Information Flow and its use in Business Organizations

John J. Miller II

CIS 207/Information Systems Fundamentals

University of Phoenix

Information Flow and Business Use

Historically information flowed into organizations via many different methods, and often still is, and was very difficult to access, verify, and otherwise use the information simply because many of the systems in place did not communicate with each other. The purpose of this paper will be to briefly describe how information moves into, around, and out of an organization and why that information is important to the organization. I will also discuss how this information is safe guarded from unauthorized use.

Information

“Information refers to data that have been organized so that they have meaning and value to the recipient.” “Data items refer to an elementary description of things, events, activities, and transactions that are recorded, classified, and stored but not organized to convey any specific meaning.” (Rainer, Cegielski, 2011, pp. 13) The purpose of Information Systems (IS) is to gather data from various sources and compile it into information that is of use to the person requesting it. As stated above though, this has not always been the case. In the matter of Executive Information Systems (EIS) data was not outputted into a standardized format, and it was extremely difficult to generate customized or ad hoc reports. Information Technology (IT) architecture had to be redesigned from the ground up to be able to these key performance indicators (KPI), and eventually were. With that being said, information is used in many ways within an organization. It can be something as simple as senior management monitoring their organizations social media pages such as Twitter or Facebook to gauge how their customers feel about the service they provide.