MIS Subsystems-Management information systems

MIS Subsystems   

In order to implement this definition, we can think of the MIS effort in an organization as composed of the following four subsystems

Transaction processing systems 

A firm's transaction processing systems  (TPS) comprise the routine, day-to-day accounting operations that have been an important part of most firms' computer processing since the early 1950s. These "paperwork processing" operations many of which provide linkages among the customer, organization, warehouse, and factory in accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory control, and many other operations. Activities comprising the transaction processing function, and the relationship of these activities to each other.

 Management reporting systems

 A management reporting system (MRS) may generates the preplanned printed reports that began to evolve in the 1960s terns for decision-making purposes. As mentioned earlier, reports produced    These through an MRS are commonly by-products of the extensive and detailed rest databases assembled by transaction processing systems. Typically, the facts contained in these reports consist of routine summary and exception information about organizational operations. Another term that has been used the i quite commonly for this type of system is information reporting system (IRS) .Sewn
this term is often attributed to Robert Zmud. During the 1960s, an organization.

 Decision support system

(DSS) provides a set of easy-to-use modeling, retrieving, and reporting capabilities so that people can generate the information they feel will be useful |o them when making decisions. For instance, a DSS might allow a manager to sit at an interactive terminal and browse through data, analyze them, and create specially tailored reports. 
Rather than consisting of a semi-frozen set of data or information outputs, as the TPS and MRS do, the DSS provides tools for enhancing user decision making. Further development of the D$S, coupled with the trend toward networking personal computers, have resulted in group decision support systems (GDSS) that support the activities and decision making of entire work teams.

Office information systems

 Office information systems (OIS) include the use of such computer-based, office-oriented technologies as word processing, desktop publishing, electronic mail, video teleconferencing,
and so on. Of all the components that fall under the MIS umbrella, the OIS area is the least uniform, overlapping to a great extent with TPS, MRS, and especially DSS.
 Both expert systems (ES) and artificial intelligence (Al) are knowledge-based systems that mimic human decision-making processes. An ES is typically a rule-based system that solves problems in a manner similar to a human experts methods. AI includes robotics and applications such as vision inspection systems for spotting defects as products roll off manufacturing assembly lines. These technologies are expected to blossom as business applications during the rest of this century. ES and AI applications will be covered more fully in Chapter 11, along with other knowledge-based systems such as neural networks.
As you read through MIS literature, you will uncover other definitions for the systems just mentioned and a much broader range of implementations. Some individuals who recall the inflexible management reporting systems of the 1960s think only of management information systems in terms of fixed-format reports and fail to include DSS, OA, ES, and AI under the MIS umbrella. However, in this text, the terms "information systems" and "management information systems" usually are interchangeable. While subtle differences between them do exist, virtually all information systems used in organizational environments are somehow connected with some form of management activity.
Strictly speaking, an MIS need not be computerized. However, especially in large organizations, they almost always are. Even in small firms, the low cost of to rempatre-bned information aystemi an increasingly widespread reality. This growing pervasiveness of computer- based information systems has been spurred by continual declines in information processing costs. Joanne Yates and Robert Benjamin estimate that the cost of informatiqn technology decreases by about 30 percent a year.
 Also, according to Michael Porter and Victor Millar, the cost of computer information processing relative to manual information processing has become at least 8,000 times less expensive over the last 30 years.