A Microfinance MIS: Mifos Database
STUDENT
University of Phoenix
BIS 219 Introduction to Business Information Systems
INSTRUCTOR
DATE

A Microfinance MIS: Mifos Database Mifos is a management information system designed to microfinance institutions in developing countries. Management information systems (MIS), such as Mifos “deal with the planning for, development, management, and use of information technology tools to help people perform all tasks related to information processing and management” (Rainer & Turban, 2008, p.24). Mifos allows running social and business reports as well as analysis, managing clients, savings, and loans portfolio. Mifos offers several advantages to its users such as efficiency and ease, growth and scalability, social and business impact, flexibility and agility, security and data integrity, among others. Mifos runs on top of a MySQL database (Grameen Foundation, 2008). A MySQL database is commonly used in web applications and for data storage and logging of user data (i.e. Facebook). The Mifos database definitely has structures for account authentication, authorization, and administration. The above operations are usually grouped together under one component of the application. The bulk of the application is used to review loan officers, branches, loans, and so forth; so, there will be tables for each of those. Those tables will hold the data that supports the business logic for the application. Mifos includes also a reporting mechanism which, in most cases, is segregated from the rest of the data. Indeed, it is considered good practice to separate the historical data from the current data, particularly for performance reasons.

References
Grameen Foundation (2008). Mifos. Retrieved July 17, 2013 from http://www.mifos.org/product/demo-the-software.
Rainer, R.K. & Turban, E. (2008). Introduction to information systems (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.