Weekly Questions-Week 3

1.Define TPS & DSS, and explain how an organisation can use these systems to make decisions and gain competitive advantages
Transaction Processing Systems: the basic business system that serves the operational level(analysts) in an organisation.
Decision Support System: models information to support managers and business professionals during the decision-making process.


2.Describe the three quantitative models typically used by decision support systems.
Sensitivity analysis- study of what happens to the result if you change one or more parts of the system
What-If analysis-study of the impact of a change in an assumption on the proposed solution
Goal-seeking analysis- finds the inputs necessary to achieve a desired level of output.


3.Describe a business processes and their importance to an organisation.
A business process is a set of steps done to achieve a goal. They are important to an organisation as they turn a set of inputs into a set of outputs and without them organisations cannot achieve goals.


4.Compare business process improvement and business process re-engineering.
Business process improvement is all about looking at current processes and making small performance improving changes where necessary whereas business process re-engineering is a complete overhaul of business processes, basing itself on the assumption that current business processes don’t work and as such redesigns the business processes.





5.Describe the importance of business process modelling (or mapping) and business process models
Business process modelling is the activity of creating a detailed flowchart or process map of a work process, showing its inputs, tasks and activities in a structured sequence. A business process model is a graphic description of a process showing the sequence of process tasks, which is developed for a specific purpose and from a selected viewpoint. The purposes of a process model is to expose process detail gradually and in a controlled manner, encourage conciseness and accuracy in describing the process model, focus attention on the process model interfaces and provide a powerful process analysis and consistent design vocabulary. They are an important feature as they provide visibility over the business process.

All information sourced from:
- Baltzan, P., Phillips, A., Lynch, K., & Blakey, P. (2010). Business Driven Information Systems. Sydney: McGraw-Hill Australia Pty Ltd.
- Lecture Slides