Name : Sukma Rizki Djalu Riverdhan

Class : MB 40 – INT – 1

ID Number : 1401160622

1.· Operational excellence :

Businesses continuously seek to improve the efficiency of their operations in order to achieve higher profitability.

· New products, services, and business models :

Information systems and technologies are a major enabling tool for firms to create new products and services, as well as entirely new business models.

· Customer and supplier intimacy :

When a business really knows its customers, and serves them well, the way they want to be served, customers generally respond by returning and purchasing more.

· Improved decision making :

Information systems and technologies have made it possible for managers to use real-time data from the marketplace when making decisions.

· Competitive advantage :

Doing things better than your competitors, charging less for superior products, and responding to customers and suppliers in real time all add up to higher sales and higher profits that your competitors cannot match.

· Survival :

Firms also invest in information systems and technologies because they are necessities for doing business.

2. Characteristics of a DSS

• Support for decision-makers in semi-structured and unstructured problems.
• Support for managers at various managerial levels, ranging from top executive to line managers.
• Support for individuals and groups. Less structured problems often requires the involvement of several individuals from different departments and organization level.
• Support for interdependent or sequential decisions.
• Support for intelligence, design, choice, and implementation.
• Support for variety of decision processes and styles.
• DSSs are adaptive over time.

Characteristics of MIS

-Management oriented

One important feature of MIS is that MIS is designed top-down. This means that the system is designed around the need felt by the management at different levels for information. The focus of the system is to satisfy the information needs of management.

-Management directed

Since MIS is ‘for the’ management it is imperative that it also should have a very strong ‘by the’ management initiative. Management is involved in the designing process of MIS and also in its continuous review and up gradation to develop a good qualitative system. The system is structured as per directions factored by management. This helps in minimizing the gap between expectations of management form the system and the actual system.

-Integrated

-Common data flows

-Strategic planning

-Bias towards centralization

3. Primary Activities

Primary activities relate directly to the physical creation, sale, maintenance and support of a product or service. They consist of the following:

• Inbound logistics – These are all the processes related to receiving, storing, and distributing inputs internally. Your supplier relationships are a key factor in creating value here.
• Operations – These are the transformation activities that change inputs into outputs that are sold to customers. Here, your operational systems create value.
• Outbound logistics – These activities deliver your product or service to your customer. These are things like collection, storage, and distribution systems, and they may be internal or external to your organization.
• Marketing and sales – These are the processes you use to persuade clients to purchase from you instead of your competitors. The benefits you offer, and how well you communicate them, are sources of value here.
• Service – These are the activities related to maintaining the value of your product or service to your customers, once it’s been purchased.

4. Five steps

1. Identify and describe clearly the facts. Find out who did what to whom, and where, when, and how. In many instances, you will be surprised at the errors in the initially reported facts, and often you will find that simply getting the facts straight helps define the solution. It also helps to get the opposing parties involved in an ethical dilemma to agree on the facts.

2. Define the conflict or dilemma and identify the higher-order values involved. Ethical, social, and political issues always reference higher values. The parties to a dispute all claim to be pursuing higher values (e.g., freedom, privacy, protection of property, and the free enterprise system). Typically, an ethical issue involves a dilemma: two diametrically opposed courses of action that support worthwhile values. For example, the chapter-ending case study illustrates two competing values: the need to improve health care record keeping and the need to protect individual privacy.

3. Identify the stakeholders. Every ethical, social, and political issue has stakeholders: players in the game who have an interest in the outcome, who have invested in the situation, and usually who have vocal opinions. Find out the identity of these groups and what they want. This will be useful later when designing a solution.

4. Identify the options that you can reasonably take. You may find that none of the options satisfy all the interests involved, but that some options do a better job than others. Sometimes arriving at a good or ethical solution may not always be a balancing of consequences to stakeholders.

5. Identify the potential consequences of your options. Some options may be ethically correct but disastrous from other points of view. Other options may work in one instance but not in other similar instances. Always ask yourself, “What if I choose this option consistently over time?”

5. A storage area network (SAN) is a network which provides access to consolidated, block level data storage. SANs are primarily used to enhance storage devices, such as disk arrays, tape libraries, and optical jukeboxes, accessible to servers so that the devices appear to the operating system as locally attached devices.

6. How a DBMS Solves the Problems of the Traditional File Environment :

-Reduces data redundancy and inconsistency by minimizing isolated files

-It can’t eliminate data redundancy as a whole, but can help control it

-It uncouples data and programs, enabling data to stand up on their own -Access and availability of information increases

-Program development and maintenance costs decreases -Users and programmers can perform and hoc queries of data in the database

-Enables the organization to centrally manage: the data, their use, and security through the use of a data dictionary.

A database management system (DBMS) is a collection of programs that enables you to store, modify, and extract information from a database. There are many different types of database management systems, ranging from small systems that run on personal computers to huge systems that run on mainframes.

7. Network convergence is the efficient coexistence of telephone, video and data communication within a single network. The use of multiple communication modes in a single network offers convenience and flexibility not possible with separate infrastructures. Network convergence is also called media convergence.

8. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems integrate and automate customer-facing processes in sales, marketing, and custiomer service, providing an enterprise- wide view of customers. Companies can use this customer knowledge when they interact with customers to provide them with better service or to sell new products and services. These systems also identify profitable or nonprofitable customers or opportunities to reduce the churn rate.

The major customer relationship management software packages provide capabilities for both operational CRM and analytical CRM. They often include modules for managing relationships with selling partners (partner relationship management) and for employee relationship management.

9. The Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 also known as the "Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act" (in the Senate) and "Corporate and Auditing Accountability and Responsibility Act" (in the House) and more commonly called Sarbanes–Oxley, Sarbox or SOX, is a United States federal law that set new or expanded requirements for all U.S. public company boards, management and public accounting firms. There are also a number of provisions of the Act that also apply to privately held companies, for example the willful destruction of evidence to impede a Federal investigation.

10. A Key Performance Indicator is a measurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs at multiple levels to evaluate their success at reaching targets. High-level KPIs may focus on the overall performance of the enterprise, while low-level KPIs may focus on processes in departments such as sales, marketing or a call center.

11. Business continuity planning (or business continuity and resiliency planning) is the process of creating systems of prevention and recovery to deal with potential threats to a company.

Any event that could negatively impact operations is included in the plan, such as supply chain interruption, loss of or damage to critical infrastructure (major machinery or computing /network resource).

12. Importance of Information Systems in an Organization :

Communication

Part of management is gathering and distributing information, and information systems can make this process more efficient by allowing managers to communicate rapidly. Email is quick and effective, but managers can use information systems even more efficiently by storing documents in folders that they share with the employees who need the information. This type of communication lets employees collaborate in a systematic way. Each employee can communicate additional information by making changes that the system tracks. The manager collects the inputs and sends the newly revised document to his target audience.

Operations

How you manage your company’s operations depends on the information you have. Information systems can offer more complete and more recent information, allowing you to operate your company more efficiently. You can use information systems to gain a cost advantage over competitors or to differentiate yourself by offering better customer service. Sales data give you insights about what customers are buying and let you stock or produce items that are selling well. With guidance from the information system, you can streamline your operations.

Decisions

The company information system can help you make better decisions by delivering all the information you need and by modeling the results of your decisions. A decision involves choosing a course of action from several alternatives and carrying out the corresponding tasks. When you have accurate, up-to-date information, you can make the choice with confidence. If more than one choice looks appealing, you can use the information system to run different scenarios. For each possibility, the system can calculate key indicators such as sales, costs and profits to help you determine which alternative gives the most beneficial result.

Records

Your company needs records of its activities for financial and regulatory purposes as well as for finding the causes of problems and taking corrective action. The information system stores documents and revision histories, communication records and operational data. The trick to exploiting this recording capability is organizing the data and using the system to process and present it as useful historical information. You can use such information to prepare cost estimates and forecasts and to analyze how your actions affected the key company indicators.