Week 4. Various Systems

So far you’ve learned various aspects and components of information systems (IS) as well as tried various tools that together can form a small IS or be a part of a large one. For example, blogs, as you realized by now, can be used as mash-ups or tools of combining the live results from many other products and sources in a way that if the source changes – the embedded result in the blog also changes (they maintain the live link). You also learned ways of determining the boundary of your IS by controlling permissions and collaborations in your blog as well as how controlling sharing parameters in various tools. This knowledge will empower you in your personal life and at work allowing to support your knowledge with your own small IS serving you diligently and increasing your powers and abilities. This week we are looking not at the parts of systems and IS but at their types. Although there could be limitless types of IS depending on their design and application, some important classes are important to know and recognize since they have many features and methods of use in common. Thus information systems (a vague term since all of them could be called “information systems,” but in this case we use the name as the book determines it) increase your ability of seeing things in a more advanced way since the real world is not what you directly see with your eyes but the numbers, features, and parameters hidden from such direct view. Here come IS allowing you to see (like in those sci-fi movies) the entities of the real world as they really are in all their properties, changing views and angles and focuses as you need to inspect some features closer and some from a bigger perspective. Decision Support Systems serve not as much as vision enhancers but as enhancers of your abilities of making decisions. Human abilities to juggle numbers and keep various relationships among multiple parameters in mind are severely limited. Here come DSS. They allow you to use such tools as scenarios (when you change some assumptions and see what will happen to ALL parts you are interested in by providing formulas of the corresponding relationships), optimization (when the system quickly finds for you the best decision among many possible), and many others. Armed with such tools you become super beings (cyborgs, if you wish, as part human and part systems) far more advanced in your mental abilities than those who doesn’t use special supporting systems. And you can use this power throughout all your life experiences no matter what you do and where you work. Although many industrial systems of this kind are very expensive, there are some simple tools that already upgrade your abilities significantly and some of them we are learning in this course. This is kung fu of modern life. The more you put in work and understanding of the material of this week – the more you will get out of it.