It205_Week_1_Chechpoint

What are the three dimensions to business problems' The three categories that presents problems that business face are organization, technology, and people. There are several organizational problems like outdated business processes, unsupported culture and attitudes, political conflict, turbulent business environment, change, complexity of task, and inadequate resources. An example of one of these would be the current business climate in the U.S. Business that could not change with the turbulent business environment have gone out of business. Technology it self produces issues for business like insufficient or aging hardware, outdated software, inadequate database capacity, insufficient telecommunications capacity, incompatibility of old systems with new technology, and rapid technological change. I face several of these challenges in my current job at this time. Aging hardware and incompatibility with new technology are my two biggest issues right now. The problem is I can't slowly replace the hardware over time so it's a very large expense to upgrade everything at once. The last problem but possibly the most important is people. The issues with people are the lack of training, difficulties in evaluating performance, legal and regulatory compliance, work environment, lack of employee support and participation, indecisive management, and poor management. I could write an entire book on this issue in business alone. The one I see at work is the poor management. Poor management not only affects the business buy not properly directing employees, but also mishandling employee issues. A poor manager can affect the employee outlook on the company, as well as causing employee support and participation to decline. What is the difference between IT and information systems' Information Technologies (IT) consists of the hardware and software in order to achieve its business objectives. This includes hardware items like the PC's, servers, hand held PDA's, blackberry phones, floor scanners or any pieces of equipment that may be used by the company. Software like Windows operating systems for the PC's and servers, Microsoft Office, or any of the many programs the company might use. Information systems can be defined technically as a set of interrelated components that collect, process, store, and distribute information to support decision making and control in an organization. The three basic processes for information systems are input, processing, and output. Input collects the data from within the organization or from it's external environment. An example would be a scanner at a supermarket. Every item is being input into the system and that system records the price, description of item, and how many of each item has been sold. Processing converts this raw data into a meaningful form. The output from the processing provides information to the people who will use it or to the activities for which it will be used. An example of the output would be the coalition of the input of data on a single item from the supermarket for a day. They data (output) could show how many were sold at what price, if a sale effected the amount sold, how many are on the shelf or left in stock or any number of things that the company may want to keep track of.