About the Book
Table of Contents:
Part 1 Information technology: nature and purpose, technology life-cycle; information technology - information technology management, overcoming resistance to technological change, office automation and its effect on business, effect on business administration, the home-based electronic executive office, summary of benefits attainable from office automation, justification and management agreement. Part 2 Systems theory: outline of systems theory - spectrum of scientific principles, the nature and hierarchy of systems, systems relationships, classification of systems; the nature of organizations, control systems, cybernetic control, feedback concepts, open-loop system, delay factor. Part 3 Information and information systems: information and information engineering - nature of information, information and organisation, information and the level of management, information for planning and control, viability of producing more information, corporate information adviser, information flows in business systems, principles of information engineering, stages of information engineering, human aspects of information engineering; information systems - characteristics of information systems and the business environment, information centres, report generators, on-line information services; information transmission systems - electronic mail; meeting the information systems needs of the organization - organization appraisal, appraisal of computer systems, methods of selection, dealing with manufacturers and suppliers, tenders and contracts; costing of different systems options - establish processing techniques, capital and revenue expenditure, intangible and tangible benefits; development of information systems - structured systems development methodology, demonstration of structured systems development methodology to a holiday booking system, terms of reference, input to the system, files, output from the system, other system factors. Part 4 Decision making, decision support systems and financial modelling: decision making and decision support systems - principles of decision making, decisions by computers, decision support systems, priority decision system, executive information systems (ETS); financial modelling, spreadsheets - spreadsheet concepts, using the spreadsheet; financial modelling, multi-dimensional spreadsheets - multi-dimensional concepts; feature of expert systems, rules, help, why and how facilities, dealing with uncertainty and fuzzy logic, modus operandi, development tools. Part 5 Image processing, desktop publishing, word processing and record processing: image processing, desktop publishing; features of word processing, range of facilities, operational features of super writer; Ashton-Tate dBASE IV database applications generator, dBASE IV characteristics, control centre, other functions and facilities.
