Space shifting means that work takes place in a global workshop, as well as within national boundaries. Information can flow seamlessly among different parts of the company and between the company and external entities—its customers, suppliers, and business partners. More and more organizations are moving toward this digital firm vision.
PERSPECTIVES ON INFORMATION SYSTEMS
Information systems can be best be understood by looking at them from both atechnology and a business perspective.
What Is an Information System?
An information system can be defined technically as a set of interrelated components that collect (or retrieve), process, store, and distribute information to support decision-making and control in an organization. In addition to supporting decision making, coordination, and control, information systems may also help managers and workers analyze problems, visualize complex subjects, and create new products.
Information systems contain information about significant people, places, and things within the organization or in the environment surrounding it. By information we mean data that have been shaped into a form that is meaningful and useful to human beings.
Data, in contrast, are streams of raw facts representing events occurring in organizations or the physical environment before they have been organized and arranged into a form that people can understand and use.
Three activities in an information system produce the information that organizations need to make decisions, control operations, analyze problems, and create new productsor services.
These activities are input, processing, and output.
Input captures or collects raw data from within the organization or from its external environment. Processing converts this raw input into a more meaningful form. Output transfers the