Review of Tech Info

Data represents a fact or statement of event without relation to other things.
Information embodies the understanding of a relationship of some sort, possibly cuase and effect. Information is anything that can be digitized (books, mags, etc.).
Knowledge represents a pattern that conects and generally provides a high level of predictability as to what is described or what will happen next.

System: input, process, and output.
Process: manner in which work is organized and coordinated to produce a product or service.

Information System (IS): components that work together to process data and produce information (to help companies solve problems and make decisions).

Complications with IS: resistance to change.

-e-commerce: b2b, b2c, c2c- business to business, business to consumer, and consumer to consumer. any business transaction executed electronically between parties involving the exchange of goods and/or services
-enterprise resource planning (ERP) very, very expensive- integrated programs that can manage a company's entire set of business operations; often coordinate planning, inventory control, production and ordering; very expensive and difficult to implement.
-customer relationship management (CRM)- manages ways to deal with existing and potential new customers; coordinates business processes of a firm necessary to provide end-to-end customer care; provides a unified view of customers across the company; consolidates customer data from multiple sources and provides analytical tools for answering questions.
-supply chain management (SCM)- links the organization with customers and suppliers (i.e. the supply chain) as one 'virtual organization'.
-business intelligence (BI)- used to support decision making (e.g. where to build, how much to order) Charateristics: suggests and compares alternatives; problem is complex; information is voluminous.

The "waterfall approach" to software development: having several different teams produce pieces of a larger software project and waiting until the very end of the project to merge all of the pieces together to see if they work jointly (or not). Mid 70's to late 80's this was popular. Then things changed: MS now merges pieces on bi-weekly or monthly bases to ensure that kinks are worked out early in, rather than several years down the road when a project is supposed to be near completion.

MS uses the "synch-and-stabilize" process to work out kinks as the production of a piece of software goes along. MS makes products in a market where companies have to take the approach of releasing software when it is "good enough," and then working out bugs with patches and future releases/updates, instead of waiting until a program is "perfect."

2 categories of software: Applications software (programs), and System software (OS's).

What is an OS? A bridge between your PC and the software you run on it. Functions: communicating with peripherals, coordinating concurrent processing of jobs, memory management, etc.