Chapter 9 : Enabling the Organization Decision Making

Making Business Decisions :

• The decision making process.
• Decision making essentials.
• Operational.
• Managerial.
• Strategic.

Support : Enhancing Decision Making with MIS :

Operational Support Systems

• Transactional information encompasses all the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performance of daily operational or structured decisions.

• Online transaction processing (OLTP) is the capture of transaction and event information using technology to :

1. process the information according to defined business rules.
2. store the information.
3. update existing information to reflect the new information.

• Transaction processing system (TPS) is the basic business system that serves the operational level (analysts) and assists in making structured decisions.

Managerial Support Systems

• Analytical information encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performance of managerial analysis or semistructured decisions.

• Online analytical processing (OLAP) is the manipulation of creation to create business intelligence in support of strategic decision making.

• The following are common decision support systems (DSS) analysis techniques :

1.  What - If Analysis.
2. Sensitivity Analysis.
3. Goal - Seeking Analysis.
4. Optimization Analysis.

Strategic Support Systems 

• Executive information system (EIS) is a specialized DSS that supports senior-level executives and unstructured, long - term, nonroutine decisions requiring judgement, evaluation, and insight.

• Granularity refers to the level of detail in the model or the decision-making process.

• Visualization produces graphical dispalys of patterns and complex relationships in large amounts of data.

• Digital dashboard a common tool that supports visualization.

• Digital dashboards offer the following capabilities :

1. consolidation.
2. drill-down.
3. slice-and-dice.

The Future : Artificial Intelligence

=> Artificial intelligence (AI) simulates human thinking and behavior, such as the ability to reason and learn.

=> Intelligent systems are various commercial applications of artificial intelligence.

=> There are many categories of AI systems such as :

       1. expert systems.

          are computerized advisory programs that imitate the reasoning processes of expert in solving difficult problems.

       2. neural networks.

          also called an artificial neural network, is a category of AI that attempts to emulate the way the human brain works.

       3. genetic algorithms.

          is an artificial intelligence system that mimics the evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem.  

       4. intelligent agents.

          is a special-purpose knowledge-based information system that accomplishes specific tasks on behalf of its users. 

       5. virtual reality.

          is a computer-simulated environment that can be a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world.