects of their operational activities. At broad level organisation must have following information systems for achieving effective decision making:

Monitoring system: This system monitors the performance of human resources and systems so that organisation can choose that only productive resources stay in connect with the organisation.

Budget regulating system: Organisation must ensure that operational costs do not exceed the predefine budget and required profit margins are obtained. If objectives are not meet within time limit organisation can decide to revise the strategy.

Operational supportive system: These systems enables organisation to make effective decision making related to supply and demand prospective and marketing factors such as competitive and customer’s behaviour (Turban.et.al. 2011).

Decision support system: These systems are specifically design for supporting decision-making. Decision supportive system compares the various data and generates qualitative information for solving issues and for achieving better decision making.

Resource management and result analysis system: With the use of these management information systems, organisation can reduce costs and give better productivity. These systems also allow to perform risk analysis and to review critically the earlier decision-makings.  

System Development 

The system development process consists of following phases.

Phases of system development:

In the first phase of system development organisation defines its requirements, future scope and available resources. According to the requirements of planning stage a design model is develop with the implementation of software development models. After the development of software, their functionality is test to ensure that system is error free and is meeting requirements. System development also requires the regular maintenance of the system (Valacich.et.al. 2015).

Figure 5: System development phases

Techniques of system development: System development can implement by following techniques:

Formal development: In this method system development phases are perform with high monitoring systems. It is inflexible and do not consider reviews in between the development.                      

Computer aided development: Computer aided software engineering tools (CASE) is use in this method. This method generates a self structured programming code after system investigation, for developing system (Kaufmann.et.al. 2013).

Prototyping development: In this software development method, software development process is performed number of times to analyse the feedback and reviews at each phase.

Various e-commerce business models and trends of e-commerce

There are various e-commerce business models. Some of them are-

Business-to-Business (B2B): This model emphasis on the business that takes place between the two organisations instead of the individual customer and organisation. The major advantage of this model is that it lowers the stock management cost, offers the best prices and reconciles books of accounts in real time.

Business to Consumer (B2C): This transaction takes place between the consumer and business organisation. This model reduces the cost of the final product as the long distribution chain eliminates and time is save (Lo and Lam, 2015).

There are various trends of e-commerce. Few of them are-

The force is strong with mobile e-commerce: Mobile e-commerce is very easy and attractive and it takes few minute to conduct the transactions. As per the statistics around 20.6% total e-commerce sales is accomplish by mobile e-commerce.

Get ready for the wave of new buyers: The trend will continue and many people will resort to e-commerce website for spending the money (Mohapatra, 2013). The countries like Brazil, Russia, India and china are gaining good growth in e-commerce and expect bigger splashes in e-commerce.

Ethical issues, threats and safeguards related to privacy, intellectual property and copyright  

With increasing role of information systems in organisation, it is important for organisation to prevent adequate security to their information systems. The information systems are always under threats of unauthorised accessing, information leakage. Such threats can cause extreme financial loss and can destroy the business. Organisation must ensure that personal details of customers and stakeholders are not accessible for illegal purpose. Before implementing certain policies or methods, it is also necessary for the organisation to provide due care with the issues of copyrights and to credit the originality of work to avoid any kind of legal and financial troubles. Such issues can highly affect the brand value of the organisation (Pagallo, 2012). Organisation must implement the high security features such as antimalware, antivirus, strong passwords in software development.

Computer Crime and Digital Forensics 

Organisation must concentrate on security features to provide information security to their systems. Computer crimes such as hacking, malwares, information leak violates the privacy protection and various information acts. Organisation must conduct digital forensic investigation and system analysis for regularly monitoring the safety and security of the system. In digital forensic investigation, system’s current performance is analysed to evaluate the possible cyber threats. After the collection of evidences, if organisation finds threatening issues then it implements appropriate steps. For collecting digital evidences, organisation uses various tools such as Encase, Aid4mail to detect the suspected emails and data. Organisation must carry the regular digital forensic and system investigation so that cyber threats eliminates before creating damage to the system (Casey, 2011).

Emerging trends and technologies in MIS  

With advancements of technologies, MIS are also marking new trends such as

1.Cloud computing

2.Easy and flexible user interface

3.Automated data collection and analysis

4.Mobile applications

5.Cross integration of various functionalities

The advanced versions of MIS are allowing organisation to share and store their data on internet so that they can operate without geographical boundaries, with the use of cloud computing. MIS are also processing data in automated process and with the help of fast mobile applications. Various MIS having different functionality also integrates as a single MIS (Marston.et.al. 2011).

Conclusion

From the essay, it can be conclude that information systems are important for organisational management. The essay has explained the various types of management information systems and their role in strategic opportunities in organisation. The essay has also described the basic components of information system and concepts of internet. The essay has focused on different phases and techniques of software development and on the necessity of database systems in organisation. The essay has explained the object oriented technology and different models of e-commerce. The essay, has demonstrated that cyber threats and digital forensic are important facts of consideration for information security. The essay has also explained the latest advancements in management information system.