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Decision making: systems view

8 九月, 2015 - 10:52

A previous chapter introduced the idea of viewing an organization as a system that acquires inputs, processes them, and generates outputs. The organization interacts with its environment, in that it acquires inputs from the environment (e.g., purchasing parts from suppliers), and creates outputs that it hopes will be accepted by the environment (e.g., through sales of products to customers). The organization also receives feedback from the environment, in the form of customer compliments or complaints, etc. This way of perceiving an organization is typically referred to as the systems view, in that the organization is essentially viewed as a system operating within an environment.

As discussed in a previous chapter, it is also possible to break the organization into a series of smaller sub-systems, or business processes. For example, we might view the purchasing function as a system that accepts inputs (e.g., materials requests from the production process), processes them (e.g., reviewing pricing and delivery details for a variety of suppliers), and generates outputs (e.g., purchase orders forwarded to specific suppliers). The purchasing process also receives feedback (details concerning orders received by the inventory control function, etc.).

For many organizations, these business processes (organizational subsystems) are supported by information systems. Before describing how this occurs, we need to define a few terms.