Management Information System
Management Information System
Management Information System
MBA IV
June 2010
Q.1(a) Explain the purpose of MIS (Management Information
System) with atleast one example?
A.1
A management information system is a system that has important tools to
support, analyze, deliver and add reliability to any organization. It ensures
that appropriate data is collected from various sources, processed and sent
to needy destinations. Also this helps to solve businesses problems. The
term MIS is often used to submit to a group of information management
methods tied to the support of human decision making, e.g. Decision Support
Systems, Expert systems, and Executive information systems.
Databases
A database consists of an organized collection of data for one or more uses,
typically in digital form. One way of classifying databases involves the type
of their contents, for example: bibliographic, document-text, statistical.
Digital databases are managed using database management systems, which
store database contents, allowing data creation and maintenance, and
search and other access.
Components of DBMS
Most DBMS as of 2009 implement a relational model.[2] Other DBMS systems, such as Object
DBMS, offer specific features for more specialized requirements. Their components are similar,
but not identical.
Object DBMS (ODBMS) has transaction and storage components that are analogous to those in
an RDBMS. Some ODBMS handle DDL, DCL and update tasks differently. Instead of using
sublanguages, they provide APIs for these purposes. They typically include a sublanguage and
accompanying engine for processing queries with interpretive statements analogous to but not
the same as SQL. Example object query languages are OQL, LINQ, JDOQL, JPAQL and others.
The query engine returns collections of objects instead of relational rows.
Types of Database
Operational database
These databases store detailed data about the operations of an organization. They are typically
organized by subject matter, process relatively high volumes of updates using transactions.
Essentially every major organization on earth uses such databases. Examples include customer
databases that record contact, credit, and demographic information about a business' customers,
personnel databases that hold information such as salary, benefits, skills data about employees,
manufacturing databases that record details about product components, parts inventory, and
financial databases that keep track of the organization's money, accounting and financial
dealings.
Data warehouses archive modern data from operational databases and often from external
sources such as market research firms. Often operational data undergoes transformation on its
way into the warehouse, getting summarized, anonymized, reclassified, etc. The warehouse
becomes the central source of data for use by managers and other end-users who may not have
access to operational data. For example, sales data might be aggregated to weekly totals and
converted from internal product codes to use UPC codes so that it can be compared with
ACNielsen data.Some basic and essential components of data warehousing include retrieving
and analyzing data, transforming,loading and managing data so as to make it available for further
use.
Analysts may do their work directly against, a data warehouse, or create a separate analytic
database for Online Analytical Processing. For example, a company might extract sales records
for analyzing the effectiveness of advertising and other sales promotions at an aggregate level.
[edit] Distributed database
These are databases of local work-groups and departments at regional offices, branch offices,
manufacturing plants and other work sites. These databases can include segments of both
common operational and common user databases, as well as data generated and used only at a
user’s own site.
These databases consist of data developed by individual end-users. Examples of these are
collections of documents in spreadsheets, word processing and downloaded files, or even
managing their personal baseball card collection.
These databases contain data collected for use across multiple organizations, either freely or via
subscription. The Internet Movie Database is one example.
The Worldwide web can be thought of as a database, albeit one spread across millions of
independent computing systems. Web browsers "process" this data one page at a time, while web
crawlers and other software provide the equivalent of database indexes to support search and
other activities.