Information Systems and Business Processes

Supporting Business Processes

Information systems are necessary for supporting business operations in a company or organization. Choosing the proper information system is paramount for an organization to be successful, and can mean the difference between failure and achievement. There are a variety of requirements for every organization that can contrast to a vast extent, depending on the size and nature of the business. Even within the same organization, different departments may have different information system needs. Everything from client/customer information to human resources documents requires information systems to handle them. Without information systems to store and process the range of tasks of a business, day-to-day operations would suffer significantly, and productivity would drop dramatically. These days, almost every department of any corporation, has system users that need information, and efficient access to that information in order to carry out their duties. Because of the many needs and requirements within different departments of a company, organizations are apt to have several information systems operating simultaneously for maximum impact.

An information system is used to store information that a company needs to run its daily processes, and saves time through the use of technology, making any organization more efficient and productive. By using a combination of resources, both human and technical, it produces data and information required to support organizational procedures and help users make intelligent decisions based on that information. Not only does an information system store and display information for its user, but also helps to generate as well as send and receive data. It can process information through complicated methods that a human alone could never accomplish as quickly or accurately.

In the case of the advertising agency that I work for, we have many clients and multiple ongoing projects for each client at any given time, so we use job numbers to keep track of each project and the time spent on different aspects of each portion. Different departments and positions within the agency are billed at different rates back to the client, so loading our time is a daily process that must be accurate. At any given time, we have associates traveling to tradeshows, meetings at client headquarters out of state, not to mention our 6 satellite offices across the country and a smaller location in another state that operates with 8 people. The software needed to keep track of so many projects and associates outside our headquarters is outsourced to a server that is both hosted and accessed via the Internet so that everyone can access and load time spent on projects or client functions from any location. With a user name and password given to each user to access this software securely from any computer, customer relationship management, and agency management in general has become more practical. Several administrators are assigned special privileges within the system to sustain the information and security of the access and permissions of users. Content management, project management and an accounting are all rolled into one system hosted on the Internet for highest productivity.

The use of an Internet-based system to keep track of time spent on any project through use of job numbers has its strengths and weaknesses. Efficiency has been the first and foremost reason that we use