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Welcome to MIST2090 this video was created by Dr. Nick Berente and
Dr. Craig Piercy of the MIS Department of the Terry College of Business
for our MIST2090 day one part A Introduction to Business
Information Systems. Created under creative commons attribution
noncommercial, share alike license
in this video
we'll explore what is MIS
we'll understand careers in MIS will look at the Terry MIS experience
and finally we will share a few notes about MIST2090 the course
What is MIS?
Technically, it means management information systems
But, what is the subject matter of MIS? What do MIS people know?
And, what do MIS people do?
this is the primary topic of this course
sometimes people have
preconceived notions that an MIS person is the IT nerd
in the basement who sits at his
computer all day eating
chips and soda,
monitoring the
enterprise IS and never coming up for
or seeing other people.
Nothing could be farther from the truth.
In reality MIS people are decision makers
who work at the intersection
of business and technology.
ninety nine point ninety nine percent
of all change in contemporary organization is
IT enabled.
So, MIS professionals
consult with businesses to figure out
how IT
can support the information needs of an organization
and provide business value.
Think about how
information systems and IT have changed the way we do business.
For example, how do you sell to your customers?
In the old days,
before most of you were born flowers were sold by florists
who had single shops on the street corners
of your hometown.
The process was straightforward. The florist projected the flowers that they
wanted to sell based on what was available.
They took delivery once or twice a week
and customers came in the store called and bought what was there.
Now, just a few flower shops remain,
but they must compete with grocery stores and online florists.
They could also become a part of floral networks and deliver the flowers that
are sold by others
and connect to services to arrange grocery store flowers.
Due to globalization more varieties of
fresh flowers are available
Grocery stores use sophisticated ERP systems to manage inventory
including flowers and production.
Florist websites store order information in data warehouses
and mine that data to spot
trends and such.
So, several major trends have changed the way we sell to customers
in all areas of retail.
These are:
globalization
the use of information systems that capture store and help us process and
understand data - known as ERP or supply chain management systems
and other systems that help us use data to make decisions known as
data warehouses, business intelligence systems
or data mining tools.
Another aspect of the business is
marketing to customers
In the old days when car companies wanted to market their cars
they would take out ads in print
or tv/radio media.
they could segment their market based on interest in the TV shows,
radio programming,
or print media targets.
While this
has not necessarily gone away
new forms of marketing
are available.
Now, marketing campaigns are
more successful when they bring together an ecosystem of media,
Social networks
link blogs to web sites and channels which are all integrated with search and
previous browsing clicks with banner ads and promotions.
Former web development organizations are becoming interactive media companies
and eating the lunch from traditional marketing firms.
CRM and point-of-sale
recommendations can be used to help
segment the market,
target specific markets,
look at niche markets, or
a long tail.
they can help with extreme personalisation
and help with customer relationship management.
Businesses also have to account for business transactions.
In the old days people
would account for numbers
using ledgers
or paper spreadsheets,
or auditing flat files sometimes linked inside
spreadsheet software such as Excel.
The data entered into the spreadsheets
would then have to be combined with other data from other departments
and they would be reconciled in batch mode.
People had to wait for data. It was is prone to error
it was time consuming
and wasteful.
Now, data is tightly integrated with processes in an organization.
Through systems like
enterprise resource planning or ERP
or BPM - business process management systems
These systems come with different
modules for each process.
They help us work with data in real time.
Data can be more easily integrated across an organisation
and between organizations.
There is a single point of data capture.
Data is linked to other business applications.
Data can be displayed in a variety of ways such as pivot tables and
business intelligence tools.
And, we can work with data using server-side applications that help us
easily collaborate with others on the
same spreadsheet or document.
Another important aspect of a business is to
collaborate with business partners.
Old modes of collaboration included synchronous mode such as
face-to-face meetings
or using the telephone
or asynchronous modes
using mail or what's known as snail mail today because of how slow it is,
or using fax
or even email.
Now, due to information systems and information technology,
we have many more options available.
Collaboration is mobile and ubiquitous.
We have multiple modes of communication.
We can use, for instance,
Skype, instant messaging,
voice, video
screen sharing, etc.
Users can generate content for sharing
over such tools
as YouTube,
often used in businesses
for training.
And, we have collaborative management systems these can help us maintain
communications and related documents.
Such tools as
Google Docs or Microsoft's Sharepoint
would be good examples of
collaborative management systems.
MIS professionals are:
leaders in IT enabled change.
Tor the most part, they are consultants.
They consult with other business professionals about how
information systems and information technology can be used
to provide business value
in changing an organization.
There are many paths to consulting in the IS field
IS consultants can come from a technical background
such as a software programmer, a database administrator or
a systems administrator.
Alternatively,
an IS consultant
could come from a more business
nontechnical background
as a project manager or a business analyst.
Typically,
by the time one becomes an IS consultant they need to have good
foundational knowledge on both sides
while they may be experts from one side of the other.
Consulting
in the MIS career
generally comes in two flavors,
either external consultant
- someone who works for a company that is
hired by other companies -
to help them
use IS to add business value -
or internal
often known as an analyst - someone who would work within a particular company
to deal with the internal workings of the systems.
General characteristics of external consulting jobs include: lots of travel
high-pay
and great experience.
While an external consultant you can
earn credibility
for your career and then either move up to partner level
or leave with
many offers.
Internal consultants
are also highly technical and have generally good pay
but, they serve as business analyst
to developers, database, process improvement,
or other types of career fields.
They have good pay
yet there work is more stable and
there's less travel.
Many of the companies listed here
or those which higher MIS majors from the Terry College.
Speaking of Terry College MIS majors:
Generally, we're number one or two within the college
for placement of our majors.
We're typically over the years have been also number one
or number two
within the disciplines of the Terry College
in starting salary.
IS and IT jobs have been noted as being
among the top
jobs in the country.
MIS is also
proven to be a fairly recession resistant
career path.
Here ar a few links that you can
have a look at if you are interested in exploring an IS career
or just want to understand how IS is used to support businesses.
What is the MIS
experience here at the Terry College.
Let's first think of two businesses one of more traditional business
around for many years
called Avon
- your mother or your grandmother may have been
Avon representatives to sell Avon to their friends.
Of course a newer business is known as Amazon.com,
probably the largest and most successful internet based retailer in the world.
Let's look at how Amazon and Avon
can be understood in terms of processes
and data.
Here is a typical Avon sales process.
Notice we can separate the process into four steps:
a salesperson will meet with the customer
- in Avon's case salespersons were often recruited from homemakers who would
typically have parties in their home to share with their friends the Avon
product line. A sales person would then submit the order
to a system on account.
After some period of time the salesperson would receive the order
and then the sales person would
visit the customer to deliver the product that was ordered.
Here's the Amazon sales process.
We could see some similarities but then there are some differences as well.
In this case a customer searches a website.
The customer will then look at reviews and recommendations.
The customer checks out
with payment from a payment page
that handles the transaction
and a customer will receive order from UPS.
In our example the processes have been simplified a little bit but we can
see some similarities and some differences.
Think about it for a moment. What are some of those?
The main differences in these two
processes include
who is responsible for each step of the process
and how the important data is collected and stored.
Here with Avon we see that every step
the salesperson is responsible for making sure each step happens.
Avon in effect outsourced much of their sales and marketing
to the homemakers.
We can see here associated with each step
the data that's collected by the salesperson or provided to the customer.
Information systems have allowed Amazon to do similar things
such as retail sales in a different manner.
!n this case it's more customer focused.
You can see each step it's the customer who is primarily responsible for making
sure that things happen.
Amazon provides the platform.
Similar data is collected at each site but it's a customer who searches
the web site
for the categories brands and prices.
It's the customer who makes the decision
and submits an order through the order page.
And then the customer receives the order directly.
The part that's outsourced here from Amazon
is with Fedex or UPS.
An MIS professional would seek to understand the business process and what
data is associated with each step in order to make the business process
more productive,
efficient, or effective,
and somehow use information systems to add value to the company.
In order to do that
information systems professionals start with modeling.
Modeling allows us to:
describe systems in a way that can be more easily communicated,
helps us to understand how various systems work, and then allows us to make
changes to those systems in a way that wouldn't affect the current system,
and then understand the effects of those changes.
This is an example of what we call a process model.
An MIS professional would learn how to create these and work with these to
understand and improve
the processes in a company.
So, IS professionals have to think a lot about how data will be stored.
Here's an example of what is known as a data model.
A model such as this is
used to help organize data as it is stored in some organized fashion such as
something known as a relational database. This particular data model includes
boxes which represent things called entities.
Anything we want to keep data about
And, relationships between those entities drawn as lines between the boxes.
It looks pretty complicated but an information system professional
would take courses in order to understand the data
and to model it in this way.
Here at the Terry College we have two foundational courses for our
MIS majors
which fit precisely these two categories. We have our data management class
MIST 4610
where an MIS major would learn how to collect,
model, and analyze data
and store it in the database.
and we have our business process management class MIST5750
where we look at businesses as sets of processes and we understand
how can we model those processes so that we may improve them
and use particular tools such as BPM systems.
We also have courses that provide MIS majors with both the technical and the
business side of MIS consultants
For the business side of things in addition to the core business courses that
MIS majors take
they would take Project Management MIST5740 and
Systems Analysis and Design
MIST 4620.
As we learn in this course project management provides techniques, skills,
and tools for managing
complex projects.
Systems Analysis and design provides a framework for helping MIS professionals
understand the requirements of the business and how those might be
translated into the
architecture of an information system.
On the technical side of things our majors also learn how to program
computers and other developed network applications.
MIS experience the Terry Tollege also include some electives.
Some of our elective offerings show how dynamic our major can be.
These electives include business intelligence -
how can we understand and work with data to support business decision making
IS leadership - what things to people such as the CIO (chief information
officer) need to know
in order to lead and organizations
Advanced Business Process Management course
Using IS to solve some of the problems of the world such as our sustainable green
IS course
and Information Protection - government risk and security course.
Here at the Terry College MIS Department we like to think that our
MIS major can put you on a career path
with endless opportunity.
Let's talk now a little bit about the specific course in
MIST2090 Introduction to Business Information System
Our course is divided into two parts
in part A the primary topic
is everything business
people need to know about what IS professionals do.
Here we take a consulting perspective where we're talking about IT enabled change.
Part B provides a service to you to help you use one of the most important
IS related tools
for business -
spreadsheets! Specifically using Microsoft Excel.
Part B will last from January 8 to
February 26
and your professor will be either Dr. Berente or Dr Piercy depending on
which section you happen to be in.
For part B, your professor will be Dr Aronson.
Part B will pick up
when part A stops from February 28 until final exams.
Keep in mind that there will be a couple part B
sessions that you'll need to attend before February 28 and those
will be announced in the syllabus and class or on your ELC site.
there you can find the syllabus.
Dr. Berente and Dr. Piercy will cover the syllabus during the first day of
class and they'll go over such things as
the course policies
course deliverables and grades
the schedule
and a note about academic honesty
Keep in mind it's your responsibility to read through the syllabus and the course
schedule and understand these policies
what's required of you to receive
decent grades in MIST2090
what topics we will cover and when will deliverables be due based on the schedule
and what's expected in terms of academic honesty.
In this course in order for you to understand what an IS professional does
we're going to look at techniques and tools that might lead us to
understanding how we can build a mobile app.
Specifically, we're going to ask you to start thinking about
"Save The World" app.
any mobile at the can be used to support an activity providing some type of
altruistic service to the world.
Could be anything,
but some examples include sustainability
tackling poverty and hunger
and reducing violence, etc.
some questions you're going to have to be thinking about as you think about
this app
and that we'll be training you to think about them using tools of IS include:
Who would use this app?
Who would benefit and how?
How would you take money off of this app? Even if it might be for some nonprofit
organization, they have to make money in order to sustain the organization.s
Can you make a business based on your app?
these are questions we'll be exploring for the next
couple of months.
It's a glimpse of the world
of an IS consultant.
This, is a Piercy production.