Definitions:

Potential Formulas 56,57

Chapter Review 74

Operational level: employees develop, control, and maintain core business activities required to run the
day-to-day operations.

Operational decisions: affect how the firm is run from day to day. They are the domain of the operations
managers, who are the closest to the customers.

Structured decisions: arise when established processes offer potential solutions.

Managerial Level employees are continuously evaluating company operations to hone the firms abilities to
identify, adapt to and leverage change

Managerial Decisions: these concern how the organization should achieve the goals and objectives set by
it’s strategy. They are usually the responsibility of middle management.

Semi structured decisions: these occur in situations in which few established processes help to evaluate
potential solutions but not enough to lead to a definite recommended decision.

Strategic Level: managers develop overall business strategies, goals and objectives as part of the company’s
strategic plan.

Strategic Decisions: involve higher-level issues concerned with the overall direction of the organization.
These define the organization’s overall goals and aspirations for the future.

Unstructured decisions: occur in situations in which no procedures or rules exist to guide decision maker
toward the correct choice.

Project: a temporary activity that a company undertakes to create a unique product, service, or result.

Metrics: measurements that evaluate results to determine whether a project is meeting its goals

Critical Success factors: the crucial steps companies perform to achieve their goals and implement their
strategies

Key performance indicators: the quantifiable metrics a company uses to evaluate progress toward critical
success factors. KPI’s are far more specific that CSF’s.

Market Share: the proportion of the market that a firm captures.

Return on investment (ROI) indicates the earning power of a project.

Best Practices: the most successful solutions or problem-solving methods that have been developed by a
specific organization or industry. Measuring MIS projects helps determine the best practices for an
industry.

Efficiency MIS metrics: measures the performance of MIS itself, such as throughput, transaction speed and
system availability.

Effectiveness MIS metrics measures the impact MIS has on business processes and activities, including
customer satisfaction and customer conversion rates.

Benchmarks: Baseline values the system seeks to attain.

Benchmarking: a process of continuously measuring system results, comparing those result to optimal
system performance (benchmark values) and identifying steps and procedures to improve system
performance.

Model: a simplified representation or abstraction of reality.

Transactional information: encompasses all the information contained within a single business process or
unit of work, and it’s primary purpose is to support the performance of daily operational or structed
decisions. Anything related to a transaction.

Online Transaction Processing (OLTP): the capture of transactions and event information using technology
to process the information according to defined business rules, (2) store the information, and (3) update
existing information to reflect new information. must capture every detail

Transaction Processing System: (TPS): the basic business system that serves the operational level (analysts
and assists in making structured decisions the most common example of TPS is an operational accounting
system such as a payroll system or an order entry system

Source documents: the original transaction record

Online analytical processing (OLAP): the manipulation of information to create business intelligence in
support of strategic decision making.

Decision support systems(DSS): model information using OLAP which provides assistance in evaluating and
choosing among different courses of action.

Executive Information System (EIS) a specialized DSS that supports senior-level executives and
unstructured, long-term non routine decisions requiring judgement, evaluation and insight.

Granularity: refers to the level of detail in the model or the decision making process.

Visualization: produces graphical displays of patterns

Infographic: a representation of information in a graphical format designed to make the data easily
understandable at a glance.

Digital dashboard: tracks KPI and CSF by compiling information from multiple sources and tailoring it to
meet user needs.

Artificial Intelligence: simulates human thinking and behavior such as the ability to reason and learn.

Expert Systems: computerized advisory programs that imitate the reasoning processes of experts in solving
difficult problems.
Algorithms: mathematical formulas placed in software that perform an analysis on a dataset.

Genetic algorithm: an artificial intelligence system that mimics the evolutionary survival of the fittest
process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem.

Machine Learning: a type of artificial intelligence that enables computers to understand concepts in the
environment and to learn.

Data Augmentation: occurs when adding additional training examples by transforming existing examples.

Overfitting: occurs when a machine learning model matches the training data so closely that the model fails
to make correct predictions on new data. Essentially the model knows the training data to well and is
unable to make future predictions overfitting happens when a model leans the details in the training data
to the extent that it negatively impacts the performance of the model on new data.

Underfitting: occurs when a machine learning model has poor predictive abilities because it did not learn
the complexity in the training data. When underfitting occurs the solution is to try different machine
learning algorithms.

Neural network: also called artificial neural network: a category of AI that attempts to emulate the way the
human brain works.

Fuzzy Logic: is a mathematical method of handling imprecise or subjective information.

Black box algorithms: decision making process that cannot be easily understood or explained by the
computer or researcher.

Deep learning: a process that employs specialized algorithms to model and study complex datasets ; the
method is also used to establish relationships among data and datasets.

Reinforcement learning: the training of machine learning models to make a sequence of decisions.

Virtual Reality: a computer-simulated environment that can be a simulation of a real or virtual world.

Augmented Reality: the viewing of the physical world with computer-generated layers of information
added to it.

Notes:

Diagrams / Pictures