Information

Technology
Management
• Unit-I Introduction to Information Systems
• Overview of information systems; competitive strategies using information systems
– Porter’s competitive forces, value chain model; ethical, social and political issues
raised by information systems; recent advances such as cloud computing, big data,
block chain, artificial intelligence; machine learning; IoT
 Quotes on Data

1. "Data really powers everything that we do." – Jeff Weiner, chief

executive of LinkedIn
2. "Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the
combustion engine." - Peter Sondergaard, Senior Vice President,
Gartner Research
3. "You can have data without information, but you cannot have
information without data." - Daniel Keys Moran
4. "Data are becoming the new raw material of business." – Craig Mundie,
Senior Advisor to the CEO at Microsoft.
5. "The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight."
– Carly Fiorina, former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard
6. Everybody gets so much information all day long that they lose their
common sense – Gertrude Stein
 Definitions

• Data
– Elementary description of things, events, activities,
and transactions that are recorded, classified, and
stored, but not organized to convey any specific
meaning.
• Information
– Data that has been organized so that they have
meaning and value to the recipient.
• Knowledge
– Information that has been organized and processed
to convey understanding, experience, and expertise
as they apply to a current problem or activity.
 Definitions
• Application ( or app)/application program
– An app is a computer program designed to support a
specific task or business process
• Information Technology (IT)
– IT refers to any computer-based tool that people use
to work with information and to support the
information and information processing needs of an
organization
• Information System (IS)
– An information system (IS) collects, processes, stores,
analyzes, and disseminates information for a specific
purpose. Most IS today are computer based
 Types of Information Systems
Functional Area
• Accounting, Production/operations,
information marketing, human resources
systems (FAISs)

Enterprise
• Integrates the functional area IS with
Resource common database
Planning(ERP)

Transaction • Monitor, collect, store, process continuous,

Processing System real time data from basic business transaction
(TPS) of organization

Inter- • Connects two or more organizations

organizational IS • Ex: Organization’s Supply Chain, e-commerce
Information System in an Organization
 Data Organization Issues
• The environment in which the organizations operate
today is global, massively interconnected, intensely
competitive, 24/7/365, real- time and Information
intensive

• IS have enormous strategic value. When they are not

working (even for a short time), an organization
cannot function

• Life Cycle Costs (acquisition, operation, security, and

maintenance) of these systems are considerable.

• Converting an organization to a networked computing-

based e-business may be a complicated process.
 Data Organization Issues
• IT systems may invade the privacy of the users or
create advantages for certain individuals at the
expense of others.
• The role of end users in the IS may be ignored. End
users play an important role in IT development and
management. The end users know best what their
information needs are and to what degree they are
fulfilled.
• Justifying information system may be difficult due
to the intangible benefits and the rapid changes in
technologies that often make systems obsolete.
• As opportunities for outsourcing are becoming
cheaper, available, and viable, the concept
becomes more attractive. How much to outsource
is a major managerial issue.
 Data Organization Issues
• IT makes managers more productive, therefore we may
have fewer managerial levels and fewer staff &line
managers. The promotions may get much more
competitive.
• The employees today can work from any where at any
time and the teams may be geographically dispersed.
For these employees, electronic or remote supervision
may become the norm. With lack of personal contact
the employees may fell being isolated and “out of the
loop”
• Although computerization has resulted in increased
productivity, it has also created ever-expanding work
load for some employees thereby leading to stress,
anxiety, physical problems like back aches, muscle
tensions in the wrists and fingers
 Data Organization Issues
• The work place may be expanded from the traditional
9-to-5 job at a central location to 24 hours a day at any
location. IT may place the employees at “constant
call”

“Without big data analytics, companies are blind and deaf, wandering out onto the
web like deer on a freeway.” – Geoffrey Moore, author and consultant.
Attributes of quality Data

Accurate

Concise Consistent

Quality
Data
Relevant Complete

Accessible Timely
 Difficulties of Managing Data
Exponential increase in data
• Historical data
• New data, unstructured data
• Big data, data hoarding
Scattered data
• Numerous servers, locations, computing systems
• Different formats, human & computer languages
Data generated from multiple sources
• database, opinions, experiences, Government reports, websites
• Clickstream, blogs, RFID tags, wireless sensors
Data Degrade & data rot
• Data Degrade: Change of address, name etc.
• Data rot : problem of storage medium -> time, temperature, humidity
Other difficulties
• Data security, quality and integrity
• Different legal requirements across countries
 Data Governance
• Data Governance is an approach to managing information across an
entire organization
 The organization follows unambiguous rules for creating,
collecting, handling, and protecting its information
• Master data management
 It spans all organizational business processes and applications.
 It provides companies ability to store, maintain, exchange, and
synchronize a consistent, accurate, and timely “ single version of
the truth” for company’s master data

Master
Data Transaction
Data •Generated and captured by
•It is a set of core data
•Ex: customer, product, employee, vendor operational systems
•Applied to multiple transactions

Along with the data governance, the organizations use the database approach to
efficienty and effectively manage their data
 Database Management System (DBMS)
• DBMS is a set of programs that provide users with tools to create and
manage a database.
– Collection of interrelated data access
– Contains information about a particular enterprise
– Provides an environment convenient and efficient
to use analyze add
Managin
g
• Database Applications: Database
– Banking: all transactions
– Airlines: reservations, schedules modify delete
– Universities: registration, grades
– Sales: customers, products, purchases
– Manufacturing: production, inventory, orders, supply chain
– Human resources: employee records, salaries, tax deductions
 History of Database Systems
• 1950s and early 1960s:
– Data processing using magnetic tapes for storage
• Tapes provide only sequential access
– Punched cards for input
• Late 1960s and 1970s:
– Hard disks allow direct access to data
– Network and hierarchical data models in widespread use
– Ted Codd defines the relational data model
• Would win the ACM Turing Award for this work
• IBM Research begins System R prototype
• UC Berkeley begins Ingres prototype
– High-performance (for the era) transaction processing
 History of Database Systems (contd.)
• 1980s:
– Research relational prototypes evolve into commercial systems
• SQL becomes industry standard
– Parallel and distributed database systems
– Object-oriented database systems
• 1990s:
– Large decision support and data-mining applications
– Large multi-terabyte data warehouses
– Emergence of Web commerce
• 2000s:
– XML and XQuery standards
– Automated database administration
– Increasing use of highly parallel database systems
– Web-scale distributed data storage systems
 File system Vs DBMS
• In the early days, database Data redundancy Multiple file formats, duplication of
applications were built on and inconsistency information in different files
top of file systems
– Data stored on files Difficulty in Need to write a new program to
– New application programs for accessing data carry out each new task
new situations
– Records stored in various files multiple files and formats
Data isolation
– Access to single file or table at
a time
Drawbacks of Integrity constraints (e.g. account
Integrity balance > 0) become part of
using file systems
problems
to store data program code

Atomicity of Failure may lead to partial updates

• DBMS offer solution to updates
these problems
Concurrent Uncontrolled concurrent accesses
access by can lead to inconsistencies
multiple users

Security enforcing security constraints is

problems difficult
DBMS Structure
 Levels of abstraction
• Through process of abstraction, a programmer hides all but the relevant data about
an object in order to reduce complexity and increase efficiency.

Levels of
abstractio
n

Physical Logical View

describes how a record (e.g., describes data stored in application programs hide
customer) is stored database, and the details of data types
relationships among the data. Views can also hide
information (such as an
type customer = record employee’s salary) for
customer_id : string; security purposes.
customer_name : string;
customer_street : string;
customer_city : string;
end;
 Database Languages
• A database system provides a data-definition language (DDL) to specify the database
schema and a data manipulation language(DML) to express database queries and
updates
• In practice, both the above languages form part of a single database language, such as
SQL language

• Specification notation for defining the database schema

Example: create table account (
account_number char(10),
branch_name char(10),
balance integer)
• DDL compiler generates a set of tables stored in a data dictionary
• Data dictionary contains metadata (i.e., data about data)
– Database schema
– Data storage and definition language
• Specifies the storage structure and access methods used
– Integrity constraints
• Domain constraints
– Authorization
Sample Relational Database
 SQL
• It is a widely used non-procedural language
– Example: Find the name of the customer with customer-id 192-83-7465
select customer.customer_name
from customer
where customer.customer_id = ‘192-83-7465’
– Example: Find the balances of all accounts held by the customer with
customer-id 192-83-7465
select account.balance
from depositor, account
where depositor.customer_id = ‘192-83-7465’ and
depositor.account_number = account.account_number

• Application programs generally access databases through one of

– Language extensions to allow embedded SQL
– Application program interface (e.g., ODBC/JDBC) which allow SQL queries to
be sent to a database
 Entity - Relationship Model
• Models an enterprise as a collection of entities and relationships
– Entity: a “thing” or “object” in the enterprise that is distinguishable from
other objects
• Described by a set of attributes
– Relationship: an association among several entities
• Represented diagrammatically by an entity-relationship diagram
 Database Users
Users are differentiated by the way they expect to interact with the system

1. Application programmers – interact with system through DML calls. These are
computer professionals and develop user interfaces

2. Sophisticated users – form requests in a database query language and submit

them to a query processor to make the storage manager understand the requests.
Analysts who submit queries to explore data in the database fall in this category.

3. Specialized users – write specialized database applications that do not fit into the
traditional data processing framework. Among these applications are computer
aided-design systems, knowledge-base and expert systems etc. 

4. Naïve users – invoke one of the application programs that have been written
previously. Ex : people accessing database over the web, bank tellers, clerical staff
 Database Administrator
• Coordinates all the activities of the database system
– has a good understanding of the enterprise’s
information resources and needs.

• Database administrator's duties include:

– Schema definition
– Storage structure and access method definition
– Schema and physical organization modification
– Granting user authority to access the database
– Specifying integrity constraints
– Acting as liaison with users
– Monitoring performance and responding to
changes in requirements
 Transaction Management
• A transaction is a collection of operations that
performs a single logical function in a
database application

• Transaction-management component ensures

that the database remains in a consistent
(correct) state despite system failures (e.g.,
power failures and operating system crashes)
and transaction failures.

• Concurrency-control manager controls the

interaction among the concurrent
transactions, to ensure the consistency of the
database.
 Storage Management
• Storage manager is a program module that provides the
interface between the low-level data stored in the database
and the application programs and queries submitted to the
system.

• The storage manager is responsible for :

– Interaction with the file manager
– Efficient storing, retrieving and updating of data

• Issues:
– Storage access
– File organization
– Indexing and hashing
 Query Processor
• The query processor components include:
– DDL interpreter
• interprets DDL statements and records the
definitions in the data dictionary
– DML compiler
• Translates DML statements in a query language
into an evaluation plan consisting of low- level
instructions that the query evaluation engine
understands
• Performs query optimization to pick the lowest
cost evaluation plan from among alternatives
– Query evaluation engine
• Executes low-level instructions generated by DML
compiler
 Application Architecture (1/2)
• Two-tier architecture
– based on Client Server architecture
– direct communication takes place between client and server
– tight coupling results in faster applications
– main problem is that the server cannot respond multiple request same time, as a
result it cause a data integrity issue

• Three-tier architecture
– Client layer
• Represents Web browser, a Java or other application, Applet, WAP phone etc.
• Merely front end
• Communicates with the application server usually through a forms interface
– Business layer
• business logic like validation of data, calculations, data insertion etc.
• Support different types of clients
– Data layer
• the external resource such as a database, ERP system etc.
• responsible for storing the data and managing data
Application Architecture (2/2)
 The Two-Way Relationship Between
Organizations and Information Technology
 What Is an Organization?
• Technical definition
– Formal social structure that processes resources from
environment to produce outputs
– A formal legal entity with internal rules and
procedures, as well as a social structure
• Behavioral definition
– A collection of rights, privileges, obligations, and
responsibilities that is delicately balanced over a
period of time through conflict and conflict resolution
The Technical Microeconomic Definition of the
Organization
The Behavioral View of Organizations
 Features of Organizations
• Use of hierarchical structure
• Accountability, authority in system of impartial
decision making
• Adherence to principle of efficiency
• Routines and business processes
• Organizational politics, culture, environments,
and structures
 Routines and Business Processes

• Routines (standard operating

procedures)
– Precise rules, procedures, and
practices developed to cope with
virtually all expected situations
• Business processes
– Collections of routines
• Business firm
– Collection of business processes
Environments and Organizations Have a
Reciprocal Relationship
Porter’s Five Forces Model
Porter’s Value Chain Model
 Strategies for Competitive Advantage

1. Cost leadership strategy

2. Differentiation strategy
3. Innovation strategy
4. Organizational effectiveness strategy
5. Customer orientation strategy
Six Characteristics of Excellent Business-IT Alignment

1. Organizations view IT as an engine of innovation that

continually transforms the business, often creating new
revenue streams
2. Organizations view their internal and external customers
and their customer service function as supremely
important
3. Organizations rotate business and IT professionals across
departments and job functions
Six Characteristics of Excellent Business-IT Alignment

4. Organizations provide overarching goals that are

completely clear to each IT and business employee
5. Organizations ensure that IT employees
understand how the company makes (or loses)
money
6. Organizations create a vibrant and inclusive
company culture
 Stages of IT infrastructure evolution

• Stand-alone Mainframes
• Mainframe & Dumb Terminals
• Stand-alone Personal Computers
• Local Area Networks
• Enterprise Computing
• Cloud Computing and Mobile Computing
 Cloud computing
• It is a type of computing that delivers convenient,
on-demand, pay-as-you-go access for multiple
customers to a shared pool of configurable
computing resources (e.g., servers, networks,
storage, applications, and services) that can be
rapidly and easily accessed over the Internet.
• Cloud computing allows customers to acquire
resources at any time and then delete them the
instant they are no longer needed.
 Cloud Computing Characteristics
• Provides On-Demand Self- Service
• Encompasses the Characteristics of Grid Computing
– Grid computing shares the processing resources of many geographically dispersed computers across a
network
• Encompasses the Characteristics of Utility Computing
– The provider of computing resources charges the customer for its specific usage rather than a flat rate
– companies can efficiently meet fluctuating demands for computing power by lowering the costs of
owning the hardware infrastructure
• Utilizes Broad Network Access
– The computing resources can be accessed using web browser and any computing device
• Pools Computing Resources
– The provider’s resources are dynamically assigned and reassigned among multiple consumers
• Often Occurs on Virtualized Servers
– A server is a computer that supports networks, thus enabling users to share files, softwares and other
network devices.
– hundreds or thousands of networked servers inside massive data centers called server farms are placed
– Server farms require massive amounts of electrical power, air-conditioning, backup generators, and
security, and located close to fiber optic links
– Server virtualization – it uses software based partitions to create multiple virtual servers – called virtual
machines on a single physical server. Therefore multiple applications can run on single physical server
– Virtualization helps to increase server utilization (According to Gartner server utilization is low 5-10%)
Server farm
Server Farms in Relation to the Internet
 Types of cloud
• Public Cloud
– shared, easily accessible, multi-customer IT infrastructures that are available non-
exclusively to any entity in the general public (individuals, groups, and/or organizations).
• Private Cloud(also known as internal clouds or corporate clouds)
– can be accessed only by a single entity or by an exclusive group of related entities that
share the same purpose and requirements, such as all of the business units within a
single organization
– Ensures system and data security
– Usually implemented behind the corporate firewall
• Hybrid Cloud
– composed of public and private clouds that remain unique entities, but are nevertheless
tightly integrated.
• Vertical Cloud
– cloud infrastructure and applications built for different businesses—the construction,
finance, or insurance businesses.
Types of clouds
 Cloud Computing Services

• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
– cloud computing providers offer on demand remotely
accessible servers, networks, and storage capacity of data
centers
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)
– customers rent servers, operating systems, storage, a
database, software development technologies such as Java
and .NET, and network capacity over the Internet.
• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)
– cloud computing vendors provide software that is specific to
their customers’ requirements
 Benefits of cloud
• Making Individuals More Productive
– Anytime, anywhere access to information
• Facilitating Collaboration
• Mining Insights from Data
• Reduce Costs
• Expand the Scope of Business Operations
• Respond quickly to market change
• Customize products and services
 Concerns and Risks with Cloud Computing
• Legacy IT Systems
– Legacy systems can’t be easily transferred to cloud
– Resistance from IT professionals who may have vested interests in legacy systems
• Reliability
– In April 2011 large part of Amazon’s Web services infrastructure went down for as long as three days
• Privacy
– Providers control and lawfully or unlawfully monitor data
– Customer’s data may not remain on the same system or data center.
• Security
– Issues include access to sensitive data, data segregation (among customers), error exploitation, recovery,
accountability, malicious insiders and account control.
• The Regulatory and Legal Environment
– European union prohibits customer data from being transferred to non member countries without the consumer’s
prior consent and approval.
– Companies located outside EU overcome this restriction by providing “safe harbor” for the data.
– Federal information security management act (FISMA), Health insurance portability and accountability act (HIPAA),
Sarbanes-Oxley Act in US, the data protection directive in EU, credit card industry’s Payment Card Industry’s Data
security standard (PCI DSS)
• Criminal Use of Cloud Computing
– Huge information in cloud such as social security and credit card make it attractive targets for data thieves.
– German security specialist Thomas Roth calculated that he could use Amazon’s cloud to crack encryption keys used
to protect wifi networks in six minutes.
– Cloud vendors offer geographical diversity. Therefore transnational attacks place political and technical obstacles in
way of authorities tracing cyber attack.
 Big data
• Big Data typically refers to data that is coming in many different forms: structured, unstructured, in a
stream, and so forth.
• Major sources of such data are
– clickstreams from Web sites,
– postings on social media sites such as Facebook, and
– Machine data - IoT devices and machines are fitted with sensors. data from traffic, sensors, or weather
– Transactional data – purchasing and banking transactions
• Google employs Big Data analytical techniques to index billions of web pages to give us relevant search
results in a fraction of second.
• Two aspects of managing data on this large scale
– Storing –
• storing this data in chunks on different machines connected by a network—putting a copy or
two of this chunk in different locations on the network, both logically and physically
• originally used at Google (then called Google File System) and later developed and released as
an Apache project as the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS).
– Processing –
• Push computation to the data, instead of pushing data to a computing node
• MapReduce was originally developed at Google and a subsequent version was released by the
Apache project called Hadoop MapReduce
 Big data
• The need to process data coming in at a rapid rate added velocity to the equation
– E.g. algorithmic trading
• The need to process different kinds of data added variety to the equation
– E.g. sentiment analysis of data on social media platforms
• With unstructured data, there is a whole new set of veracity challenges. Human
bias, social noise, and data provenance issues can all have an impact upon the
quality of data.
– Data is valuable only if it is accurate, relevant, and timely.
• Big Data analytics must deliver insights that can help businesses become more
competitive and resilient – and better serve their customers
• Today Big Data is associated with almost any kind of large data that has the
characteristics of volume, velocity, variety, veracity, and value
•  AI, Machine learning and modern database technologies allow for Big Data
visualisation and analysis to deliver actionable insights – in real time
 Types of data
• Structured
– financial data, machine logs, and demographic details.
– simplest to organise and search
– databases have used a programming language called Structured Query
Language (SQL) in order to manage structured data.
• Unstructured
– social media posts, audio files, images, and open-ended customer comments
– cannot be easily captured in standard row-column relational databases
– unstructured data is usually stored in data lakes, data warehouses, and NoSQL
databases.
• Semi-structured
– hybrid of structured and unstructured data
– Emails, Devices that use geo-tagging, time stamps, or semantic tags
 Benefits of big data
• https://www.sap.com/india/insights/what-is-
big-data.html
 Internet of things
• Internet of Things (IoT) is the network of physical objects that contain
embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their
internal states or the external environment (Gartner)
• The Internet of Things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects
—“things”—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other
technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other
devices and systems over the internet. These devices range from ordinary
household objects to sophisticated industrial tools. 
• In a nutshell, the Internet of Things is the concept of connecting any device
(so long as it has an on/off switch) to the Internet and to other connected
devices.
• E.g. self driving cars, fitness devices, and smart microwaves
 Artificial intelligence
• Artificial intelligence (AI) may be defined as the branch of computer
science that is concerned with the automation of intelligent
behavior
– Principles include
• data structures used in knowledge representation,
• the algorithms needed to apply that knowledge, and
• the languages and programming techniques used in their
implementation.
• intelligence itself is not very well defined or understood
• The Turing test (imitation game) measures the performance of an
allegedly intelligent machine against that of a human being,
arguably the best and only standard for intelligent behavior.
– The Turing test measures the performance of an allegedly
intelligent machine against that of a human being, arguably
the best and only standard for intelligent behavior.
– A program that has potentially achieved intelligence in some
area of expertise may be evaluated by comparing its
performance on a given set of problems to that of a human
expert.
• Turing’s test as an important component in the verification and validation of
modern AI software. However,
– Turing test needlessly constrains machine intelligence to fit a human mold
• Two objections cited by Turing
– computers can only do as they are told and consequently cannot perform original (hence,
intelligent) actions
– impossibility of creating a set of rules that will tell an individual exactly what to do under
every possible set of circumstances
• Expert systems especially in the area of diagnostic reasoning, have reached
conclusions unanticipated by their designers (original actions)
• Many modern AI programs consist of a collection of modular components, or
rules of behavior, that do not execute in a rigid order but rather are invoked as
needed in response to the structure of a particular problem instance. (flexibility)
• the idea that intelligence emerges from the interactions of individual elements of
a society is one of the insights supporting the approach to AI technology
 Biological and Social Models of Intelligence:
Agents Theories
• intelligence as rooted in culture and society and, as a consequence, emergent.
• intelligence is reflected by the collective behaviors of large numbers of very simple
interacting, semiautonomous individuals, or agents
• Most intelligent solutions require a variety of agents. These include rote agents, that
simply capture and communicate pieces of information, coordination agents that can
support the interactions between other agents, search agents that can examine
multiple pieces of information and return some chosen bit of it, learning agents that
can examine collections of information and form concepts or generalizations, and
decision agents that can both dispatch tasks and come to conclusions in the light of
limited information and processing
• The two most fundamental concerns of AI researchers are knowledge representation
and search.
– capturing in a language, i.e., one suitable for computer manipulation, the full range of
knowledge required for intelligent behavior.
– Search is a problem-solving technique that systematically explores a space of problem states,
i.e., successive and alternative stages in the problem-solving proces
Thank You