Telecommunication is communication at a distance by technological means, particularly through electrical signals or electromagnetic waves.
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to serve billions of users worldwide. It is a network of networks that consists of millions of private, public, academic, business, and government networks, of local to global scope, that are linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries an extensive range of information resources and services, such as the inter-linked hypertext documents of the World Wide Web (WWW) and the infrastructure to support email.
An intranet is a computer network that uses Internet Protocol technology to share information, operational systems, or computing services within an organization. The term is used in contrast to internet, a network between organizations, and instead refers to a network within an organization. Sometimes, the term refers only to the organization’s internal website, but may be a more extensive part of the organization’s information technology infrastructure, and may be composed of multiple local area networks. The objective is to organize each individual’s desktop with minimal cost, time and effort to be more productive, cost efficient, timely, and competitive.
An extranet is a computer network which allows controlled access from the outside, for specific business or educational purposes. In a business-to-business context, an extranet can be viewed as an extension of an organization’s intranet that is extended to users outside the organization, usually partners, vendors, and suppliers, in isolation from all other Internet users. In contrast, business-to-consumer (B2C) models involve known servers of one or more companies, communicating with previously unknown consumer users. An extranet is similar to a DMZ in that it provides access to needed services for channel partners, without granting access to an organization’s entire network.
All physical contents of computer are hardware. This form is given to all electrical and mechanical devices attached to the computer for the purpose of input, process, and storage and output operations.
Primary Hardware: is the CPU and its other units i.e. circuits and IC’s.
Secondary Hardware: is the memory or storage area of computer.
Software
Software is a general term used for computer Programs. A computer program is a planned, step by step set of instructions that directs the computer what to do and how to do. It turns the data into information – that makes a computer useful.
Types Of Software
Generally speaking, software can be categorized as: (1) System Software (2) Application Software
System Software
The programs directly related to the computer hardware and perform tasks associated with controlling and utilizing computer hardware are known as system software.System software does not solve a specific problem for the user rather it helps to solves a problem.
System software falls into following categories.
(i) Operating System
Operating systems are the most important system software. Operating system is a set of programs that control and supervises the hardware of a computer and provides services to application software, programmers and users of computer.Without operating system a computer cannot do anything useful. A user cannot communicate directly with the computer hardware, so the operating system acts as an intermediary between user of a computer and the computer hardware. The primary goal of an operating system is to make the computer convenient to use. The secondary goal is to use the computer efficiently.
Some important tasks of an operating system are managing the resources of the computer such as Central Processing Unit (CPU), memory, disk drives and printer and running user programs. Every type of computer has its own operating system. Operating system for mainframe and other large computers are very complex since they must keep track of several programs from several users all running in the same time frame.
Following are some of the popular operating systems used in personal computers: DOS, Windows, Unix, Linus, Solaris, etc.
(ii) Language Translators
The computer does not understand a programming language, because computer only know the machine language or binary language. A program must be translated into machine language before the machine can execute it.
Software associated with programming languages include language translators such as assemblers, interpreters and compilers.
(a) Interpreter
An interpreter translates and executes each program statement one at a time. After execution the translation of a statement is removed from memory and next statement is loaded for translation. Translation is required if program is executed again. Therefore interpreter has limitations that it forgets translation after execution of statement. Interpreters are suitable for short programs developed by beginners to programming.
GWBASIC is an interpreter for BASIC language programs. Each programming language has its own interpreter.
(b) Compiler
Compilers translate the whole program at a time and store their translated program on disk. The original program is called “Source Program” while its translated version is called “Object Program”.
(c) Assembler
The assembler is a language translator for a low level programming language called “Assembly language”. Assembly language is a Symbolic language.
(iii) Data-management software
Data-management software includes database and file management programs that manage data for an operating system. They can organize, update and print data.
(iv) Editors
Editors allow the user to type-in a program, generate text and make modifications whenever necessary. A program is first written in an editor and then is compiled. It is possible that the compiler of any language has its own editor for writing programs.
(v) Utility Software
These are programs that users can purchase as seperate products to perform a wide range of functions. The programs for these functions are PC-Tools, Scan Disk, Norton Disk Doctor (NDD), Anti virus and some of the utilities that are mostly bundled with the operating system.
Application
An application is a job or task a user wants to accomplish through a computer. Application software are programs that help a user perform a specific job.
For example application software enables a user to write a letter and/ or create a drawing. It helps the user work faster, more efficiently and thus provide more productivity than manual performance.
Types of Application software
Application software can be grouped into two broad categories.
(i) General purpose Application software
(ii) Special purpose Application Software
GENERAL PURPOSE APPLICATION SOFTWARE
These are called package software or commercial software. A single software can be applied to a wide variety of tasks. By using such software a user can fulfill his or her general needs.
General purpose software includes, MS Office, Corel Draw, Page maker, Adobe Photo shop, etc.
(ii) Special Purpose Application Software
The software that is designed to perform a specific task is known as special purpose application software. This i also called Custom software. The Software can perform only one task for which it has been designed. Custom software for the tasks of a large organization may be extremely complex and takes a lot of time to develop.
For example, Software to process inventory control, software to maintain Bank Accounts, Software used in Airline Booking System, etc.
Early computers – mainframes – were too large and expensive to have broad application in business and in the 1960s; they became cost-effective and widely adopted. Initially, the mainframe had a purely supporting role, mostly in the accounting department. This was the era of Electronic Data Processing (EDP).
In the beginning of the 1980s IBM introduced the first Personal Computer (PC). Individuals used these machines in their home environment but soon they found their places in the offices and on the production floors. At first, the EDP professionals did not know how to cope with this event. Some simply ignored it and some began a war against these intruders. After a while, it became clear that the PC was there to stay. It took its place in the organization; first as a stand-alone workstation, but rapidly the need to act as a terminal for the mainframe arose.
A few years later, departmental computers and Local Area Networks (LANs) technologies allowed people to share information and work together in small workgroups or companywide. The old EDP department only had one “client” within the organization but the newly born IT department suddenly had to cope with the whole organization. The users of traditional EDP were specialists in their branch and were therefore well trained to work with these systems; the newcomers only had a limited knowledge of computers. So, specialized services like training classes and help desks had to be organized by the IT department. Information Technology supported almost every part of the business and the dependency of it increased dramatically. As IT covered more areas of the business, it was more used to get a better insight in the business and became part daily activities in many organizations.
Meanwhile, the communications technological evolution took place. People and their computers started to communicate and share information over networks and as few as three to four users – or as many as thousands – can access the same database or use the same computing resources concurrently within the organization or even between contents.
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2 The role of IT / IS
Importance of Information for organizations
Today’s organizations are confronted with rapidly changing market conditions, indicated by strong competitors. Under these conditions, traditional management approaches that focus on financial figures and on centralized planning methods are considered to be insufficient for steering the organization in a dynamical environment.
Organizations all around the globe have to take the aid of information technology (IT) in some way or the other to keep themselves in sync with the market and the world. Different departments within organizations utilize IT to carry out their respective operations in a productive manner and efficient manner.
Organizations need to buy software packages that would cater to their specific management, operational, and functional needs. For this purpose, they need to approach IT firms who deal in such software applications.
Larger organizations on the other hand have their own operational and functional employees (IT staff) who develop software applications and work on several IT needs of the businesses. They usually purchase ERP software to coordinate different processes and functions into a single application, which is actually more convenient.
How IT is utilized for this purpose?
IT is used for storing, protecting, processing, securing, transmitting, receiving and retrieving information. In business establishments, information technology is used for solving mathematical and logical problems. Firstly, planning is done, data is collected, sorted and processed and finally, results are generated.
An Information System is an organized combination of People, information technologies and associated procedures that store, retrieves, transform and distribute information in an organization to support operations, management, and decision-making. It is not the technology only but also to the way in which people interact with this technology in support of business processes.
Information Systems are not necessarily computerized systems. Your book bag, the card catalog in library and the cash register in the restaurant are all example types of information systems.
How Information Systems can help Business?
1) Information Systems help to identify problems
Information systems often help business people determine that a problem exists and some action needs to be taken. For example, the inventory system at an organization flags items that need to be recorded, signaling to department managers that action is needed.
2) Information System provide current facts
Information systems show exactly what is currently happening and where we stand at this moment. Typical system output is composed of a variety of reports that meet the needs of various employees for information about the company’s performance. For example, sales people can determine whether the company has a certain product in stock, or they can receive a report at any time during the day to see exactly how much of their quota has been completed to that point.
3) Information Systems communicate Goals and Standards
Information Systems communicate company standards about what is supposed to be happening. Built into company reports is information about company standards. For example, indicators to flag performance that is outside the standard.
4) Information Systems facilitate interpersonal communication
Information systems facilitate communication among groups of business people who share responsibility for decision making. Information systems frequently provide such groups with a common body of information to be considered. Information systems reduce the amount of time that busy people must spend in face-to-face meetings.
As we explained earlier, Information Systems are not necessarily computerized systems. But now the information systems are computerized systems (computers are used to enhance systems) for the following reasons:
Computers can Calculate: Large amount of calculations and mathematical operations in a fraction of time.
Computers can Store and Retrieve Data: Huge data (Text, numbers, images …) stored and retrieved from media in a very high speed.
Computers can Communicate: Computers share data between each other and gives ability to people to share knowledge as well.
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3 Information Systems for Business success
Today’s organizations rely on computerized Information Systems for planning and controlling the performance of business processes and give managers the ability to utilize the collected data from daily and routine transactions to be analyzed and processed into useful understandable information which is then communicated to the various departments in an organization.
Information Systems are found in three vital roles:
Support for business processes and operations.
Support for decision making by managers.
Support for strategies for competitive advantage.
Types of Information Systems
There are two major types of the information systems; Operations Support and Management Support Systems.
Support for business processes and operations:
First, we need to understand some definitions:
A business model is the method of doing business and represents core aspects of a business, including purpose, offerings, strategies, infrastructure, organizational structures, trading practices, and operational processes and policies.
A business process is a collection of related, structured activities that produce a specific service or product for a customer or customers. There are three main types of business processes:
Management processes, the processes that govern the operation of a system.
Operational processes, the processes that constitute the core business and create the primary value stream.
Supporting processes, which support the core processes.
A workflow is a description of a sequence of operations. Workflow may be seen as abstraction of real work, segregated for control purposes.
With the business growth to be multi-functional / multi-location, organizations had to promote business effectiveness and efficiency with control while striving for innovation, flexibility, and integration with technology. That is what is called Business Process Management (BPM).
BPM enables business to respond to changing consumer, market, and regulatory demands faster than competitors – creating competitive advantage. Some people view BPM as “the bridge between Information Technology (IT) and Business.
The following Chart describes the major components of an information system supports a Business Process Management.
Business Process Managment
There are four major components of an information system supporting business processes:
Process Engine – a platform for modeling and executing process-based applications according to a workflow definition, including business rules.
End user applications – which enable employees and operational staff to execute the process governed by the workflow rules.
Business Analytics — enable managers to identify business issues, trends, and opportunities with reports and dashboards and react accordingly. Executed on the application servers and client PC’s
Content Management — provides a system for storing and securing electronic documents, images, and other files.
Collaboration Tools — remove intra- and interdepartmental communication barriers through discussion forums, dynamic workspaces, and message boards.
Business operations are recurring activities or day-to-day tasks involved in the running of a business for the purpose of producing value for the stakeholders. They consist of business processes.
All businesses deal with production, inventory management, billing, etc. Each of these operations is a Business Process and is integrated and impacts one another. For example, if products are not produced and delivered, then billing cannot happen. An operations manager overall responsibility is to see that all operations run smoothly and he uses information systems to achieve this goal (to manage business processes and to integrate them).
Routine Business Operations are managed by several types of information Systems such as the Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) which record and process the data resulting from business transactions, Process Control Systems (PCS) which monitor and control physical processes in manufacturing, and Collaboration Systems which enhance team and workgroup productivity.
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Support for decision making by manager
Decision making is an outcome of processes leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Every decision making process produces a final choice. The output can be an action or an opinion of choice.
Four steps in rational decision making process:
Intelligence: identify problems & opportunities, define objectives, criteria for success.
Design: develop and evaluate alternatives
Choice: prioritize, and select one or more alternatives
Implement and evaluate: implement the choice and monitor success
There are two types of decisions:
Unstructured or Semi-structured decisions:
Straightforward problems, requiring known facts and relationships
Structured Decisions:
Relationships among data are not always clear, the data may be in a variety of formats and sometimes from external sources (outside the organization)
DSS Systems
The type of information required by decision makers is directly related to the level of management and the amount of structure in the decision situations.
Tools are needed to facilitate decision making processes. These tools can be classified as Decision Support Systems (DSS) which serve the management level of the organization and help to take decisions, which may be rapidly changing and not easily specified in advance.
A DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from a combination of raw data, documents, personal knowledge, or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. It helps avoiding a situation where you say ‘ if I knew that before I would have decide it differently ‘. DSS are integrated with other information systems through a common database.
DSS characteristics include: Handling large amounts of data from different sources, providing report and presentation flexibility, offering both textual and graphical orientation and supporting drill down analysis. DSS also performs “What-if” analysis and simulation.
Development of a Decision Support Systemfor John Day Reservoir This set of tools is being used to estimate the effects of reservoir level and water discharge fluctuations on aquatic and terrestrial habitats in John Day Reservoir. Different scenarios being studied now range from typical reservoir levels at high and low discharges to a simulation of what things might be like if the river were to return to natural conditions http://wfrc.usgs.gov/research/geospatial%20studies/STGeospat4.htm
DSS System
Architecture of DSS:Four fundamental components of DSS architecture are:
The database (raw data from other systems)
The model (decision context and user criteria)
The user interface.
The output reports
DSS Structure
The users themselves are also important components of the DSS architecture.
Examples of DSSs include a bank loan officer verifying the credit of a loan applicant or an engineering firm that has bids on several projects and wants to know if they can be competitive with their costs. The Spreadsheet on your PC is also a Desktop DSS.
DSS is extensively used in business and management. Executive dashboard and other business performance software allow faster decision making, identification of negative trends, and better allocation of business resources. A good DSS include high-level summary reports or charts and allow the user to drill down for more detailed information.
Dashboard
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Support of strategies for competitive advantage
A competitive advantage is an advantage over competitors gained by offering consumers greater value, either by means of lower prices or by providing greater benefits and service that justifies higher prices. There are some business strategies that could be adopted in order to gain competitive advantage and relate to the business activities and to which a business seeks to differentiate its products.
To achieve the goal of competitive advantage and revenue increase, basic strategies are developed and supported by information systems:
Cost Leadership Strategy:
Becoming a low-cost producer and services in the industry and finding ways to help suppliers or customers reduce their costs or increase the cost of competitors.
Differentiation Strategy:
Differentiate the company’s products and services from its competitors by developing new IT features and use them to reduce the differentiation advantages of competitors.
Growth Strategy:
Expand the company’s capacity to produce goods and providing services, Expanding into global markets, and integrating into related products. Use IT to manage regional and global business expansion.
Innovation Strategy:
Create new products and services that include IT components. Make changes to business processes with IT that dramatically cut costs. Improve quality, efficiency of customer service using automated IT solutions.
Alliance Strategy:
Use IT to create virtual organizations of business partners. Develop inter-enterprise information systems linked by Internet and extranet that support strategic relationships with customers, suppliers and others.
In business, information systems are used through the Value Chain of activities which in turn enable the organization to optimize and control function of operations. They create a linkage between these activities through a value chain and help in lowering cost of value activities or by product’s differentiation.
The Value Chain of activities (Michael Porter) showed here are either primary processes or supporting processes with examples. Primary processes directly related to manufacturing or delivering products where Support processes help support the day-to-day running of the firm and indirectly contribute to products or services.
Value Chain
4 Conclusion Executives are making critical business decisions every day based on the information available to them. This information can come from a variety of sources: opinions from peers and colleagues; a personal sense of intuition or business judgment; or data derived internally or externally to the organization.
Companies need to utilize information for:
Alignment of business activities with corporate strategy
Resource allocation and utilization
Standards, compliance, and risk reduction.
This can be achieved using Information Systems and Technology by:
Providing analysis and reporting tools to create a centralized view necessary to ensure that departmental activities are in line with the overall corporate strategy.
Providing real-time information, allowing management to track performance and make adjustments more rapidly.
Combining value chain data it is possible for management to make better-informed decisions in deploying the right people, investments, equipment, and assets for the right activities at the right time.
Although IT & IS has become more of a commodity, when coupled with
complementary changes in organization and management, it can provide the
foundation for new products, services, and ways of conducting business that
provide firms with a strategic advantage.
Library Management System is a term for computer-based system that manage the catalogue of a library. The main purpose of this system is to manage library daily operation efficiently.
Objectives of Library Management System (LMS)
a) To build a system that can receive input and generate automatically output in easy way and short time.
b) To build a monitoring system that is able to monitor and manage all library operations efficiently.
c) Give an opportunity to librarians to reduce mistakes that always happen during manual method.
d) To store properly the library items in order to maintain their security.
e) To enter and preserve details of the various issues and keep a track on their returns.
This system basically has four types of modules that handle daily activities for the library :
a) Manage Account module
b) Search Record Module
c) Book Borrowing System Module
d) Report Generator Module
By using library management system, the operation of borrowing and managing inventories is paperless. This system provides a user-friendly data entry with dropdown button menu, list box and checkbox in purpose to make the input entry easier to understand and use. It is also created to ensure that the library items are stored properly in order to maintain their security.
This system will store all the books and members information that consist book numbers, book titles, author names and racks to the system database. It also provides search function to help students find the book by number of book. Search function will search through the books database to look for the book and view where the book is situated.
For the administrator user, only librarians have access to view or edit data from the system databases. Administrator user will handle administrative functions such as create new LMS user account and decide the number of days allowed for the borrowed books. Users need to enter correct password and user id before they can access to this function. From here, they can add, delete or update the book and borrower database
Library Management System 