Information System Assignment Part A: Information Management Needs Laudon and Laudon (1988) identified 4 levels of information users in the organization: workers, middle managers, senior managers and executive. In line with this, the author also presented a pyramid of systems which reflect the said levels of information users: transaction processing systems, management information systems, decision support systems and executive information systems, which is shown in figure 1. Thus, the four levels of information systems help these 4 levels of information users in different levels of the organization. Executives

Senior Managers

Middle Managers

Workers/First Level Managers Figure 1 Four Level Pyramid Model (Information Users and Information Systems)
Source: (Laudon and Laudon, 1988) The lowest level among the 4 information users is the worker.
Workers need information that are related to short-term decision, thus focus on the transaction of the day-to-day business (Obermeyer and Pinto 2008). Thus, this level of users use transaction processing systems (TPSs) in order to deal with thousands or even millions of transactions with the customers and suppliers
(Heathcote 2004). TPSs cope with well-structured routine processes and sustain many of the day-to-day operations of the organization (Visscher, Wild and Fung
2001). It collects source data regarding each business transaction, such as customer order, sales, purchases, movement of stocks, payments, invoices and receipts, which are reported on a regular basis, thus these are vital for control and audit purposes, but offer little usable management information
(Collier and Agyei-Ampomah 2008). The