Information systems concepts and applications

Information Systems

What is an Information System?

An information system is a computer program that contains a collection of data that is organized in a data storage component known as the database. An information system is expected to present and provide access to information that can be retrieved by a user or a number of users connected to a network where the information system resides. Typically, an information system presents data in a structured and organized manner. This makes the information system a useful source of information where users can conveniently derive knowledge from an efficient and sensible structure and flow of data. These days, the term information system correlates with a computer, software, hardware, or any peripherals and devices that are capable of providing information to users. An online source defines information system as follows.

Any equipment or interconnected system or subsystems of equipment that is used in the automatic acquisition, storage, manipulation, management, movement, control, display, switching, interchange, transmission, or reception of data and that includes computer software, firmware, and hardware. Included are computers, word processing systems, networks, or other electronic information handling systems and associated equipment."

An information system can also be capable of receiving data input from a user. After which, the system will process the data and provide output of the necessary information required by the user. For instance, a computer system located in shopping malls where a person can ask for a location of a particular store by inputting to the system the name of the store he wants to find is one example of an information system.

What does a database management do?

A database management is the administration of data into an organized and interrelated structure of data. The organization of data in a database allows quick access to information. Database management typically arranges related information in a virtual storage device such as tables, views, and queries. With database management, information can be presented as a collection of properly structured and related data. For instance, in a school system, the names of the employees can be stored in an Employee Table while the names of the students can be stored in a Student Table. Hence, the collection of employee names can be retrieved once from the Employee Table without having the need to look from one table to another just to gather all the employee names. Such Employee and Student Tables can be further managed by regrouping them into particular collection type. Some examples of database management tools are SQL, Oracle, and SAP among many others.

A database management is important to information systems. Without database management, an information system may not provide accurate and efficient data to users. It is from the right database management where an information system depend its accurate performance because it is from the database where an information system derives data.

Database management is typically administered by a systems administrator or a systems analyst. They are the persons responsible for the design and decision-making of the structure of a database.

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