IS blueprint
Application systems serve particular business functions and are a part of information systems (see fig 1). Office applications, like spreadsheets, word processing software etc. support all business functions – but each function (or department, like marketing) has got its own application systems. They are usually designed for special business processes (e.g. creating corporate blog articles) and data (e.g. information on reference clients). Information systems contain application systems and serve all or part of an enterprise. They include organisational aspects (e.g. creating a project team to establish a corporate blog) and management aspects (such as training the team members in the use of blogging software).
Fig. 1
Fig. 2 shows the blueprint architecture of any information system. Its elements are input – something fed into the system – processing – something done with the input, output – something resulting from processing the input, and feedback – a sub-process that feeds some or all of the output back as input for more (or different) processing.
To stick to our corporate blog example:
Fig. 2 - blueprint for any information system (Source: Laudon & Laudon, 2009)
Date: April 30, 2009