hello my name is dr vlad krotov i'm an associate professor of information systems at murray state university welcome to my video lecture on information systems as you can see from this diagram the concept of information systems is central to the field to the major and to the profession of cis computer information systems and that's why we'll spend quite a bit of time discussing what information systems are what are the most important components of information systems where this concept came from and we will also go through some examples of information systems in the workplace more specifically upon completing this lesson you should be able to discuss the impact of information and communication technologies on business and society discuss what information technology is explain the difference between data information and knowledge define systems explain system thinking or the so-called socio-technical approach to information systems you should also be able to explain what information systems are and discuss components of socio-technical systems finally you should be able to explain the difference between the fields of mis and cis and also discuss some examples of computer information systems management information systems and also enterprise systems so these are the learning outcomes for this video lesson today i.t or which is the same the same term information communication technologies pervasive and have a profound impact on individuals organization countries and the world as a whole to get a better sense of what kind of impact information communication technologies have on individuals organization countries and the entire human civilization i suggest you watch the following video did you know from 2019 i think this video has been around for about 10 years every year it gets updated either by the original author on somebody else so what this video does in you know in five minutes it lists some of the most important trends that are impacting different countries and and the entire human civilization and as you watch this video you will see that at least 50 of those trends are related to technology not everything is related to technology but a good 50 percent has to do with social media uh the development of the internet uh the developing the development of artificial intelligence and things like that so please pause this video and go to youtube to watch did you know 2019 video so after watching this video you should probably come to the following conclusion nowadays there's no escape from information technology maybe 10 20 years ago you could have made a you could have said well uh i'm not good at computers i don't like computers i want to stay away from computers i want to stay away from my tea therefore i don't know i will be a elementary school teacher but you know that nowadays even elementary school teachers they use they heavily rely on various i.t tools to deliver their lessons to you know monitor progress of their children and things like that even farming i mean for for a number of years farming was used as an example of a very low low-tech industry again an industry where you can afford not to have information technology but nowadays you know it has changed you know even farming is becoming highly digitalized highly automated feel so no matter what kind of career choice you choose for yourself most likely you will end up using information communication technologies heavily so let's start uh with the definition over the taxonomy that explains what information technology is or i t when people say i t they typically mean three things software hardware and data so one example of software is microsoft excel sheet when they say hardware it's pretty much anything you know starting from a cpu unit ram and all the way down to networking equipment such as wires or routers okay when we talk about data we're talking about those little tiny bits of information that is coming our way typically when they say data they're talking about digital data it's not just any kind of data so this is what they mean by information technology software hardware and data now of course there are many sub-categories within each of those main categories under the umbrella of it for example software can be application software meaning the software designed to accomplish a particular task for example microsoft word google chrome they can be classified as application software that helps us compose documents or browse the web then there's system software something that supports the the overall system computer system helps running it such as windows operating system ios operating system android operating system and then we also have utility software something that supports our work uh with the system you know such function as archiving or backing up your data uh when it comes to hardware nowadays there's there's all kind of you know there are all kinds of devices out there so probably these are the main categories end user device computing devices such as desktop computers laptops mobile devices such as smart smart phones i think mobile devices now i mean they've been around for i would say for the last 15 years you know as a popular platform for end user computing and nowadays they're as important as ever in fact everybody expects everything all uh it resources all data all information to be available through a cell phone you know be it a learning management system and oriented enterprise system so mobile devices is probably the most dominant end user computing platform and then you have networking equipment uh something along the lines of servers routers and firewalls you know firewall can be software it can also be like a physical box equipped with software so those are classifications for uh software and hardware elements of information technology now the difference between data information knowledge requires us to become a bit philosophical but i will use some practical examples to make it less esoteric and hopefully more useful for everyday application when we say data we mean raw facts you know just think about some kind of system that is uh streaming uh you know zeros and ones or like wards for example just imagine somebody working as a cashier as a point of sale cashier at walmart and this person keeps scanning all those items that that are purchased by customers so each item is being scanned and then this information about this item being sold let's say with the code the name of the item and price is being streamed in real real time um you know through the network so that would be data you know data about sales okay now the concept of data has been around for a while for example if you took courses in accounting you know there's something called general ledger in accounting in the old days general ledger was a physical book like this one and this is where all accounting information is entered all transactions are entered so whenever there's any kind of transaction let's say you sell a bottle of coke you know you enter that transaction there okay so this is data just you know routine transactions that happen every time when you sell something when when somebody gives you money when you give money to somebody so this is all like data okay uh this data itself on its own so if somebody streaming data just gives you like a huge general edge it's not very useful because it's raw i mean it's like a raw resource you know it's disorganized you cannot make much sense of it right you just see all those transactions but you don't understand what it all means okay now when you take those transactions and you aggregate them together and in accounting classes they teach you how to do that you have information so information is processed or summarized data or summarized raw facts that can actually be useful in decision making okay so for example if this is a general ledger for vacavia national bank then based on all those transactions we can com compose the so-called a balance sheet right so this this looks like a balance sheet with assets liability liabilities and shareholders equity okay again if you took accounting courses you know that a balance sheet is a snapshot of companies position at a particular point of time so here we see how much the company owns and also how much the company owes so we see the overall financial health of this organization through the balance sheet okay so this is information so what kind of decisions can be made based on this information well for example uh banks they use uh balance sheets and insurance companies they use balance sheet to determine somebody's credit worthiness right so if company has quite a bit of assets and those assets are less than liabilities then they will say well okay this company seems to be in a good financial health will give them money right so uh the unfortunate fact of life is that banks like to give money to people who don't need money right and if you do you really need money if you're desperate you know if you're in a bad financial situation they don't want to give you money because they will look at your balance sheet and you will see that you have a lot of debt and unfortunately and not too many assets and they don't like to lend money to people like that so this is information so you can make a decision whether somebody should be giving out a loan or not based on information you cannot really make this decision based on a general ledger because there's just too many transactions it's hard to make sense of all of them okay and now there's a third level of uh you know of distinction something called knowledge okay now information is one level above data and knowledge is one level above information so knowledge means being able to actually do something you know do something valuable with information okay now now we're getting a bit esoteric and philosophical but for a long time it has been argued that information systems they equip us with information but this is not enough i mean having information is not enough you need to be able to do something useful with that information in real life right for example warren buffett i mean that's what he has been doing most of his life he's been looking at financial statements of companies looking at their income statements balance sheets and cash flow statements to decide whether to invest his money or not now i think warren buffett he likes to shock people with some eccentric rumors or eccentric pieces of information about himself but you know for for many years he has been claiming that he doesn't own a computer that on his office desk he doesn't have anything except the calculator and then everything else is being brought to him by his secretary like in printed form so basically he sits in his desk and has a bunch of printed financial statements that he ponders over to decide and which company to invest money so what i'm trying to say is that knowledge is the ultimate goal of information systems i mean if you have like a very powerful information system but it doesn't give you that knowledge that power to make wise and advice investments then it's it's of little use okay so and apparently if somebody has knowledge then he he or she doesn't need information systems right to provide with information because he or she can do can do this manipulation where data is transferred to information and knowledge using his or her brain right so so again some people i would argue that most the most important goal of information systems is not production of information it's really production of knowledge okay or generation of knowledge and that's why for a number i would say like for for maybe even decade for at least for the last 20 years there have been a movement in the field of management and information systems called knowledge knowledge management systems so that that was that's what this movement was about going one step above information trying to generate knowledge with the help of technology but generally people would say that some people define information systems or argue that the main purpose of information systems is to transform data into information this is what information systems all about so for example let's say you're working at walmart you have data comprised of daily transactions then this data is being streamed through the network and saved on the server and then at the end of each day you provide output let's say in the form of a sales report then the store manager will look at the sales report and will say something like um okay it looks like we're selling a lot of milk or a lot of toilet paper or you know it looks like we're we need more dog food right so based on that summarized uh transactional data the store manager uh we'll receive information that will help him or her to make a decision so so here we're trying to define uh what you know we're trying to to define what information systems are like in a very superficial way without discussing any any of the individual components but let's talk about some of the elements uh of of this definition by the way this is not the ultimate definition that we'll be using in this course this is just like an example one way to explain i guess it's a practical way to explain what information systems are so once again we're trying to define what information systems are so we already explained what we mean by data and information so let's talk about systems typically a system is defined as a set of interrelated components that work together towards a particular goal systems can be technical and non-technical for example systems can be social or biological right so what you see here is an example of a biological system so here we have a respiratory system of a human so all those components you know they work to as you well know they all they work together towards one particular goal which is to keep our body our organism oxygenated right to make sure that we have enough oxygen to uh sustain our living okay and also all of those components are important they're all you know interrelated like if your nose is blocked you know then you have problems getting the air inflow inside your lungs and and if within your lungs there's a damage due to smoking then you have problems converting uh air into oxygen and things like that so all of those components are very important right there is you know one component influence influences the other to the point where sometimes we're not aware how one little thing such as allergy right leads to problems breathing you know and then to to unfortunately more serious health complications so all those systems all those components are interrelated so this is a biological system now here you have an example of a technical system i see you know here you have a very high level diagram of the cpu central processing unit architecture typically cpu is called a processor as you probably well know the most common brands of processor is intel and amd okay so for approach for a processor you have registers so this is where information is stored using binary machine code then you have combinational logic so this combinational logic allows you to manipulate with those registers so when the data comes in you know it's being manipulated it's being put into registers and manipulated using combinatorial rules or logic then you have control unit that that maintains operations of all the components of a cpu you have main memory typically it's called cache so this is where some intermediate results are being stored so the data can be from the input can be stored in the main memory then it can go into the registers this is where manipulation is done then it's temporarily stored in the main memory again and then at some point the cpu generates output and what is the result of that computation so this is an example of a technical system and all those uh components work together now in relation to this concept of a system which i think is is pretty much it's pretty clear what it is there's also something called system thinking i mean this concept has been around for decades i think it was born in engineering when organizational psychology started to look at certain engineering phenomena and system thinking is also important to the information systems field although it's important in in all in all facets of life so what is system thinking it's a you know briefly i would say that it's a holistic perspective on complex phenomena uh system thinking forces you to view complex phenomena as a combination of components and their interrelationships as opposed to oversimplifying things by concentrating on individual components okay so so this distinction requires some explanation so hopefully i will be i'll be able to give you a practical illustration what i mean by lack of system thinking you see humans they like to oversimplify things i think that's something related to our human psychology we like simple ideas and simple solutions right for example if you feel sick you know god forbid then when you go to a doctor i think most people want to hear something simple like a simple advice take that pill and all of your problems will go away right what people don't want to hear is that your body is a very complex socio-psychological system and everything that you do in your life every component that you have in your body determines your health right so you cannot i mean sometimes you cannot tackle the general complex problem of poor health using by concentrating on just one component okay it had you know and and that's what people don't like to hear from doctors because and i think doctors also understand if they give this kind of advice they're not gonna make much money right because if you keep telling somebody like whenever somebody comes to you and you say something like okay you're not feeling well uh watch your diet start exercising um you know make sure you do something that makes you happy so the the psychological part of yours of your system you know is is well maintained uh you know those things seems like too simple nobody wants to pay money for that right what we want to pay money for is like some kind of silver bullet some kind of magical pill that will solve our problems right so so yeah humans don't like this complexity they wanna you know they wanna something simple and they tend to over simplify things so one example of lack of system thinking is this whole focus on vitamins and up to up to this date you see all those infomercials on tv you know you see those uh commercials on youtube social media about like different uh you know vitamins you know different uh supplements that that will you know make you healthy and happy with just like one single shot well let's take vitamin c for example right for a number of years people would say well if you you know if you consume vitamin c if you buy or supplement you will be in good health you know it will strengthen your immune system it will make you a very healthy and happy person well for a number of years scientists have been saying well it doesn't work like that right i mean vitamin c is just one little thing is like one little component of your overall organism right so so you know what what they're saying in relation to vitamin c specifically is that lack of vitamin c will give you serious problems right however simply by taking vitamin c you're not going to improve your health you're not going to improve your immune system okay so it's like a very simple component very small component of your entire body right and you cannot just bring bring down the issue of health and and immunity immune system just to vitamin c okay but again people don't like to listen to those complicated arguments they like something simple okay buy this vitamin and you you'll do great right this this phenomena this uh uh tendency of humans to concentrate on one single factor is exploited in all kinds of advertising campaign something along the lines uh chew this gum and everybody will like you you will have a lot of friends now you know maybe chewing gum will help you with your breath a little bit but it's not going to make you popular among other people right so so you cannot just bring you know you cannot you cannot uh formulate somebody's social problems such as loneliness in terms of chewing gum right but that's what everybody is trying to do they're trying to ignore the overall system and just concentrate on one factor sometimes it works you know for example when you come to a mechanic you know you let's say your car wouldn't start so they just focus on one component let's see your battery they change it and then you know your car can start again and you can drive your car to work so sometimes it works for simple systems such as a car because i think a human organism is infinitely more complex than a car but most of the time when we when you're dealing with really complex systems with millions of interrelated components then it doesn't work that way you cannot just solve problems by looking at one component of a system in isolation from all other components so so this is what system thinking is um one earlier mentions of system thinking that i saw was an engineering textbook it was kind of funny how they discussed it they were talking about building bridges in that engineering textbook and and what they said they said that when people when people built when managers like you know managers engineers when they build bridges they concentrate on blueprints but they never pay attention to people who actually execute those blueprints and they give an example of one construction crew that unfortunately had problems with alcohol consumption so every day after work they would drink a lot and that would impact their well-being and decision making next morning right so because of that they made a lot of mistakes in the process of pouring concrete and and the you know the bridge pillars of foundation had a lot of cracks and it was it actually led to the bridge collapsing and i think unfortunately there were some victims because of that accident right so that's what they were trying to say when you build bridges don't just concentrate on the blueprint also take into account the people who are executing that blueprint okay so that that's the earliest example of system thinking that i saw and it came from the field of engineering so having defined information and system thinking uh now let's give let's let's discuss the overreaching the the most important definition of information system that we'll have in this lesson so here we define information systems as complex socio-technical systems by socio-technical we mean that those systems have technical components such as software hardware and data and also non-technical components right and those non-technical components include things related to people and organizations within which those people function so once again information systems are complex socio-technical systems comprised of hardware software data people and organizational components that work together to transform data into useful information so once again it's information it doesn't mean that you will become knowledgeable in something if you have access to an information system now some examples of socio-technical systems one example comes from my own article on the internet of things a lot of times when people discuss internet of things they discuss the technology they discuss the hardware the rfid tags wireless sensors they discuss the software that is used to power uh various iot applications they discuss cloud storage they discuss you know they focus a lot on the network networking aspects of iot but they never discuss that broader environment for example in order for you to be successful with your iot based product you also need to take care of social issues surrounding your application for example you need to persuade consumer privacy groups that you're that you're not violating anyone's privacy with the application also you need to make sure that your application is complying with existing legislature in relation to privacy in relation to data storage in relation to wireless communication also developing iot applications uh requires entrepreneurs people who are willing to invest their energies their expertise to developing new ideas and also the physical environment i mean you you cannot ignore the physical environment within which your iot applications are being implemented for example low frequency rfid tags they're very good at penetrating objects for example they can be used in retail but the problem though those low frequency rfid systems have you know for uh tracking items is that they're easily blocked by metal like for example foil so if you uh put some of you know some of those rfid attacks they can be effectively blocked with foil so for example if rfid tags are used for security purposes in a book shop what you can do you can come with a foil bag right and then just put those books in that bag and you can leave the premise and no alarm will ever sound because it will block the signal coming from those low frequency rfid attacks now don't do it don't don't don't don't get caught stealing something from a story and then telling you that i explained to you in a lecture how to do it but i'm just saying that physical environment is also important social and physical environment is very important for creating successful iot implications it's not just about this it's not about this area now some theories or theoretical perspective that outlines socio-technical thinking and also tells you like where it all came from i forgot the first name of this uh american organizational psychology but his last name is levitt that's at least that's how i pronounce it so he came up with this framework called levitt diamond so what this framework tells you is that technology is only a small component of an organization technology also inter interrelates with organizational processes organizational structure let's say iraq and also people that work in that organization so if you want to be successful in integrating technology within an organization you cannot just focus on technology alone you need to make sure that this technology is compatible with business processes you need to make sure that people know how to use this technology and you also need to make sure that technology is well suited for the giving organizational structure you know i have a practical experience implementing certain it projects as an administrator and you know what i noticed especially for the last 10 years is that whenever you have an id project in your hands technology is often the least problematic component the most the the areas where you encounter the problems the most are people and organizations in my opinion right so sometimes organizational politics stands in new ways sometimes people are playing all kinds of games sometimes they're not prepared to use your technology sometimes they're prepared but they're trying to sabotage your your implementation because they you know somehow somehow they view it as an invasion of their turf of their territory so that that's how they perceive your technology from a political standpoint and not from a technological standpoint right and i can give you so many examples of when those two when like two or more items are not aligned for example i worked on implementing uh certain applications in a college of business and a lot of people were just saying that well we don't have knowledge to use it and that that's what that was their answer we never asked them to use the system so i organized some training seminars for them i actually told them to come to a lab where uh where where i would help them together with with some i.t it employees to migrate their data into this new digital measure system and you know they they give me all kinds of fences like i'm busy like i cannot do it you know i have too many publications to enter so eventually i started you know approaching it from that organizational side so i started threatening them with action from from top management of the university if they don't comply with that right so technology was there you know we bought digital measures there were very little technical tweaks that they did for us the system was available through the cloud it was never a problem the problem was always people okay um sometimes you know something you know one one thing that i experienced in the uae all the time is that whenever we buy any kind of technology most most of the time it comes somewhere from the west like united states or europe and sometimes it's simply not compatible with current organizational processes that we have in in the middle east right so for i mean just a very very tiny thing zip codes right a lot of software a lot of websites in the united states in europe they require entering zip codes as a part of the workflow well in the middle in the united arab emirates at least when i lived there there were no zip codes so that was a big stumbling block for a lot of processes so processes in the ui were not compatible with the technology that is coming from the west also sometimes technology it violates existing organizational hierarchy i cannot come up with a personal example right now but there's a famous study that was published in management information systems quarterly which is the number one publication in the field of mis it was about implementation of gis geographic information systems in india and that was done for government department responsible for issuing uh crop permits to farmers so basically the goal behind that system was that they didn't want farmers to go bankrupt to lose their crops so they asked farmers to apply for a permit every year to grow a particular crop so they were trying to ensure that farmers make money uh you know they they don't lose their craw because it becomes a big socio-economic problem if they do so it was done manually for a number of years where you know some people go to the field you know they take a note of the soil characteristic or whatever whatever is needed and then they they write the recommendation and this recommendation go through several approval levels and at the end the head of this department signs off a permit and it's giving to a farmer so uh one day they decided to implement a geographical information system to streamline it so that you don't have all those levels of decision making you just have an agent going to the field entering all soil parameters and then the permit is automatically issued or denied right so when they did that the systems seemed to be you know like a very good idea from that operational technological standpoint but it was a huge failure from the perspective of organizational structure what happened with the system it completely eliminated from the decision-making cycle from from the from decision making authority all those levels of top management their their signature became irrelevant with this new system so they did everything they could to sabotage the system and eventually the system failed right so this is an example of technology not being compatible with organizational structure one one positive example of technology reinforcing certain processes again when i moved to abu dhabi i had to go to hospitals like to process my visa to do this and that and what i've noticed like one thing that irritates me a lot is when people cut in front of me in a line you know you go to a hospital right and you usually like to go to hospital you take like i don't know two three hours away from your work from your productive hours and somebody gets in front of you and you know in a way it's i don't know what i'm still trying to understand what it is like why it makes me feel so upset when somebody cuts in front of me in line but i felt very upset and irritated and then i noticed like there was this trend like within one or two years i think it was some kind of government main date it was a part of their medical license requirements that everybody had to buy those ticketing system right so in other words you don't when you go to a hospital you you don't just wait in line you get a ticket and then you wait until you're cold you know based on the number of your ticket now people still cut in front without any tickets sometimes but it eliminated a lot of frustration that i had when i clearly see that somebody was not in the line and they go right in to a particular office without asking anybody and they pretend that nothing is happening so so with this ticketing system i think things became much more pleasant even if somebody cuts in front of me i kind of you know i have my ticket i know when it's going to be my turn so i'm sitting working on something or drinking coffee waiting for my turn so sometimes technology reinforces processes and obviously technology has certain processes embedded as well so it's a mutual relationship back and forth so overall all those compu components are mutually dependent they all influence each other in this levitz diagram now another theory that is quite popular up to this date is is the so-called actor network theory by bruno latour i think it's uh you know it's a very important theory because it gives you an important uh a valuable perspective on how to look at technology and how to understand certain phenomena in relation to technology so again there are many books written using extra network theory uh bruno auteur himself wrote several books trying to formulate his theory but it basically comes down to it it's not a theory it's more like a framework or method for analyzing technologies and related issues so so what this theory says is that technologies can be best understood by mapping various technological and non-technological actors within a network so any technology that you use is connected to other actors and those actors can be anything or anybody they can be human actors they can be physical actors like a house so here we have a human actor which is an old uh older person here we have a non-human actor which is environment neighborhood home uh then we have other human actors so it's only when you visualize this this complex network of human and non-human actors that influence each other this is when you will start to understand better what's happening with technology again a lot of i think a lot of it entrepreneurs they have this technology focus they think that you build if you build a great product and clients will come well sometimes it's not about product it's not about the technical actors sometimes it's about non-technical actors right for example if you look at the history of microsoft corporation there are a number of uh non-human actors that influence the development of the company in a positive way for one as far as i can recall uh bill gates mother she was on the board of ibm right so that helped them to sign this contract uh with ibm uh writing this first uh operating system for ibm pc uh for basically five ibm pc compatible desktops it was called ms-dos right so that was like a human actor that gave a big push to their organization another thing that was happening at that time was that fight between ibm and apple apple was focusing on personal computers ibm uh at that time when when in the early days of apple uh they were not focusing on personal computers they were looking at corporate clients as their most lucrative source of revenues but then they realized that they were wrong that they missed a very important market so they decided to catch up with the apple and as a part of that catch-up strategy they decided to release that operating system that would make it easier for other vendors to um to build computers with that operating system to to to create uh hardware components that would also compete with apple uh architecture so there were like a number of things happening that helped microsoft to become successful not just the fact that they had a good product in fact some people argued that their product was quite bad you know compared to other operating systems but nevertheless those human actors supported the development of the company so this is just like one brief example of how to use active network theory for analyzing issues surrounding a particular technology now towards the end we'll try to talk about we'll try to to explain the difference between computer information systems and management information systems as i explained before computer information systems as a field as a profession as a major is very broad it draws on three pillars of knowledge so cs majors are typically equipped with knowledge in technology business data also cs programs have a heavy emphasis on developing soft skills related to leadership teamwork communication personal integrity so this is like a brief way of explaining what computer information systems are now to be honest with you sometimes i don't see the difference any difference between computer information systems and management information systems programs they almost have identical coursework uh but if i were to explain like what's the difference i would say that maybe computer information systems have a larger focus on technical subjects while management information systems programs they have more focus on business subjects and those business subjects are covered with the intention of either specifically specifically focusing on how to manage information systems right how to you know management of information systems you know in order to equip students with knowledge on how to manage information systems and various components of information systems or on information systems used by management managers so this is where that management keyword kind of comes into play this is the distinction but all in all sometimes i don't see much as i said i don't see much difference between cis and mis programs now here we will try to to look at some examples of computer information systems management information systems and and related concept enterprise systems so what you see here is a very high level uh sketch of the modules that comprise the so-called enterprise resource planning system or erp sap is by far the most commonly used enterprise information system especially when it comes to manufacturing oil companies energy companies and things like that so an erp system is comprised of a number of modules of subsystems like customer service management system procurement management system you know human resource management system and things like that so each of those systems can be viewed as an example of management information systems because they're used by management to manage a particular aspect of operations for example human resource management systems are used by human resource management managers to manage their human resources right so that's an example of a management system now the overall uh you know the overall system is called enterprise resource planning system you know this is an important keyword enterprise what it tells you tells you it's beyond management everybody uses this system to execute his or her processes or tasks when i was a doctoral student at the university of houston one of my research projects was actually following uh implementation of peoplesoft which was a very popular erp system at that time for universities at the university of houston and this is this system was very complex i think they spent 10 years and millions of dollars implementing it but when they were done you know every aspect of the of of the university's operations was automated through peoplesoft sometimes it was scary like you do one thing like anything that nobody will notice but then whatever you do cascades through the entire system for example you go to a library as a student you scan some books you check out some books now all those books are automatically added to your library record in the system then if those books are overdue this library system automatically starts billing your student account with fines as long as you bring the books back they will remove all those fines so everything was done through the system and everything was interconnected so that would be an enterprise system right uh when we're talking about a management system it's something that is used by uh by managers right and you know when we say uh computer information systems i would say we mean the same thing as management information system but we're just saying that we're talking about the the computing component of that management information system so when we talk about the crm system we are talking about the the data the servers the software that is being used and we're not talking about management meaning the people who are using that system so those are some examples of various types of enterprise systems mis systems and cas systems being used in the workplace today