MIS and DSS

The main goal of MIS is in allowing you to see (like in those sci-fi movies) the entities of the real world as they really are in all their properties, changing views, angles and focuses as you need to inspect some features closer and some from a bigger perspective. For example, when you walk through the College you actually do not see much beyond the walls, offices, and posters. Once you access the College MIS – you immediately see (supposedly) all involved entities and processes in their normal activities and deviations that have to be notices and corrected. Augmented reality (AR) allows you to combine physical vision with MIS orientation (this is where the research on MIS and AR will be appropriate!).

Decision Support Systems serve not as much as vision enhancers but as enhancers of your abilities of making decisions based on the vision. Human abilities to juggle numbers and keep various relationships among multiple parameters in mind are severely limited. Here come DSS. They allow you to use such tools as scenarios (when you change some assumptions and see what will happen to ALL parts you are interested in by providing formulas of the corresponding relationships), optimization (when the system quickly finds for you the best decision among many possible), and many others. Armed with such tools (especially now available in mobile formats) you become super beings (cyborgs, if you wish, as part human and part systems) far more advanced in your mental abilities than those who doesn't use special supporting systems. I actually run a special course fully dedicated to DSS where students learn the decision theory (on how to always make best decisions in all situations) as well as how to arm yourselves with simple (and more advanced) DSS dramatically enhancing your decision making abilities and outcomes in all your activities. Recently one student emailed me that he got a job because of this knowledge.

You can use this power throughout all your life experiences no matter what you do and where you work. Although many industrial systems of this kind are very expensive, there are some simple tools (like spreadsheets in advanced forms of use) that already upgrade your abilities significantly. Some of them we are learning in this course. This is kung fu of modern life. The more work and understanding efforts of the material of this week you apply – the more you will get out of it. This is the way to compete with AI allowing the mankind to stay relevant.

Embedding Spreadsheet Video

Zoho is a service allowing working with documents from multiple devices and locations by using the cloud. Once an asset, like a spreadsheet, is created - it can be managed by one department located on the other side of the globe while the presentation part (like your blog) can use live embedding operation which will show the latest data (I encourage you after you embed the sheet to change it and watch the sheet in your blog to reflect the change).
This way your blog is becoming not only a pace for your posts but a platform allowing integration of various sources from your distributed networked business. This is a simplest way of building a small information system with distributed inputs and asset management as well as with global distribution of the controlled outputs. Here different blogs can be offered to the customers, management, suppliers, etc.
Here you can see the procedure of creating a spreadsheet on Zoho cloud and sharing it across the Web.

Web 2.0 and Collective Intelligence

The best way of learning systems, and IS features in particular, includes the design of a small information system versus just learning buttons for the current version of Excel and Access. Normally, the development of an IS, even of a small size, is quite expensive and/or requires a lot of man/hour investments of highly skilled systems developers. Only organizations with sufficient capital were able to develop and use IS...

The evolution of software as a service (SaaS) or even Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) with various types of accompanying web services (and apps) created a possibility of new methods in IS development – assembly of systems out of existing services LEGO – style. This simplicity has led to a dramatic increase in end-user creativity and development capabilities. In this course I want you to learn the most simple but effective ways of such system development for personal and organizational use. Become a one-person army... The basic services we were using so far included free blog development and support services, Zoho spreadsheet and database services and, what is most important, services allowing sharing and collaboration. Already this set of tools, if learned a bit deeper than you've done so far, allows for some basic IS development.

The new, mostly free, and easy to use services that can be incorporated in any custom IS design/redesign led to a new phenomenon: social networks. But the most important effect goes beyond increased activity of emerging social structures. This new unleashed power is studied in Collective Intelligence (CI) dealing with creation of super intelligences out of rather simple processing performed by its parts. Examples include ant societies, various swarm intelligence examples, and... effective teams and organizations. This possibility of acquiring enhanced intelligence is the biggest asset and advantage an organization can dream about nowadays, which comes not as much from the mere infrastructure presence, but its proper architecture and processes in accordance with this new Web 2.0/CI developments.

Web 2.0 technologies released the power and creativity of regular IT users making them producers/consumers (prosumers). These Web 2.0 technologies paired with proper CI organization (where effective collaboration is the key) are the main and the most fascinating developments in modern IS.
Another important event, not to be missed, is rapid growth of cloud computing (see the textbook) that makes Web 2.0 services and accompanying networking even easier.

Steps for the DB task on Zoho

After the table and the formula column have been created, you have to complete the last part of the task - sharing your table over the Internet! Here you will have two types of sharing: one for the forum link and another is an iframe to be embedded into your blog. Note that the first one is a link, that if you click on - you get to the table. Another one is an iframe that works only if embedded into the HTML gadget in the Blogger.

Here are the sharing steps that might be even easier than the task proposed:

1. Make the view  of your table public (this is important for further sharing):

2. Copy the url that you will post into the Moodle forum and then confirm the public view

3. Select Publish, Embed in Website/Blog to copy the iframe and then paste it into the HTML gadget in Blogger

Databases

Although a database table might look like a spreadsheet, the capabilities of a database management system (software engine behind the databases) are quite different. For better understanding you might go to the Featured Samples (while on the Home page in your Zoho Reports site) to see that after the initial tables are created and filled with data, the rest of the database consists of various queries (that could be saved for future easy customer use), reports, charts, etc. All other database products, created from the data tables by using simple and effective tools, allow to SEE and ANALYZE a LOT of DATA form MULTIPLE POINTS OF VIEW, as compared to the relatively small amount in typical spreadsheets.

Well designed and developed (in terms of convenient analysis) databases - is what create added value to the initial data collection often stored in some input “flat” files. Data warehouses (or smaller data marts) are systems enhancing this analytical and decision support function of organizational (and even personal) data.

In my professional capacity, I was often asked by organizations that invested a lot of money into collection of valuable data – to help them make better use of this information (bang for the invested buck, if you want). This usually results into the development of an information system with a database at its core (this is why they call them “information systems” :)

Bang for the Time

How to get the most (knowledge, better grade, and doing less work) of the time invested into this course?
You online attendance is automatically registered. You are required to log in at least once a day to see if there is any need in your reaction or something new and important has been posted  (like help materials and messages regarding the quiz, etc.). The most important parts where you get a lot of explanations saving your thinking time and enhancing the quality of your work can be found in Q&A forums – read them all as I assume that you did it, see the posts of the leading students doing the early work to which I usually comment if there is a way of improving the post. Read the News forum (if there is anything new – since MOST important messages will be posted there). A good way of keeping track of ALL my posts and responses is to find me in the Participants and click on forum posts. Checking the bottom-right pane of the Moodle page for new posts is an easy way to follow the blog changes from the same Moodle page.

Meaning of the Gadget Task

After you add a gadget to your blog, you should realize that leading blogs are not just diaries but special carriers of various types of media, software objects, and live services that could be placed on them. Such services might include games, live images, GPS-based regional information, current events/weather, and practically and app that you can have on your phone. They can be used for secure group collaboration (adding me as a co-author showed it) and many other features.  Later we will use these blog capabilities to build on its base a small networked information system to supplement the theoretical aspects from the textbook. They also have static pages allowing to build real web sites, as well as RSS broadcasting of their content (this is how posts from my blog automatically appear in the bottom-right gadget pane of the Moodle front page).