Week 3 Blog Questions

1. Define TPS &DSS, and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantages.

Transaction Processing System (TPS) includes all basic day to day information of a business. TPS functions at an operational level of the business.(Baltzan P, Phillips A, Lynch K, Blakey P, 2010 Business Driven Information Systems, 1st edn, McGraw-Hill Australia) DSS is the decision support system that models information from analysts to assist managers and others in a capacity of making decisions for the organisation and as a result can help them put their organisation in a more competitive position against other organisations of the profession.


2. Describe the three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems.

The 3 quantitative models used by decision support systems are:
1- What-if analysis "which checks the impact of a change in an assumption on a proposed situation" so that means management can formulate an idea see the impact it will have if the idea is implemented..(Baltzan P, Phillips A, Lynch K, Blakey P, 2010 Business Driven Information Systems, 1st edn, McGraw-Hill Australia)
2- goal-seeking analysis "finds the inputs necessary to achieve a goal such as a desired level of output". This means that management can find out for example how much a certain expense will impact the business if they want to achieve a certain amount profit. (Baltzan P, Phillips A, Lynch K, Blakey P, 2010 Business Driven Information Systems, 1st edn, McGraw-Hill Australia)
3- Sensitivity analysis "is the study of the impact that changes in one or more parts of the model have on other parts of the model".(Baltzan P, Phillips A, Lynch K, Blakey P, 2010 Business Driven Information Systems, 1st edn, McGraw-Hill Australia)

3. Describe a business process and their importance to an organisation.

"A business process is a standardised set of activities that accomplish a specific task".(Baltzan P, Phillips A, Lynch K, Blakey P, 2010 Business Driven Information Systems, 1st edn, McGraw-Hill Australia). Business processes are important to an organisation because if the organisation does not have a defined business process they will not be able to achieve a proper outcome.

4. Compare the business process improvement and business process re-engineering.

Business process improvement "attempts to understand and measure the current process and make performance improvements accordingly" and the business process re-engineering "is the analysis and redesign of workflow within and between  enterprises".(Baltzan P, Phillips A, Lynch K, Blakey P, 2010 Business Driven Information Systems, 1st edn, McGraw-Hill Australia)