Video Transcript: What is an Information System?
Hello and welcome to the Introduction to Information Systems. And I would, I would love to get us started in a prayer before we start off this first week, which is talking about, generally, what are information systems? So like to get us started, Dear Heavenly Father, I'd like to thank you for this opportunity to learn together and to help us all improve, personally, improve our organizations. Really move forward with our with our families, and to just gain new knowledge and expand our horizons and as we, as any of us, learn anything we're just following where, where you're leading us of what we need to know so that we can be a light for you in our communities and in our workplaces and in our families. So just thank you so much for this opportunity to learn together. I pray for each student who might, who might be watching this, that you you look over them as they as they study, as help them, you know, learn and retain the information that's really going to help them with their goals for their career and just for being forward and for moving forward and and and sharing the message for you, so in your heavenly name, we pray amen. And so again. Welcome to Information Systems. My name is Emily Baskin. I am currently working for a technology mobile application, a startup business in the travel space. So what that means is that I am working with developers to make an app for your cell phone and a website that will help travelers move along more quickly, and a lot of those efficiencies that we're used to when we're doing mobile computing. And so a lot of the topics that we're going to jump into over the next several weeks here in Information Systems is what I do all day, every day. So I'm very excited to be able to share that experience with you and be able to really bring some of my my work experience into your work experience. So that's my current job. I am also a project, an IT project manager for a university until very recently, and was a teacher for about 10 years. So I've got a lot of wear a lot of different hats that hopefully can come together to be exactly the right person you need to get this information. So from the education side and from the technology and the mobile application side, hopefully it'll be a good combination to help you learn. So so here we go. We're going to jump right into week one, which is, what is an information system? And a lot of you who might be taking this course might be talking to friends or family, and you say, I'm studying information systems. And they might say, what does that mean? You might, you might think that information system sounds like, well, I'm going to be studying computers, or maybe you'll think I'm going to be studying data and databases and spreadsheets, or I'm going to be studying binary code encoding for processor speed. And all of these would be correct answers, because information systems, if we're going to look comprehensively, all those components that come together to make an information system, so any one of those would be correct. We're just going to we're going to look at all the pieces that go into the technology and the people, and when you combine the technology and the people, we get this field MIS managing information systems that's going to help you make better
decisions in the workplace and personally and make life easier for everyone. So it's such an exciting field of study, and I hope you love it. And by the end of this video, you should be able to, with confidence, answer the question. If someone says, What is that you're studying? What is information systems? That's what this week is all about. So here's week one, and we're going to move on to the what we're going to try anyway. There we go, the learning objectives, and this is so at the end of this video, hopefully you're going to be able to again define what in the world is it an information system. We're going to talk about the basic history of where we've come from in information systems, and later on in the. Course, we're going to talk about the future of so that we know where we've been and we can kind of anticipate where we're going in terms of technology and information systems. Lastly, we're going to describe Anthony's triangle and why it's important. And really what we mean by that is there is a concept of how information systems are organized that are going to be how useful they are to your organization. And once we do that, we're going to kind of jump into some of these more detailed components as we move along. But this first week is meant to be an overview of information systems as a whole, and how it can be useful to you and to your career as you move forward. So here are the components we have, components that work together to add value to an organization, and that's what an information system is. So the hardware we're going to talk about all those physical things that lead to here we go. There we go. We're going to talk about all those, the physical things you can touch that are part of the technology. Think about your mouse, your keyboard, your smartphone, your monitor, your CPU tower, if there's a your headphones, you know anything that is the actual hardware part of technology is going to be one component of what makes up information systems. For some of you, these are the very first things you might have thought of when it comes to information systems. It sounds techy, right? Like there's going to be technology components. When you think of technology, likely, you think of a laptop computer, which is the hardware. So, so you wouldn't be wrong. That is definitely the first component here. The second component is the software, and it's going to be its own. We're going to study this as its own module. There's so much to dive into here with the software. The software is what tells the hardware what to do. And this is going to be anything from a and we'll jump into it, but applications to the the iOS that you're running, the operating system that you're working with any of those, any of those things that are programmed that tell the hardware what to do are going to be the software components, and they're both necessary to make up an information system. Third is going to be the data. Or maybe you're someone who says data, and that's okay too. I'm a data girl myself. So that's what I'll be saying in this course. You can say whatever you want. So as we go through the data, we're going to be talking about all those tiny little pieces of information that get used to make really good decisions at work and at home, in your families, all the information
that is created. And there's staggering amounts of data every day that just you, by yourself, are creating, and most of the time you don't even know it. So these things that are happening as part of your everyday, daily life, and in your job at
work, all the pieces of data that are created by the work that you're doing get used to inform better decisions. And that is part of the third component as data. We're also going to be talking about databases, data warehouses, how we organize data as we move forward in this course. So those first three went together, and they all can fall under the umbrella of technology. And so the technology is definitely needed to be an information system. But the fourth piece is the people. And this is where that human side is coming in. This is a role, the people, and the fifth one, the process. These are going to be roles that you play in the organization. So you might be really, really good at the hardware and software. You might know that inside and out. But if you're not really good at number four as well, the people, component of information systems, you wouldn't be a very effective IT project manager or data analyst, or any of those things that are going to be in the field of information systems, if you don't know how to relate well to others, to help a project move forward, to communicate what you need For something to be successful. So we need to make sure that there's really an emphasis on the human people side of information systems as well. It's the fourth component, I would argue. It's one of the most important components in terms of being able to communicate well, and the fifth, final component is the process, and as we go through we're going to talk about all of these in greater detail as we move forward, but the process is going to be just the steps that you go through to make something happen. And all of these things are used comprehensively. They're all used together to make really good decisions, and if it doesn't have all five, likely it's not an information system. So we're going to get real familiar with all five of these. As we said, those first three go together and make up technology, and that's going to be the hardware, the software and the data, and then that last bullet of networking that's going to be the way that computers talk to each other, and the way that the network that the people talk to the computers, and the computers talk to other computers, coming back to inform a process which then communicates with the people again. All of this interconnection is part of the networking that makes this possible. And as we go through the history of information systems, in just a minute, we're going to talk about how important that networking piece really is. So the technology pieces come together, and then again, we have the people. You'll hear them refer to as users, which is a little clinical, but you are yourself an end user of all kinds of information systems. You might be a person who is part of developing as well users or people are at all levels of your organization. So MIS is important to the CEO, it's also important to someone who is their very first day and don't have a very clinical role at all, everyone is contributing to the factors of information systems and how those pieces of data inform decisions up
the line. So those are the people, and those can be inside your organization or outside your organization. Let's say you're a project manager at your job, and you are in charge of launching a new product or organizing an event that's going to recognize your best customers. You're having a Customer Appreciation Event, whatever the case may be, if you're organizing something or you're the project manager, the people that you're going to have as part of your team are going to be your teammates at work. They're also probably going to be members of the community, members of the media, perhaps all kinds of different people that you're going to need to be able to explain these information systems concepts, and we're going to help you do that and get you prepared to do just that. Finally, that process is again, a series of steps to have an outcome be possible, and just so that we can use that technology to gain a competitive advantage, or to give you an edge over the next company, or to give if you're let's say you're planning a vacation to give you an edge over someone who's trying to get a good deal the same time you are from their home computer. Any process that's going to give you efficiencies and make you better at harnessing that power of technology is going to be really tapping into the field of information systems, and I'm really excited to get you learning about these processes. Next we're going to be talking about Anthony's triangle. So once we've got these five components down pat of what makes up an information system, we're going to organize those Information Systems categorically, and so starting at the bottom, just like if you're familiar, here we go, there we go. We're going to sorry, starting at the bottom is the operational level of Anthony's triangle. And this is going to be a any piece of transaction that happens. This is going to make up the bulk of all information systems. Let's say you return a library book that is a transaction. They scan the barcode. You check out a library book that is a transaction, you return the library book that is a transaction, that is a TPS, a transaction processing system, and as part, you use TPS all day, every day, most likely, if you buy a bottle of water, if You scan your ticket on the bus. Anything that is a piece of information that changes from one place to another is going to be a TPS, a transaction processing event, and that's all part of this operational level. The most common and. It's going to be every time you scan your badge to get into a building, all of these things. As we move up the triangle, we'll see this tactical level. That's the middle management level is for in terms of decisions. So if we go back down to the operational level, let's see the sports team as an example, and every jersey that gets sold out of the gift shop, that's going to be the operational level. Every time there's a purchase made, it's a transaction. And those transactions all get logged, and they get into a database, and we can use those bits of information at that next level, the tactical level. This is where middle management might decide. Okay, look at all those pieces of operational data. How can we use that to make a better decision? Maybe we need to order a different size. Maybe all the medium jerseys are sold out and all the smalls are
left on the shelf, and we need to change the ratio in which we're ordering them, or maybe, maybe a different color is necessary. Maybe we need to have them in a different area of the gift shop, because this supply is running out, and this one
isn't getting touched in the back of the corner. So all of those things in the tactical area we can, we can use the TPS information to make decisions as we move up the triangle. This is the strategic level. This is for the executive information system. This is most likely going to be people in the C suite that are using this information your CEO, your CFO for finances, your CIO for your chief intelligence officer, this is going to be those people who are looking at the strategy of where is this organization going? They're looking at the very big picture, and so all those tiny pieces of data that happen all day, every day, that get informed up the triangle into that very highest level. Now we're talking about decisions like, Should we move this team from one city to another? Maybe it's a professional sports team, and we're going to sell the sports team, or maybe we're going to we're going to have a major human resources change these things that are at the strategic level that most people in the organization wouldn't have access to all that data. But it's going to get compounded. We're going to we're going to take all that data together from the operational and tactical levels, and now we're at the strategic level to make really high level C suite decisions, and all of those pieces underneath were necessary components that bring us to that strategic level. So it's just a convenient way to categorize information systems and understand the purpose and kind of where our job fits in to Anthony's triangle, if we are, if we're the person checking in and out those library books, or if we're the person deciding if a new library should be built and where it should be built, and all of those things that go into those decisions. So I hope that that the sports example makes sense. There's certainly, if you take a look at really any organization, if you start we started at the bottom before if you start at the very top, and you look at the most important decisions being made, if you work backwards, you can kind of see the data that informs those decisions. And then if you drill down even further than that, you can see this small, little everyday transaction data that makes up the decisions that are necessary. So it's just a way to organize it and and hopefully that, hopefully that makes a lot of sense, and we can kind of start looking as we dig into the information systems where each one fits in to this triangle. Next, we're going to look at the history. We're going to look at the history of information systems, and where we've been. We're not going all the way back, I promise, but we will go back to 1950s and look at those first mainframe computers, those really, really big computers that took up an entire room. You could never have one in your home. Most people didn't have one in their office. You certainly wouldn't have one in your pocket. The way we do now. These are going to be those, those huge mainframe computing stations and and mostly only used in things like big manufacturing, big assembly lines, things like that. You know, NASA is what we're talking about.
If you fast forward a little bit into the 70s and 80s, when the first micro computers, those personal computers, PC started being developed. Windows became a thing, and we started having computers in our homes and offices, more offices, probably in schools. And then when we go into the 80s and 90s, this is when we start to see more home computing. This is when we have client servers for serving smaller organizations and families. This is when we have networking and ERP. And if you're not familiar with ERP, you will, you will become very familiar with ERP by the time this course is over. This is enter enterprise resource planning, and this is going to be kind of the brains behind the operation of what gets ordered and what gets delivered, and everything that goes into planning an organizations success. So the ERP really coming into focus in the 80s and 90s was a game changer. Nothing was a game changer like the next column here in the 90s to the 2000s with the advent of the World Wide Web, and so we look at the difference of what was possible once the Internet came to our homes, it came to our workplaces, it came to our families, it came to our churches, it came to Our stores, and everything being connected with these this networking capability of computers talking to each other and people being able to talk to each other through these computers was astonishing. And so if we saw this as a timeline, this mid 90s to early 2000s worldwide web would be a definite game changer and catapult us leaps and bounds forward in the area of information systems. I am going to take my picture off here so you can see the last one of we're going to stop in the early 2000s because we have a whole week planned just for talking about current and future MIS status. But since we're talking about the history, we're going to end about 20 years ago where we started with our mobile computing and cloud computing. And this is going to be anything that takes place with the with the invention of the smartphone, you can shop from anywhere. You can get directions sent directly to the dashboard of your car, all of these mobile applications and cloud networking so that organizations can so easily store their information and data and have all these tasks completed in the cloud. And if you're not quite sure what that means. You keep hearing this term the cloud, and you're not really sure what it means. Don't worry. We're going to be jumping right into that in the next few weeks and talking about exactly what it means to have your business done on the cloud. And so once, once we get past that, now, once we get to modern times, we're going to be talking more about all those, all the things that are happening now, in the current time where we've, you found leaps and bounds past this mobile computing and cloud computing and everything that's happening. But for now, we're going to talk, I'm going to end with this. Does it even matter? And this is a question that was asked by Nicholas Carr in Harvard Business Review from Intel. And there is a video with Nicholas Carr, and he is going to be in one of the resource videos that I have asked for you to watch. And this is going to be asking about if it even really matters. And so now we know the
IT isn't just a luxury, and being online isn't just a luxury. So he asked that main human question of, is it a privilege, or is it a right? And the way that is answered here is that Nicholas Carr was saying that it's now similar to a utility like someone having access to an electric electricity that we're talking about, it's the cost of doing business, not an investment for something extra or something that's extravagant, but more just the cost of doing business. And that what IT really need is to be as risk free as possible and as accessible as possible, to reduce costs for everyone and reduce and really level the playing field, making sure that it's always up and running. So we're going to go ahead and leave it there for this week, talking through the five components with the technology umbrella, having the hardware and the software and the data, and then going through with the people and the processes that make it possible to have an information system, and how we can use those information systems to really elevate organizations, elevate our families, elevate our church. Elevate our workplace all these things that go together to really allow us to harness the power of technology and use it to move us all forward. So thank you so much, and I'll see you for the next one.