investments in hardwired telecommunications
Chapter 1
Computer Software: Integrated, Downloadable,
Social By the early 1990s, Microsoft
Corporation’s Windows software had become
the standard operating system for the vast
majority of microcomputers being used as
desktop and portable computer “clients.” By
the end of the 1990s, Microsoft’s Office suite
(i.e., word processing, spreadsheet, database,
slideshow presentation, and e-mail software
sold in a single bundle) as well as its Web
browser (Internet Explorer) had become the de
facto software in use in U.S. organizations and
multinational companies.
ENTERPRISE SYSTEM - software packages with
integrated modules that can easily share data
across dispersed work teams, business divisions,
and national boundaries in “real time.
The introduction of a Web browser in the mid-
1990s that used an Internet communications
standard (TCP/IP) to link companies and
individuals to the Internet has been described
as a “killer application” due to its widespread
global impact. Demands for high-speed Internet
access have spurred investments by
government and the private sector to install
fiber-optic (highbandwidth) lines. Today, many
households in developed countries pay a
monthly fee for cable, satellite, or a telephone
utility for integrated data, voice, and perhaps
television services in their homes.
Satellite and cellular technologies now link
remote workers to central support centers,
travelers to travel services, and delivery
personnel to transportation schedulers.
Wireless technologies have also enabled some
emerging countries to bypass expensive
1
lines to more remote areas
Beehive is IBM’s intranet equivalent to
Facebook. Within the first 15 months of its
launch, more than 50,000 IBMers had joined
and were sharing both work-related and
personal information. 
ThinkPlace is a virtual forum for employees to
suggest, comment on, rate, and route ideas.
Within its first 3 years, more than 18,000 ideas
had been suggested; of the 350 ideas actually
implemented, over half had resulted in time
savings improvements. 
SmallBlue identifies social networks within IBM
by analyzing e-mail and electronic chats
between employees who opt to participate.
Employees can see visual displays of who knows
what and who knows whom within the
knowledge communities that they are a part of.
Computers and communication networks
enable companies to compete in two primary
ways:•
Low Cost—competing with other businesses by
being a low-cost producer of a good or a
service•
Differentiation—competing with other
businesses by offering products or services that
customers prefer due to a superiority in
characteristics such as product innovativeness
or image, product quality, or customer service
Computers can lower the costs of products or
services by automating business transactions,
shortening order cycle times, and providing
data for better operational decision making.
Since the 1980s, a flood of IT innovations have
led to efficiency gains in manufacturing firms
alone— such as shortening the time to develop
new products with computeraided design tools;
optimizing a plant floor process with software
that implements a human expert’s decision
rules; and speedily changing a production line
with computerized planning systems based on
sales information.
IT has also been used by companies to
differentiatetheir products or services from
those of competitors. IT applications can
provide sales personnel with information to
help them better service a specific customer;
just-in-time replenishments of supplies for
business customers based on inventory levels
rather than manually initiated purchasing
orders; and decision support applications with
embedded industry knowledge, such as best
practices for first responders to treat a heart
attack or stroke patient.
Telecommuters – are personnel with portable
computers and mobile equipment who can
access company data anytime 24/7 and
anywhere with an internet connection and do
work.
virtual team—that is, teams with members who
are separated too far geographically to work
face-to-face—has also become increasingly
common.
free agents who contract out their services
without being a permanent employee of any
organization.
Within organizations, supporting these new
ways of competing and new ways of working
with computer systems and networks is the
responsibility of the information systems (IS)
department.
Types of resources
2
- TechnologyInfrastructure
- Human Resources
- Business/IT Relationship
TECHNOLOGY INSFRASTRUCTURE
Computer, software, and networks that enable
an organization to conduct business and share
information across organizational units as well
as business partners
HUMAN RESOURCES
IT professionals and managers who have the
needed mix of technology, business, and
interpersonal skills to plan for, design, and
manage the other IT resources
BUSINESS/IT RELATIONSHIP
Established relationships between business and
IT workers to ensure that the other IT resources
are aligned with business needs
IT LEADERSHIP ROLES
Many organizations today have created an
officer-level position for the senior IT executive
in the organization: the chief information
officer (CIO). Although in other organizations,
the senior IT leader may not be formally
designated as a CIO, all of today’s IT leaders are
all expected to work closely with other senior
managers to keep the company’s IT resources
aligned with the goals of the business. Senior IT
leaders may report directly to a president or
CEO or may report to another officer in the
company—such as a chief financial officer (CFO)
or chief operating officer (COO).
IT LEADERSHIP ROLES 
1. They are expected to work closely with other
Senior managers. 
2. They should possessed in-depth technical that you as a manager are most likely to use are
knowledge.  a microcomputer keyboard and a mouse.

3. Have an ability to work well with senior
business leaders. 
4. The should plan and monitor compliance with
governMent laws and reporting requirements 
5. To ensure that appropriate investments are
made in techonologies and procedures to
manage IT security.
CHAPTER 2
COMPUTER SYSTEM
BASIC COMPONENTS OF COMPUTERSYSTEMS
For historical completeness, we should note
that there are really two distinct types of
computers—digital and analog.
- Digital computers operate directly on
numbers, or digits, just as humans do.
- Analog computers manipulate some
analogous physical quantity, such as
voltage or shaft rotation speed, which
represents (to some degree of accuracy)
the numbers involved in the
computation. Analog computers have
been most useful in engineering and
process control environments, but
digital machines have largely replaced
them even in these situations. Thus, all
of our discussion in this book relates to
digital computers
Terminal - is a simpler device than a PC; it is
designed strictly for input/output and does not
incorporate a processor (CPU), or at least not a
general-purpose processor. The terminal is
connected to a computer via some type of
telecommunication line.
Speech Recognition Software - Voice input to
computers is another input option, although the
accuracy of speech recognition software is still
less than perfect, with the best packages
achieving recognition accuracy in the 95 to 99
percent range. With these numbers, speech
recognition software is a productivity-enhancing
tool for users with limited typing skills,
disabilities, repetitive stress injuries from
overusing a computer keyboard, or no time to
do anything except dictate (such as medical
doctors).
Some input methods read an original document
(such as a typed report or a check or deposit
slip) directly into the computer’s memory.
Check processing is handled this way in the
United States through the magnetic ink
character recognition (MICR) input method.
Checks have the account number and bank
number preprinted at the bottom using strange-
looking numbers and a special magnetizable ink.
After a check is cashed, the bank that cashed it
records the amount of the check in
magnetizable ink at the bottom of the check

INPUT/OUTPUT
Optical character recognition (OCR) - an input
To use a computer, we must have some means
method that directly scans typed, printed, or
of entering data into the computer for it to use
handprinted material. A device called an optical
in its computations. There are a wide variety of
character reader scans and recognizes the
input devices, and we will mention only the
characters and then transmits the data to the
most commonly used types. The input devices

3
computer memory or records them on some
type of digital media.
Imaging - goes even further than OCR. With
imaging, any type of paper document, including
business forms, reports, charts, graphs, and
photographs, can be read by a scanner and
translated into digital form so that the
document can be stored in the computer
system. Then this process can be reversed so
that the digitized image stored in the computer
system can be displayed on a video display unit,
printed on paper, or transmitted to another
computer.
An increasingly important way of entering data
into a computer is by scanning a bar code label
on a package, a product, a routing sheet, a
container, or a vehicle. Bar code systems
capture data much faster and more accurately
than systems in which data are keyed. Thus the
use of bar codes is very popular for high-volume
supermarket checkout, department store sales,
inventory tracking, time and attendance
records, and health care records. There is
actually a wide variety of bar code languages,
called symbologies.
The dominant form of output, however, is the
printed report. Computer printers come in a
variety of sizes, speeds, and prices. The printers
used with PCs usually employ a nonimpact
process (such as an ink-jet process), and they
typically operate in a speed range of 5 to 50
pages per minute. Printers used with larger
computers may be impact or nonimpact
printers.
Impact printers operate at speeds up to 2,000
lines per minute and print one line at a time,
usually employing an impact printing
4
mechanism in which individual hammers force
the paper and ribbon against the appropriate
print characters (which are embossed on a
rotating band or chain).
Nonimpact printers often employ an
electrophotographicprinting process (similar to
a copying machine); cut-sheet printers operate
at speeds up to 135 pages per minute, while
continuous-form printers may reach speeds up
to 1,800 pages per minute.
COMPUTER MEMORY also referred to as main
memory or primary memory. All data flows are
to and from memory. Data from input devices
always go into memory; output devices always
receive their data from memory; two-way data
flows exist between files and memory and also
between the arithmetic/logical unit and
memory; and a special type of data flows from
memory to the control unit to tell the control
unit what to do next.
ARITHMETIC/LOGICAL UNIT (ALU)like memory,
consists of incredibly small integrated circuits
on a silicon chip. In many respects, the
arithmetic/logical unit is very simple. It has
been built to carry out addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division, as well as to
perform certain logical operations such as
comparing two numbers for equality or finding
out which number is bigger
COMPUTER FILES As applications are being
processed on a computer, the data required for
the current computations must be stored in the
computer memory. The capacity of memory is
limited (although it can go over a trillion bytes
on some large machines), and there is not
enough space to keep all of the data for all of
the concurrently running programs (e.g.,
Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word, Adobe
Photoshop) in memory at the same time. In
addition, memory is volatile; if the computer’s
power goes off, everything stored in memory is
lost. To keep vast quantities of data accessible
within the computer system in a nonvolatile
medium and at more reasonable costs than
main memory, file devices—sometimes called
secondary memory or secondary storage
devices—have been added to all but the tiniest
computer systems.
Examples of Computer File Devices
•magnetic tape drives
•hard (or fixed) disk drives,
•removable disk drives,
•flash drives, and •CD or DVD (optical) drives.
two basic ways to organize computer files:
sequential access and direct access.
with sequential access files, all of the records
that make up the files are stored in sequence
according to the file’s control key.
Sequential access files are usually stored on
magnetic tape. A magnetic tape unit or
magnetic tape drive is the file device that stores
(writes) data on tape and that retrieves (reads)
data from tape back into memory.
A direct access file (DAFS), stored on a direct
access storage device (DASD), is a file from
which it is possible for the computer to obtain a
record immediately, without regard to where
the
The control unit provides the control that
enables the computer to take advantage of the
5
speed and capacity of its other components.
The thin arrows in Figure 2.1 point out that the
control unit controls each of the other five
components.
The complete listing of what is to be done for an
application is called a program,
each individual step or operation in the
program is called an instruction
THE PROCESSOR CHIPS At the heart of every
computer today is one or more processor chips,
such as the Intel Core i7 processor chip. It is
important to note that the processor chip
includes both the arithmetic/logic unit and the
control unit. The Intel Core i7 processor chip,
which is used in many of today’s top-of-the-line
microcomputers, contains hundreds of millions
of transistors and has been described by Intel as
the “fastest processor on the planet” (Intel Web
site, 2008). It is also a quad-core processor
which has four complete processors
manufactured as part of a single chip.
TYPES OF COMPUTER SYSTEM
- MICROCOMPUTERS
- MIDRANGE SYSTEMS
- MAINFRAMES
- SUPERCOMPUTERS
Microcomputers, often called micros or
personal computers or just PCs, cost from
P10,000 to P200,000. They generally have less
power than midrange systems, but the dividing
line between these categories is faint. In
general, microcomputers can be carried or
moved by one person, and they usually have
only a single keyboard and video display unit
(which is why they are called personal
computers).
Desktop PCs are the most familiar, but PCs also
come in laptop or notebook models in small
briefcaselike packages weighing under 10
pounds and in newer, smaller handheld or
palmtop models weighing in under a pound.
Smartphones are handheld PC which also
operate as cellular telephones (see the box “The
Smallest PCs: Smartphones”).
Midrange systems constitute the broadest
category of computer systems, stretching all the
way from microcomputers to the much larger
mainframes and supercomputers.
The term workstation, as used here, describes a
powerful machine that is run by a
microprocessor (just as a PC is run by a
microprocessor), which may or may not be used
by a single individual (whereas a PC is used by a
single individual).
Minicomputers - originally, these machines
were just like the larger mainframe machines,
except that they were less powerful and less
expensive. For a while the larger minicomputers
were even called superminicomputers, which is
a strange name, using both super and mini as
prefixes.
Mainframes are the heart of the computing
systems for many, perhaps most, major
corporations and government agencies.
are the true “number-crunchers,” with
MFLOPS ratings in excess of 250,000 and price
tags from $1 million to $100 million or more.
The high-end supercomputers are specifically
designed to handle numerically intensive
problems, most of which are generated by
research scientists, such as chemists, physicists,
and meteorologists.
6
World’s Fastest Supercomputer: Jaguar
Applications software includes all programs
written to accomplish particular tasks for
computer users.
Word processing might be the most ubiquitous
of the personal productivity software products.
While secretaries were usually the first
wordprocessingusers in an organization, today
managers and professional workers alike create
their own documents at a microcomputer
keyboard. The first popular word-processing
product was WordStar, which was in turn
supplanted by WordPerfect in the 1980s and
then by Microsoft Word in the 1990s.
Spreadsheets Second only to word processing
in popularity are electronic spreadsheet
products, the most widely used of which is
Microsoft Excel.
Database Management System (DBMS) After
word processing and spreadsheets, the next
most popular category of personal productivity
software is microcomputerbased database
management systems (DBMSs). The most
widely used product is Microsoft Access; other
popular products include FileMaker Pro, Alpha
Software’s Alpha Five, and Corel Paradox. dBase
was the desktop DBMS leader in the 1980s but
has now disappeared. All these products are
based on the relational data. The basic ideas
behind these products are the same as those for
large machine DBMSs, but the desktop DBMSs
are generally easier to use.
Presentation Graphics Used for creating largely
textual presentations, but with embedded clip
art, photographs, graphs, and other media, the
leader in this field is Microsoft PowerPoint,
followed by Corel Presentations and Sun’s
StarOffice Impress. Free presentation graphics
packages include IBM Lotus Symphony
Presentations, OpenOffice Impress, and Google
Docs. For more complex business graphics, the
leading products are Microsoft Visio, Adobe
Illustrator, and CorelDRAW Graphics.
Electronic mail has become the preferred way
of communicating for managers in most
businesses today. It is asynchronous (no
telephone tag) and unobtrusive, easy to use and
precise.
Groupware incorporates electronic mail, but
also much more. Groupware has the goal of
helping a group become more productive and
includes innovative ways of data sharing.
Hypertext is a creative way of linking objects
(e.g., text, pictures, sound clips, and video clips)
to each other.
Support software has been designed to support
applications software from behind the scenes
rather than to directly produce output of value
to the user. There are several types of support
software, as shown in Figure 2.8. We now want
to take a systematic look at the various types of
support software
The most important type of support software is
the operating system, which originated in the
mid-1960s and is now an integral part of every
computer system. The operating system is a
very complex program that controls the
operation of the computer hardware and
coordinates all the other software, so as to get
as much work done as possible with the
available resources. Users interact with the
operating system, and the operating system in
turn controls all hardware and software
resources of the computer system.
7
Database Management System (DBMS) is
software that is used to create, manage, and
protect organizational data.
Database - is a shared collection of logically
related data that is organized to meet the needs
of an organization.
Data Warehouse - a very large database or
collection of databases
Database Architecture - refers to the way in
which the data are structured and stored in the
database.
The five (5) basic Database Architectures
1. Hierarchical
2. Network
3. Relational
4. Object-oriented
5. Object-relational
CHAPTER 3
1. Sharing of Technology Resources
• Networking permits the sharing of
critical (and often expensive)
technology resources among the
various users (machines) on the
network.
• The users can also share software that
is electronicallystored on a file server
(another computer designated for that
particularpurpose).
LAN-Local Area Netwrok- a network
that covers a small geographical area
such as homes, officer, and groups of
building. It has a higher data transfer
(Speed) as compare to WAN.
 WAN-Wide Area Network-is a network NETWORKING
that covers larger geographical areas Is the electronic linking of
that can span the globe. geographically dispersed devices which
is critical for modern organizations
2. Sharing of Data Either a LAN or a WAN
permits users on the network to get TELECOMMUNICATIONS
data (if they are authorized to do so) It is communications at a distance.
from other points, called nodes, on the
network.
Functions of a Telecommunications Network

Transmission-movement of voice and/or data

3. Distributed Data Processing and using network and underlying media
CLient/Server System
Processing- Ensuring that error free
With distributed data processing, the communication
processing power is distributed to multiple
computers at multiple sites, which are then
tied together via telecommunications lines.
Client/server systems are a variant of
distributed systems in which the processing
power is distributed between a central
server system, such as a midrange
computer or a mainframe, and a number of
client computers, which are usually desktop
microcomputers. Distributed and
client/server systems tend to reduce
computing costs because of their reliance
on more cost-effective microcomputers and
workstations.

4. Enhanced Communications Telephone

network Electronic mail (Email)
Internet- has ectended the reach of
email systems Instant messaging Video
conferencing Virtual Reality
5. Marketing Outreach In the last 20
years, the Internet has become an
important marketing channel for a wide
variety of businesses. Marketing is
communication is a very specialized
type of communication