1.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

In the document as follows, we will be studying about why Information Systems are required in a company in general. Also, we will be studying and analyzing these Information Systems used in IBM (International Business Machines), an American multinational technology and consulting firm. The major objectives of this report are as follows: To learn about the various Information Systems To know why these Systems are required in a company To know about the working of a present day company To know how these Systems work in that company To know the applications of various Systems and their performance To understand how these Systems help the company and make its tasks easier and more efficient

2. TYPES OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Following are the major types of Information Systems used at various levels in a company: 1. Management Information System These systems assist lower management in problem solving and making decisions. They use the results of transaction processing and some other information also. It is a set of information processing functions. It should handle queries as quickly as they arrive. An important element of MIS is database. A database is a non-redundant collection of interrelated data items that can be processed through application programs and available to many users.

2. Office Automation System Office automation systems are configurations of networked computer hardware and software. A variety of office automation systems are now applied to business and communication functions that used to be performed manually or in multiple locations of a company, such as preparing written communications and strategic planning. In addition, functions that once required coordinating the expertise of outside specialists in typesetting, printing, or electronic recording can now be integrated into the everyday work of an organization, saving both time and money.

3. Transaction Processing System

2

It processes business transaction of the organization. Transaction can be any activity of the organization. Transactions differ from organization to organization. There are some transactions, which are common to almost all organizations. This provides high speed and accurate processing of record keeping of basic operational processes. These include calculation, storage and retrieval.

Transaction processing systems provide speed and accuracy, and can be programmed to follow routines functions of the organization.

4. Decision Support System These systems assist higher management to make long term decisions. These type of systems handle unstructured or semi structured decisions. A decision is considered unstructured if there are no clear procedures for making the decision and if not all the factors to be considered in the decision can be readily identified in advance. These are not of recurring nature. Some recur infrequently or occur only once. A decision support system must very flexible. The user should be able to produce customized reports by giving particular data and format specific to particular situations.

5. Executive Support System It supplies the necessary tools to senior management. The decisions at this level of the company are usually never structured and could be described as educated guesses. Executives rely as much, if not more
3

so, on external data than they do on data internal to their organization. Decisions must be made in the context of the world outside the organization. The problems and situations senior executives face are very fluid, always changing, so the system must be flexible and easy to manipulate.

3. COMPANY PROFILE IBM

International Business Machines (IBM) is an American multinational technology and consulting firm headquartered in Armonk, New York. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. Its distinctive culture and product branding has given it the nickname Big Blue. IBM is a global technology and innovation company that stands for progress. With operations in over 170 countries, IBMers around the world invent and integrate hardware, software and services to help forwardthinking enterprises, institutions and people everywhere succeed in building a smarter planet. IBM has been present in India since 1992. The diversity and breadth of the entire IBM portfolio of research, consulting, solutions, services, systems and software, uniquely distinguishes IBM India from other companies in the industry. IBM India's solutions and services span all major industries including financial services, healthcare, government, automotive,

telecommunications and education, among others.

 As a trusted partner with wide-ranging service capabilities, IBM helps clients transform and succeed in challenging circumstances. IBM has been expanding its footprint in India - and has a presence in over 200 cities and towns across the country - either directly or through its strong business partner network. IBM India has clearly established itself as one of the leaders in the Indian Information Technology (IT) Industry - and continues to transform itself to align with global markets and geographies to grow this leadership position. Widely recognized as an employer of choice, IBM holds numerous awards for its industry-leading employment practices and policies.

4. THE IBM SCENARIO

When it comes to information systems management, many IT organizations just spin their wheels. Studies show over 70 percent of IT operations spending goes to maintaining and managing existing systems, instead of developing new and innovative applications. No wonder that in a 2006 study, 77 percent of companies said their top operational priority was improving IT efficiency. The following are set as a vision and mission for the company: Automate error-prone IT tasks such as backup and recovery, provisioning, deployment, and resource configuration for consistent, cost-effective management Deploy critical software updates and patches quicker and easier, reducing end-user downtime and information systems management support costs Meet customers expectations by monitoring the response time they experience for an entire transaction, not just pieces of it Isolate problems quickly with end-to-end visibility. IBM Information Management System (MIS) is a joint hierarchical database and information management system with extensive transaction processing capabilities.

5. HISTORY
IBMs first formal Information System designed was a Management Information System with Rockwell and Caterpillar starting in 1966 for the Apollo program. MIS's challenge was to inventory the very large bill of materials (BOM). The first "MIS READY" message appeared on 14 August 1968. MIS is still going strong over 40 years later and, over time, has seen some interesting developments as IBM System/360 technology evolved into the current technology. Now the company has a wide range of Information Systems which will be discussed further. Vern Watts was MIS's chief architect for many years. Mr. Watts joined IBM in 1956 and worked at IBM's Silicon Valley development labs until his death April 4, 2009. He had continuously worked on MIS since the 1960s.

MIS is reportedly IBM's highest revenue software product, and it continues to grow.

6. THE MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM AT IBM

6.1 DATABASE The MIS Database component stores data using a hierarchical model, which is quite different from IBM's later released relational database, DB2. (DB2 gets its name because MIS, which was created first, was DB1.) In MIS, the hierarchical model is implemented using blocks of data known as segments. Each segment can contain several pieces of data, which are called fields. For example, a customer database may have a root segment (or the segment at the top of the hierarchy) with fields such as phone, name, and age. Child segments may be added underneath another segment, for instance, one order segment under each customer segment representing each order a customer has placed with a company. Likewise, each order segment may have many children segments for each item on the order. Unlike other databases, you do not need to define all of the data in a segment to MIS. A segment may be defined with a size of 40 bytes but only define one field that is six bytes long as a key field that you can use to find the segment when performing queries. MIS will retrieve and save all 40 bytes as directed by a program but may not understand (or care) what the other bytes represent. In practice, often all data in a segment may map to a COBOL copybook.

 Besides DL/I query usage, a field may be defined in MIS so that the data can be hidden from certain applications for security reasons. The database component of MIS can be purchased standalone, without the transaction manager component, and used by other systems.

6.2 THREE BASIC FORMS There are three basic forms of MIS hierarchical databases: 1. Full function databases Directly descended from the Data Language Interface (DL/I) databases originally developed for Apollo. Full function databases can have primary and secondary indexes, accessed using DL/I calls from the application program, like SQL calls to DB2 or Oracle. Full function databases can have a variety of access methods, although Hierarchical Direct (HDAM) and Hierarchical Indexed Direct (HIDAM) dominate. The other formats are Simple Hierarchical Indexed Sequential (SHISAM), Hierarchical Sequential (HSAM), and Hierarchical Indexed Sequential (HISAM). Full function databases store data using VSAM, a native z/OS access method, or Overflow Sequential (OSAM), an MIS-specific access method that optimizes the I/O channel program for MIS access patterns. In particular, OSAM performance benefits from sequential access of MIS databases (OSAM Sequential Buffering).

10

2. Fast path databases Fast Path databases are optimized for extremely high transaction rates. Data Entry Databases (DEDBs) and Main Storage Databases (MSDBs) are the two types of fast path databases. Neither provide any indexing. Virtual Storage Option (VSO) DEDBs can replace MSDBs in modern MIS releases, so MSDBs are gradually disappearing.

3. High Availability Large Databases (HALDBs) MIS V7 introduced HALDBs, an extension of MIS full function databases to provide better availability, better handling of extremely large data volumes, and, with MIS V9, online reorganization to support continuous availability. (Third party tools exclusively provided online reorganization prior to MIS V9.) A HALDB can store in excess of 40 terabytes of data. Fast path DEDBs can only be built atop VSAM. DL/I databases can be built atop either VSAM or OSAM, with some restrictions depending on database organization. Although the maximum size of a z/OS VSAM dataset increased to 128 TB a few years ago, MIS still limits a VSAM dataset to 4 GB. This "limitation" simply means that MIS customers will use multiple datasets for large amounts of data. VSAM and OSAM are usually referred to as the access methods, and the MIS "logical" view of the database is referred to as the database "organization" (HDAM, HIDAM, HISAM, etc.) Internally the data are linked using 4-byte pointers or addresses. In the

11

database datasets (DBDSs) the pointers are referred to as RBAs (relative byte addresses).

Collectively the database-related MIS capabilities are often called MIS DB. MIS DB has grown and evolved over nearly four decades to support myriad business needs.

6.3 TRANSACTION MANAGER MIS is also a robust transaction manager (MIS TM, also known as MIS DC) one of the "big three" classic transaction managers along with CICS and BEA (now Oracle) Tuxedo. A transaction manager interacts with an end user (connected through VTAM or TCP/IP, including 3270 and Web user interfaces) or another application, processes a business function (such as a banking account withdrawal), and maintains state throughout the process, making sure that the system records the business function correctly to a data store. Thus MIS TM is quite like a Web application, operating through a CGI program (for example), to provide an interface to query or update a database. MIS TM typically uses either MIS DB or DB2 as its backend database. When used alone with DB2 the MIS TM component can be purchased without the MIS DB component. MIS TM uses a messaging and queuing paradigm. An MIS control program receives a transaction entered from a terminal (or Web browser or other
12

application) and then stores the transaction on a message queue (in memory or in a dataset). MIS then invokes its scheduler on the queued transaction to start the business application program in a message processing region. The message processing region retrieves the transaction from the MIS message queue and processes it, reading and updating MIS and/or DB2 databases, assuring proper recording of the transaction. Then, if required, MIS enqueues a response message back onto the MIS message queue. Once the output message is complete and available the MIS control program sends it back to the originating terminal. MIS TM can handle this whole process thousands (or even tens of thousands) of times per second.

6.4 APPLICATION Prior to MIS, businesses and governments had to write their own transaction processing environments. MIS TM provides a straightforward, easy-to-use, reliable, standard environment for high performance

transaction execution. In fact, much of the world's banking industry relies on MIS, including the U.S. Federal Reserve. Today MIS complements DB2, IBM's relational database system, introduced in 1982. In general, MIS performs faster than DB2 for the common tasks but may require more programming effort to design and maintain for non-primary duties. Relational databases have generally proven superior in cases where the requirements, especially reporting
13

requirements, change frequently or require a variety of viewpoint "angles" outside of the primary or original function. A relational "data warehouse" may be used to supplement an MIS database. However, nightly copies of the MIS data may be copied to relational systems such that a variety of reports and processing tasks may be performed on the data. This allows each kind of database to focus best on its relative strength.

14

7. THE OFFICE AUTOMATION SYSTEM AT IBM

7.1 ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING

Electronic publishing systems include word processing and desktop publishing. Word processing software, (e.g., Microsoft Word, Corel WordPerfect) allows users at IBM to create, edit, revise, store, and print documents such as letters, memos, reports, and manuscripts. Desktop publishing software (e.g., Adobe Pagemaker, Corel VENTURA, Microsoft Publisher) enables users at IBM to integrate text, images, photographs, and graphics to produce high-quality printable output. Desktop publishing software is used on a microcomputer with a mouse, scanner, and printer to create professional-looking publications. These may be newsletters, brochures, magazines, or books of the Company.

15

7.2 EMAIL E-mail is software that allows users, via their computer keyboards, to create, send, and receive messages and files to or from anywhere in the world. Most e-mail systems let the user do other sophisticated tasks such as filter, prioritize, or file messages; forward copies of messages to other users; create and save drafts of messages; send "carbon copies"; and request automatic confirmation of the delivery of a message. E-mail is very popular because it is easy to use, offers fast delivery, and is inexpensive. Examples of e-mail software used at IBM are Eudora, Lotus Notes, and Microsoft Outlook.

7.3 VOICE MAIL Voice mail is a sophisticated telephone answering machine. It digitizes incoming voice messages and stores them on disk. When the recipient is ready to listen, the message is converted from its digitized version back to audio, or sound. Recipients may save messages for future use, delete them, or forward them to other people.

7.4 FAX A facsimile or facsimile transmission machine (FAX) scans a document containing both text and graphics and sends it as electronic signals over ordinary telephone lines to a receiving fax machine. This receiving fax recreates the image on paper. A fax can also scan and send a document to a fax modem (circuit board) inside a remote computer. The fax can then be
16

displayed on the computer screen and stored or printed out by the computer's printer.

7.5 DESKTOP VIDEOCONFERENCING

Desktop videoconferencing is one of the fastest growing forms of videoconferencing. Desktop videoconferencing requires a network and a desktop computer with special application software (e.g., CUSeeMe) as well as a small camera installed on top of the monitor. Images of a computer user from the desktop computer are captured and sent across the network to the other computers and users that are participating in the conference. This type of videoconferencing simulates face-to-face meetings of individuals. If a conference is held in IBM office at New York, it can be viewed and the employees at IBM India can also participate instead of making them travel all the way.

17

7.6 ELECTRONIC COLLABERATION Electronic collaboration is made possible through electronic meeting and collaborative work systems and teleconferencing. Electronic meeting and collaborative work systems allow teams of coworkers to use networks of microcomputers to share information, update schedules and plans, and cooperate on projects regardless of geographic distance. Special software called groupware is needed to allow two or more people to edit or otherwise work on the same files simultaneously.

7.7 TELECOMMUTING Telecommuters perform some or all of their work at home instead of traveling to an office each day, usually with the aid of office automation systems, including those that allow collaborative work or meetings. A microcomputer, a modem, software that allows the sending and receiving of work, and an ordinary telephone line are the tools that make this possible. High-tech meeting rooms help companies make more effective presentations. At some conference halls, small video screens are built into the table tops.

7.8LOCAL AREA NETWORKING The LAN allows users to transmit data, voice, mail, and images across the network to any destination, whether that destination is in the local office on the LAN, or in another country or continent, through a connecting network. An OAS makes office work more efficient and increases productivity.
18

8. THE TRANSACTION PROCESSING SYSTEM AT IBM

8.1 BATCH TRANSACTION PROCESSING BTP collects the transaction data as a group and processes it later after time delay as batches of identical data. It is processed when convenient or economical to do so. Large volumes have lower processing costs. Collected and stored offline using magnetic tape or paper. Batch approach is used for generating pay cheques etc. Three functions performed by BTP: CHEQUE CLEARANCE- A cheque is a written order asking the bank to pay an amount of money to a particular person. When one is issued to a person they deposit it into a bank account yet the money cannot be withdrawn until the cheque is cleared. This involves checking the that the cheque writer has enough money in their account to cover it usually taking 3 working days in which cheques are cleared in a group during a quiet period of the day. BILL GENERATION- IBM develops a bill or invoice of services or products supplied to a customer. Usually generate a group of bills at a scheduled time as this enables the user to effectively manage time and results in less disruption to main database. CREDIT AND DEBIT TRANSACTIONS- Credits and debits have become a method of paying for goods and services. Anytime the company has credited or debited from or to anywhere, automatically a report will be generated as to how, when, from where has the credit or debit been done.
19

8.2 GOODS TRANSACTION PROCESSING GOODS AND SERVICES PRODUCED BY IBM - Any kinds of goods or services have been sent out of the company are noted down by this system. This tells the capacity of the company to produce and send goods and services it offers. Also, it tells about the demand of the same. REJECTIONS Any rejected material or service brought back to the company is noted down by this system. Basically any up down of goods is registered for further improvements and record if required in case of loss of goods. ASSETS The companys sold and bought material like land, resources, raw materials, machinery, equipment, furniture, stationery etc is recorded in this system as it is required while calculating the costs per annum.

20

9. THE DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM AT IBM

9.1 FINDING COMPARITIVE SALES FIGURES The higher management at IBM can find comparative sales in years preceding. This helps in predicting the future of the company. It also helps them to be easily answerable to the CEO and Chairman of the company. This DSS helps them plot graphs related to the growth of the company profit and loss wise. The company officials find this easier, efficient and quicker than any other method.

9.2 FINDING SALES IN NUMBER IBM finds its products availability vs demand through another decision maker system. This helps them in determining which product line generated how much profit. Further, this helps them in knowing what to produce more or less in comparison to the previous batches. It also helps them decide which areas are more profit generating for them. There are some places where the company generates high, medium and very less customers for itself. These areas are clearly identified by the higher management in this way.

9.3 COST CUTTING The company finds out the costs involved in its various goods using this system. It helps them in lowering the undesirable costs and enhancing their goods. They make sure their services and products are available at hand
21

for any customer. These decisions have to be made and applied by the higher management as middle or lower management might compromise on quality or other parameters, which may spoil the brand image and trust the company has won over the years of success.

9.4 CHANGES IN POLICIES AND LEGAL ISSUES This is another thing which IBM keeps confined to the higher management. This system focuses upon the grievances of the employees as well as the customers. If any change of policy is required or any changes in the legalities of the company, information reaches the higher management who look into the matters. They also bring in the concerned department while discussions are done and decisions are made.

22

10.

THE EMPLOYEE SUPPORT SYSTEM AT IBM

The employee support system at IBM is called ECM Enterprise Content Management, they state that it keeps the entire employee data Hire to Retire IBMs Enterprise Content Management software operation enables it to make better decisions, faster. As the market leader in content, process and compliance software, IBM ECM delivers a broad set of mission-critical solutions that help solve todays most difficult business challenges: Managing unstructured content, optimizing business processes and helping satisfy complex Compliance infrastructure More Than 13,000 global companies, organizations and governments rely on IBM ECM to improve performance and remain competitive through innovation Inside the company it aims at: Efficiently capture, process, manage unstructured content requirements through an integrated information

associated with employees Reduce the inefficiency, cost and documents off-site Utilize electronic forms to improve accuracy capturing information and enable employee transactions Automate core HR processes to facilitate reduce administrative costs
23

and

consistency

in

employee self-service

Access employee documents from create a complete view of