Types of Information Systems - Essay Example

To better understand types of information systems, it would be best to discuss them individually.Transaction Processing SystemA transaction processing system collects and processes information about various transactions that take place between two or more parties. It also governs certain aspects of a transaction depending on the requirements of the users or the flexibility of the system. For example, a checkout counter at a store is a part of a transaction processing system which may be linked to other information systems that handle reordering of goods or approval of purchases such as credit card transaction approvals (Kelly, 2006).

Such systems often establish the survival of business since without these a company may have difficulties in manually handling a large number of transactions on a daily basis (Kelly, 2006). For large enterprises, the volumes of data handled by these systems and the number of records created, edited, or processed on a daily basis can run into millions. Companies such as Wal-Mart and other retailers depend on the efficient running of these systems since the information gathered from them can help in making real-time strategic decisions.

The stakeholders in this system are all parties that are involved in the transaction process as well as those who are going to make decisions based on the results and nature of the transactions that are processed.  Decision Support SystemsA DSS is a type of information system which helps managers and other higher stakeholders in a company make strategic decisions. These information systems work with input given from other information systems such as transaction support systems, human resource management systems, etc.

They are particularly useful when a company or a manager wishes to create ‘what if’ scenarios to see what impact certain decisions can have in theory (Kelly, 2006).For example, if a company wishes to achieve a certain target in terms of sales, one possible way to get that target would be to reduce its prices. However, the reduction in prices can impact other aspects of the business, therefore, a company has to go about this very carefully. A DSS can help a financial expert see what impact a reduction in prices could have on sales as well as the profit gathered from increased sales or loss due to the price reduction.

In effect, any party that has something to gain or lose from the decisions created with the help of the DSS is a stakeholder to some level in a Decision Support System.Expert SystemsPerhaps the most complicated type of information system is an expert system that seeks to emulate the expertise of a human being in a given field. The concepts of Artificial intelligence figure largely in this type of system since an expert system seeks to capture the knowledge and the reasoning of a human expert.

This requires a vast knowledge base for the data in the expert system as well as logical rules of inference on which an expert system can base the evaluations of given data (Kelly, 2006).Of course, expert systems can be used by anyone involved in decision making or evaluating any course of action its use figures largely when a large amount of data has to be processed for expert evaluation. For example, in a theatre of war, aerial photographs of a region may be processed into an expert system whereby the system can mark those photographs that seem to contain points of military interest or those which are strategically important.

While a human being might be able to analyze hundreds of such pictures in a day, an expert system would be able to process millions of such images in a matter of minutes. The stakeholders for such a system would be anyone who has to make decisions dependant on the information system as well as those who carry out or are affected by the human-made decisions.