Organizations refer to their management information systems functional area by several names, including the MIS Department, the Information Systems (IS) Department, the Information Technology Department, and the Information Services Department.

Regardless of the name, however, this functional area deals with the planning for-and the development, management, and use of information technology tools to help people perform all the tasks related to information processing and management.

Recall that information technology relates to any computer-based tool that people use to work with information and to support the information and information processing needs of an organization.

An information system collects, processes, stores, analyzes, and disseminates information for a specific purpose. The purpose of information systems has been defined as getting the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right amount, and in the right format.

Because information systems are intended to supply useful information, we need to differentiate between information and two closely related terms: data and knowledge

Data items refer to an elementary description of things, events, activities, and transactions that are recorded, classified, and stored but are not organized to convey any specific meaning. Data items can be numbers, letters, figures, sounds, and images. Examples of data items are collections of numbers (e.g., 3.11, 2.96, 3.95, 1.99, 2.08) and characters (e.g., B, A, C, A, B, D, F, C).

Information refers to data that have been organized so that they have meaning and value to the recipient. For example, a grade point average (GPA) by itself is data, but a student’s name coupled with his or her GPA is information. The recipient interprets the meaning and draws conclusions and implications from the information.

A computer-based information system (CBIS) is an information system that uses computer technology to perform some or all of its intended tasks. Although not all information systems are computerized, today most are.

For this reason, the term “information system” is typically used synonymously with “computer-based information system.” The basic components of computer-based information systems are listed below.

The first four are called information technology components. The figure illustrates how these four components interact to form a CBIS.

• The hardware consists of devices such as the processor, monitor, keyboard, and printer. Together, these devices accept, process, and display data and information.
• Software is a program or collection of programs that enable the hardware to process data.
• A database is a collection of related files or tables containing data.
• A network is a connecting system (wireline or wireless) that permits different computers to share resources.
• Procedures are the instructions for combining the above components to process information and generate the desired output.
• People are those individuals who use the hardware and software, interface with it, or utilize its output.