Understanding Real-Time, Decision Support, and Information Systems

Understanding Key System Characteristics

Real-Time Systems

• Process data and return results quickly to influence the environment immediately.
• Interact with both users and the environment.
• Interrupt tasks to prioritize higher-priority operations.

Decision Support Systems

These are computer systems that provide information to managers for rational decision-making, but do not make decisions themselves.

Strategic Planning Systems

Knowledge-Based Systems (Expert Systems)

Associated with artificial intelligence, applying fuzzy logic. They contain extensive knowledge used to perform specific tasks.

System Representativeness

Information Systems

Must fully represent reality, integrated with all attributes: variables, data, states, transformations, and interactions.

Reference Systems

Given an information system, a reference system is a smaller or simplified system representing the information system's framework.

Reference Systems should:

• Be qualitatively fit for the study's purpose.
• Be mentally comprehensible.
• Be representable with available material resources.

What is an Information System?

An information system is a set of interrelated components that collects, processes, stores, and distributes information to support decision-making and control within an organization.

The goal of an information system is to develop and provide all the data needed for an accurate and complete representation of its reference system's reality.

Data are flows that are organized and arranged for people to understand and use. Data are also called upon all processing elements of an information system, hence the call to that database particular form of storage of foods.

The Role of Information

The primary function of information is to increase user awareness.

Different roles of information:

1. Provide decision-makers with probabilities to base choices, reducing the range of decisions and uncertainty for intelligent decisions.
2. Provide a series of standards, assessments, and decision rules for identifying and communicating warnings and feedback for control.

Characteristics of Information

Lower levels of an organization generate as much information as higher levels.