Sunday, March 13, 2016

IT Knowledge Characteristics of Information System between and within Organization Class 4



The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh ICAB




IT Knowledge



Class No- 4



A.H.M. Ariful Islam ACA





Class-IV

Characteristics of Information System between and within Organization


Types of Information: (Page 48) Two different types –


Internal information:

Information that has been generated from the operations of the organization at various functional areas. The internal information gets processed and summarized from junior to top most level of management.

This is information which is only available to the business. This information will be private and accurate. Internal information may take the form the followings:

Sales & Marketing
            Order Processing
            Pricing Analysis
            Sales Trend forecasting
Manufacturing and Production
            Machine control
            Production planning
            Facilities location
HR
            Training
            Compensation
            HR Planning
Finance and Accounting
            Accounts Receivable/ Payable
            Budgeting
            Profit Planning
And other functional areas wherever applicable


External information:
The external information is collected from the external environment of the business organization. External information is considered to affect the organizational performance from outside the organization.

This is information which comes from outside the business. This is gathered via mainly secondary information methods such as newspapers and magazines, the internet etc.
Examples might include:
  • Census figures
  •  
  • Telephone directories
  •  
  • Judgments on court cases
  •  
  • Computer users’ yearbook
  •  
  • Legislation, for example
  •  
  • The Data Protection Act
  •  
  • National opinion polls
  •  
  • Trade Journals 
  •  
  •  Survey maps
  •  
  • Professional publications
  •  
  • Financial services agencies
  •  
  • Industry standard
  •  
  • The Internet





Passive and Interactive Information System: (Page 49)

Passive Information System: Passive information systems are systems that willanswer queries based on the data that is held within them, but the data is not altered.

Interactive Information System: An interactive system is one, that data can be
entered for processing which may alter the contents of the database.


Passive or Interactive

1)      Electronic Encyclopaedia
2)      A school secretary updating the attendance record of a pupil in the pupil file.
3)      A stock control system in a supermarket.
4)      A customer wants some work done or makes a payment.
5)      A large chemical plant is controlled automatically from a central control room. One process is to mix two chemicals at a specific temperature and         pressure. The process is to be computer controlled. Information about the    state of chemical processes in the plant is conveyed to the control room.
6)      Student file in a school that can be accessed by members of the teaching staff to find out where a student is at a particular time of day, or to look up   their telephone number in order to contact the parents; but it is not possible        for an ordinary teacher to alter it.
7)      Customers contact a firm to ask for a quote for a standard piece of work.




Answer: Passive

1)      Electronic Encyclopaedia where queries can be used to search for data but        the user is not allowed to alter the data.

6)      Student file in a school that can be accessed by members of the teaching staff to find out where a student is at a particular time of day, or to look up   their telephone number in order to contact the parents; but it is not possible        for an ordinary teacher to alter it.

7)      Customers contact a firm to ask for a quote for a standard piece of work.          This quote / estimate would be obtained from a database which remains          unchanged during the enquiry.


Answer: Interactive

2)      A school secretary updating the attendance record of a pupil in the pupil file.

3)      A stock control system in a supermarket is an interactive information      system because it not only gives information like the price and the        description of the goods for the till receipt (passive), but also updates the        number in stock immediately (interactive) so that when the next item is sold       the number in stock has already been altered.

4)      If a customer wants some work done or makes a payment then the           customer’s record in a database would need to be altered to reflect this.

5)      A large chemical plant is controlled automatically from a central control room. One process is to mix two chemicals at a specific temperature and         pressure. The process is to be computer controlled. Information about the    state of chemical processes in the plant is conveyed to the control room.          operators need to alter automatic process





Batch processing
Batch processing is the execution of a series of programs ("jobs") on a computer without manual intervention. Jobs are set up so they can be run to completion without human interaction. All input parameters are predefined through scripts, command-line arguments, control files, or job control language.
Batch Processing and Rapid Response Processing: (Page 51)

Batch Processing: A batch processing system is used when the output does not have to beproduced immediately. Other factors are that the application will tend to use a large amountof data that processing will tend to be of the same type for each set of data and that humanintervention is not necessary.

Rapid Response Processing: Rapid response processing referred to as real time
Processing. Real time processing can be thought of as being used in process control wherethe results of the process are used to inform the next input. The classic example is the airline booking systems. (Page 51)





Knowledge-based system
                                                  

Knowledge-based system
A knowledge-based system (KBS) is a computer program that reasons and uses a knowledge base to solve complex problems. The term is broad and is used to refer to many different kinds of systems.

A knowledge based system has two types of sub-systems: a knowledge base and an inference engine. The knowledge base represents facts about the world,
The inference engine represents logical assertions and conditions about the world, usually represented via IF-THEN rules.
Knowledge-Based systems were first developed by Artificial Intelligence researchers. These early knowledge-based systems were primarily expert systems. In fact the term is often used synonymously with expert systems. The difference is in the view taken to describe the system. Expert system refers to the type of task the system is trying to solve, to replace or aid a human expert in a complex task. Knowledge-based system refers to the architecture of the system, that it represents knowledge explicitly rather than as procedural code. While the earliest knowledge-based systems were almost all expert systems, the same tools and architectures can and have since been used for a whole host of other types of systems. I.e., virtually all expert systems are knowledge-based systems but many knowledge-based systems are not expert systems.
The first knowledge-based systems were rule based expert systems. One of the most famous was Mycin a program for medical diagnosis. These early expert systems represented facts about the world as simple assertions in a flat database and used rules to reason about and as a result add to these assertions. Representing knowledge explicitly via rules had several advantages:


Advantage of Knowledge –based system:
1.     Acquisition & Maintenance. Using rules meant that domain experts could often define and maintain the rules themselves rather than via a programmer.
2.     Explanation. Representing knowledge explicitly allowed systems to reason about how they came to a conclusion and use this information to explain results to users. For example, to follow the chain of inferences that led to a diagnosis and use these facts to explain the diagnosis.
3.     Reasoning. Decoupling the knowledge from the processing of that knowledge enabled general purpose inference engines to be developed. These systems could develop conclusions that followed from a data set that the initial developers may not have even been aware of.
4.     The knowledge-based became more structured, representing information using similar techniques to object-oriented programming such as hierarchies of classes and subclasses, relations between classes, and behavior of objects.

Disadvantage:
As knowledge-based systems became more complex the techniques used to represent the knowledge base became more sophisticated
As the knowledge base became more structured reasoning could occur both by independent rules and by interactions within the knowledge base itself. For example, procedures stored as demons on objects could fire and could replicate the chaining behavior of rules.
Another advancement was the development of special purpose automated reasoning systems called classifiers. Rather than statically declare the sub assumption relations in a knowledge-base a classifier allows the developer to simply declare facts about the world and let the classifier deduce the relations. In this way a classifier also can play the role of an inference engine.



Knowledge base (KB)
A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term was in connection with expert systems which were the first knowledge-based systems.
The term "knowledge-base" was to distinguish from the more common widely used term database. At the time (the 1970s) virtually all large Management Information Systems stored their data in some type of hierarchical or relational database. At this point in the history of Information Technology the distinction between a database and a knowledge-base was clear and unambiguous. A database had the following properties:
  • Flat data. Data was usually represented in a tabular format with strings or number in each field.
  • Multiple users. A conventional database must support more than one user or system logged into the same data at the same time.
  • Transactions. An essential requirement for a database was to maintain integrity and consistency among data that is accessed by concurrent users. These are the so-called ACID properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability.
  • Large, long-lived data. A corporate database needed to support not just thousands but hundreds of thousands or beyond rows of data. Such a database usually needs to persist past the specific uses of any individual program, it needs to store data for years and decades rather than for the life of a program.

 
Types of knowledge-based systems: (Page 53) three types –

Diagnostic: The user interface gives a series of questions, each of which has a limited number of possible answers, each one of which leads to another question. Gradually the amount of data in the knowledge base is reduced until there is only a small amount of relevant data which must provide the answer to the query.

Advice Giving: An advice giving system is one that follows some process being done and then offers advice on how to proceed if something needs to be done or goes wrong.

Decision Making: A decision making knowledge based system is a system which understands what is happening in a system and has been given enough rules to be able tomake and carry out decisions without further intervention.


Following are the different types of knowledge-based system -

a)       Expert System
b)      Neural Networks (NNs)
c)       Case-based reasoning (CBR)
d)      Genetic algorithms
e)       Intelligent Agents
f)       Data mining.


Financial Reporting System and Role of IT (page no.-55)
Pivot table
In data processing, a pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data visualization programs such as spreadsheets or business intelligence software.

Graphics
Graphics (from Greek γραφικός graphikos, 'something written' e.g. autograph) are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone to inform, illustrate, or entertain.

International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)

Structure of IFRS (page no. - 59)
   Framework (page no.-60)
   Objective of Financial Statements (page no.-61)

A financial statement should reflect true and fair view of the business affairs of the organization.

Qualitative Characteristics of Financial Statements (page no.-61)

Understandability
Reliability
Comparability
Relevance
True and Fair View


   Elements of Financial Statements