Define the Information System

• Growing sophistication in products and markets is driving the organisational requirement for increasing amounts of information.
• This requirement is being met by implementing technology based information systems that span organisations and markets.
• The information system is; an operational process comprising elements of hardware and software; that interfaces with human operators; that collects data; that it transforms and disseminates using a suitable communications system.
• The growth on sophistication of information systems has been enabled by: increases in processing capability allowing smaller and smaller pieces of hardware to perform more and increasingly complex functions; the convergence of computing and communications technologies; the development of easy to use human machine interfaces; the emergence of design standards for information systems making it easier for companies to design, procure and install these systems; the use of standardised hardware combined with customised software leading to a more capable and cost effective system.
• The basic currency used by information systems is data however this must be transformed into information and knowledge to be useful to the organisation. This transformation is as follows.
• Empirical data given structure and meaning becomes information. Thinking skills are then applied to the information so converting this information into knowledge.
• The basic purpose of the information system is to convert and manage data into something that is meaningful. The basic processes for doing this are classification, sorting, ordering, aggregating, summarising, calculating, selection and retaining/discarding.
• Functions of information system are capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating and displaying.
• A work system is a system in which humans and/or machines perform a business process using information, technology and other resources to produce products and services for internal or external customers.
• The elements of the work system are customers, products and services, processes, participants, information, technology, context and infrastructure.
• By adopting a human-centred design approach the objective would be to implement the technology to make the work of the participants as effective and satisfying as possible. With a machine-centred design approach the technology and process is designed to simplify what the machine must do.
• User friendliness can be understood as an easy to learn system that is intuitively simple, is compatible with the user's needs, accepts inputs that are easy to supply and produces outputs that are easy to use.