البنية التحتية لتكنولوجيا المعلومات

Enterprise Computing Lecture Notes

• Enterprise computing involves information systems designed to help businesses achieve their goals.
• Information technology (IT) comprises the hardware and software used by businesses to achieve their goals.
• An information system is a group of interconnected components that manage information to support decision-making and control. It assists with analysis, visualization, and product creation.
• IT and organizations influence each other. Factors influencing this relationship include organizational structure, business processes, politics, culture, environment, and management decisions.
• An organization is a formal social and legal structure that manages resources from the environment to create outputs (products or services).
• Characteristics of organizations include hierarchical structure, accountability, efficiency principles, routines, and business processes.
• Routines are standard operating procedures, precise rules, and practices developed to address common situations.
• Business processes are groups of routines. A business firm is a collection of these business processes.
• Organizational structure dictates how organizational activities are divided, organized, and coordinated. Types of structures include functional, divisional, and matrix structures.
• Information systems often mirror organizational structure.
• Functional business processes include manufacturing, production (assembling products), sales, marketing (identifying customers), finance and accounting (creating financial statements), and human resources (hiring employees).
• IT improves processes by increasing efficiency (automating tasks), enabling new processes (like changing information flows), replacing sequential tasks with parallel tasks, and eliminating decision-making delays.
• Systems for different management groups include transaction processing systems (for operational managers), business intelligence systems (for support of better decision making), and management information systems (supporting middle management).
• Decision support systems aid non-routine decision making, often utilizing external information as well. An example involves assessing the impact on production scheduling if December sales double.
• Executive support systems support senior management, incorporate external data (e.g., new tax laws, competitors), and provide real-time views of firm financial performance (example would be a digital dashboard).
• Enterprise applications aim to connect the enterprise, bridge departments, and execute business processes. Key applications include enterprise systems, supply chain management systems, customer relationship management systems, and knowledge management systems.

Enterprise Systems Lecture Notes

• Enterprise systems (often called ERP systems) integrate data from key business processes into a single system.
• They improve communication speed throughout a firm.
• ERP systems enable greater flexibility in responding to customer requests and improve order fulfillment accuracy.
• They help managers gain a complete view of operations.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) Systems Lecture Notes

• SCM systems manage relationships with suppliers, distributors, and logistics companies.
• They manage information about orders, production, and inventory levels.
• The goal is to move the correct amount of product from source to consumption point as quickly as possible at low cost.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems Lecture Notes

• CRM systems help manage relationships with customers.
• They coordinate business processes related to customers, sales, marketing, and customer service.
• Goals include optimizing revenue, improving customer satisfaction, increasing customer retention, and increasing profitable customer numbers.

Knowledge Management Systems (KMS) Lecture Notes

• KMS manage processes for capturing and applying knowledge and expertise.
• They collect relevant knowledge and make it available throughout the organization to improve business processes.
• These systems link the firm to external sources of knowledge.

Intranets and Extranets Lecture Notes

• Intranets are internal networks based on Internet standards, increasing integration and expediting information flow. They are often a private area of a company's website.
• Extranets are company websites accessible only to authorized suppliers/partners to facilitate collaboration.

E-Business, E-Commerce, and E-Government Lecture Notes

• E-business uses digital technology and the Internet to drive major business processes.
• E-commerce is a subset of e-business, focusing on buying and selling goods and services online.
• E-government uses Internet technology to provide information and services to citizens, employees, and businesses.

Organizing the Information Systems Function Lecture Notes

• IT governance defines strategies and policies for using IT in an organization, including who has decision-making authority for IT resources.
• IT resources must be organized, employing central or decentralized structures.

IT Infrastructure and Emerging Technologies Lecture Notes

• IT infrastructure encompasses physical devices and software required to operate a business.
• IT infrastructure also includes services, human, and technical capabilities.
• Key components include computing platforms, physical facilities, IT management, and education.
• The progression of IT infrastructure encompasses mainframe/minicomputer, client/server, enterprise computing, cloud & mobile computing, illustrating evolution over time.
• Key hardware platform components include client machines (desktops, laptops, mobile devices) and servers (including mainframes).
• Key software components include operating systems (Windows Server, Unix, Linux) and applications software/middleware for enterprise use (SAP, Oracle).
• Database Management Systems (DBMS) enable centralized data management, separate logical and physical data views, control redundancy, and eliminate inconsistencies.
• Operations of relational DBMS use common commands like SELECT, JOIN, and PROJECT to develop data subsets for use.
• Business intelligence infrastructure uses tools to consolidate data from multiple sources (separate systems, big data) and create data warehouses/marts.
• Data mining uses various techniques to discover patterns in data (associations, sequences, classifications, clustering). OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) provides tools to perform multi-dimensional analysis of data.
• Trends encompass green computing (manufacturing, use, disposal of hardware), hardware platforms (e.g., mobile digital devices such as smartphones, tablets, and wearables), cloud computing (various kinds of services, such as IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, and security concerns), edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT).

Dealing with Platform and Infrastructure Change Lecture Notes

• Businesses require flexible and scalable IT infrastructure to adapt to growth or reduction in size.
• Scalability is the ability of IT infrastructure to expand/reduce to meet user demands (including accommodating new platforms such as mobile computing and cloud computing).
• New mobile computing/cloud computing implementations may require new policies and procedures (or amendments to current policies) for management, including contractual agreements that relate to these platforms/services.

Management and Governance Lecture Notes

• IT governance refers to who controls the IT infrastructure within an organization—centralized control through a central IT department or decentralized control where business units manage their own systems.

Making Wise Infrastructure Investments Lecture Notes

• Wise investments in IT infrastructure consider the impact on company performance. Overinvestment or underinvestment can be problematic – optimal investment balances required capabilities with costs (renting versus buying hardware/software, security needs, workflow compatibility). Outsourcing can also be an option or strategy when appropriate.

Foundations of Business Intelligence: Databases and Information Management Lecture Notes

• Firms seek operational excellence, new products and services, customer/supplier intimacy, improved decision making, competitive advantage, and firm survival with the implementation of appropriate information systems.
• Data consists of streams of raw facts, while information results when data is meaningfully organized.
• Data organization includes various structures from the lowest levels like bits and bytes to databases and files. Methods of organization help in managing data in relational databases using terms such as files, records, and fields. Data structures are hierarchical. Problems with traditional file systems that relational database systems address include redundancy and inconsistency.

Data and Information Management Lecture Notes

• Data is raw facts, and information is meaningful data organized in a useful manner. Information systems shape data into meaningful information used for analysis and decision making in business.
• Concepts are explained using terms and examples of organizational information systems using data structures and methodologies

Databases Lecture Notes

• Relational Database Management Systems (RDBMS). DBMS are programs to manage data in a database, including creation of databases, control of users who access the data, and security to protect data.
• Three basic relational data operations are SELECT (creating subsets meeting criteria), JOIN (combining data across tables), and PROJECT (creating subsets of columns in a table).
• Demonstrated examples of SQL queries and the format associated with relational queries and database management.
• Specific capabilities of DBMS software including capability for data definition, dictionary, querying, reporting, data manipulation language (SQL), and report generation.
• Access data dictionaries (for report generation, design, viewing and modifying, etc.) associated with database systems

Business Intelligence Infrastructure and Tools Lecture Notes

• Arrays of tools and systems enable consolidating, analyzing, and accessing comprehensive data sets like big data; this includes data warehouses, data marts, Hadoop Distributed File System(HDFS), MapReduce, and OLAP.
• Contemporary business intelligence (BI) infrastructures use multi-dimensional data models that employ various software tools for visualization and reporting; these systems include data marts, data warehouses, and Hadoop data lakes among others.
• Data mining techniques, such as associations, sequences, classifications, and forecasting, provide insights from data. Analytical tools like OLAP (online analytical processing) and diverse ways of mining data (text mining and web mining) are also discussed.