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Types of Information Systems

With so many people working with so many different kinds of information in the modern world, it should come as no surprise that there are innumerable— and varied— types of information systems in existence. In fact, there is a whole academic discipline called information systems, which combines elements of computer science and business. This article will discuss these types of information systems, how they have been classified, and how they relate to one another.

The Types of Information Systems Pyramid

During the 1980s, computer scientists came up with a pyramid illustrating the hierarchy of types of information systems. The details varied, but it was usually arranged as follows, from top to bottom:

• Executive information systems (EIS’s) provide easy access to information, both inside and outside, needed by senior business executives in making major decisions regarding the goals of the organizations in which they work. Their emphasis is on graphics and user interfaces that are easy to use. And they help executives track business performance through the monitoring of major variables.
• Decision support systems (DSS’s), which include knowledge-based systems, consist of three main components: a database, a model (the context in which a particular decision is to be made), and a user interface.
• Management information systems (MIS’s) provide the information needed for efficient management. They include the data used by managerial accountants to estimate the costs of products and services.
• Transaction processing systems (TPS’s) deal with a company’s financial transactions. These systems are subject to the ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) test that determines if a transaction is in the consistent state required to be classified as such. Atomicity means that the changes resulting from the transaction occur either together or not at all.

As mentioned above, there were several variations on this theme. For instance, EIS’s were often considered as a specialized type of DSS. Terminology has changed, too; the term EIS has been largely replaced by “business intelligence” (see below). Likewise, there is no universally accepted definition of a DSS; experts speak of such subcategories as data-, communication-, and model- driven DSS’s.

The term “business intelligence” (BI), as mentioned above, has been adopted by many specialists in place of the older “EIS.” But today’s BI systems often involve much more than what was originally included in the latter category. For instance, BI may also cover data visualization (the representation of data in pictorial fashion) and online analytical processing (OLAP), a system of analyzing the information stored in a database.

Advances in computer technology have resulted in the creation of a number of types of information systems online, including the following:

• Group decision support systems are a type of “electronic meeting system,” whereby meetings take place in which each participant has his or her own computer and, in addition, there is a large, central screen for everyone to look at.
• An expert system is a form of “artificial intelligence”— in essence, a computer program that knows so much about a given subject that a human user can ask it questions on that subject. Automated online assistants have evolved as an offshoot of these systems.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Various Types of Information Systems

Different types of information systems have their own advantages and disadvantages. EIS’s, for example, are easy for top-level senior executives to use, provide information that is easy to understand, filter data so that they can be easily managed, and makes the task of decision-making more efficient; on the down side, they tend to be “system- dependent”; the costs of implementation tend to be high; it is difficult to quantify any benefits they produce; and many managers complain of an “information overload.” DSS’s are better at providing new evidence that supports a decision, automating the process of management, and promoting training. With MIS’s, income reports make it easier to analyze strengths and weaknesses, and thus make improvements in the latter area.

Studying and working with the various types of information systems can be a very complex discipline indeed. That is why people are paid so much for their work in the field. An information systems manager’s annual salary, for instance, may run over $100,000. There are hundreds of thousands of jobs available in IS.