Page 490 - Using MIS

458 Chapter 12 Information Systems Development
How Do Business Processes, Information Systems,
and Applications Differ and Relate?

As you learned in Chapter 3, a business process consists of one or more activities. For example,
Figure 12-1 shows activities in an ordering business process: A quotation is prepared and, assum-
ing the customer accepts those terms, the order is processed. Inventory availability is verified,
customer credit is checked, special terms, if any, are approved, and then the order is processed
and shipped. Each of these activities includes many tasks, some of which involve processing
exceptions (only part of the order is available, for example), but those exceptions are not shown.
The activities in a business process often involve information systems. In Figure 12-1, for
example, all of the activities except Approve Special Terms use an information system. (For this
example, we’ll assume that special terms are rare and approved by having a salesperson walk
down the hallway to the sales manager.) Each of these information systems has the five com-
ponents that we’ve repeatedly discussed. The actors or participants in the business process are
the users of the information systems. They employ IS procedures to use information systems to
accomplish tasks in process activities.
Each of these information systems contains a software component. Developing software
nearly always involves the data component, and it often involves the specification and charac-
teristics of hardware (e.g., mobile devices). Consequently, we define the term application to
mean a combination of hardware, software, and data components that accomplishes a set of
requirements. In Figure 12-1, the Customer Credit IS contains an application that processes a
customer database to approve or reject credit requests.
As you can see from the example in Figure 12-1, this one business process uses four dif-
ferent IS. In general, we can say that a single business process relates to one or more infor-
mation systems. However, notice that not all process activities use an IS; some require just
manual tasks. In Figure 12-1, the Approve Special Terms activity uses no IS. Instead, as stated,

Prepare
Quotation CRM

Verify Inventory Information Systems
Availability IS

Customers Check
Customer Customer
Credit IS
Credit
Approve
Special
Terms
Business Process
Process Shipping
Order IS

Figure 12-1
Activities in a Business Process
and the Correlating Information
Systems Orders