Lecture
The structure and functional purpose of information systems must correspond to the structure and functions of the organization, the goals of management and the decisions being made, as well as to the capabilities of the information technologies employed. The construction of an IS begins with an analysis of the organization's management structure. The levels of decision-making are characterized by the complexity of the tasks being solved, the corresponding set of functions, and the type of information support. As the level rises, both the degree of competence and responsibility of the DM and the time required to implement the decisions made increase.
Strategic-level ISs for goal-setting management are intended for use by senior executives in order to obtain advantages for the organization's activities in competitive struggle in economic markets. Operational-level ISs for functional regulation are developed to ensure the control, management and administrative actions of middle managers. Tactical-level ISs for information provision are intended for information technology specialists, for the analysis of current information, and for the processing, storage and presentation of data. Tactical-level ISs for operational execution are intended for the performers who support the elementary actions of the organization — such as sales, payments, accounting, carrying out transactions, operational financial decisions, operations management, the regulation of flows of materials and products in production, and so on.
Information systems are naturally distributed by functional areas as well. Each of the basic organizational functions — sales and marketing, production, finance, accounting and human resource management — is, as a rule, served by its own dedicated system, and in large organizations each major function may have its own local information subsystems.
Information systems make it possible to solve the following classes of tasks. Data analytics — the calculation of specified indicators and statistical characteristics of the organization's activity on the basis of retrospective information from databases. Information visualization — a clear graphical and tabular representation of the available information. Knowledge extraction — the determination of the interrelationships and interdependencies of business processes on the basis of existing information. Simulation analysis — carrying out computational experiments with formalized models with the aim of analyzing the possible consequences of making managerial decisions. Control synthesis — the determination of the set of admissible control actions ensuring the achievement of a specified goal. Control optimization — the choice, from the set of admissible controls, of those that ensure the most effective (with respect to the chosen criterion) progress toward the set goal.
All the information used by the DM in the decision-making process can be divided into formalized, partially formalized and non-formalized. In accordance with the degree of formalization, the types of decisions made are also determined — structured, partially structured and unstructured. For each of these types of decisions and for each organizational-managerial level, there exist the following categories of information systems serving them, which help successfully solve the classes of tasks indicated above with the processing of the corresponding type of data.
Transaction processing systems ( Transaction Processing Systems — TPS) - are basic systems serving the level of operational execution in the organization, intended for the automatic performance of a large number of standard operations or transactions. Knowledge work systems {Knowledge Work Systems — KWS) serve the information needs at the tactical level of providing information for the decision-making process, using heterogeneous, multi-profile information of varying degrees of formalization. Office automation systems {Office Automation Systems — OAS) serve the information needs at the tactical level of information provision, but unlike knowledge work systems they deal with almost completely formalized information; the decisions made with the help of such systems are highly structured, and the results are easily traceable. Management information systems {Management Information Systems - MIS) provide all middle and senior managers with current information on the accuracy of the execution of decisions regulating the main business processes in the organization. Decision support systems {Decision Support System — DSS) allow end users to work interactively with all types of information, conduct analytical studies, build models and play out scenarios for solving semi-structured and even unstructured problems in innovative projects. Executive support systems {Executive Support Systems — ESS) make it possible to make unstructured decisions at the strategic level of organizational management and to carry out systemic analysis of information from the external environment better than any applied or specialized IS.
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