Tomorrow's successful business professionals need more than the ability to do personal work on a computer and general familiarity with business and technical terms. Contributing fully to current organizations requires an ability to participate in systems, evaluate them, and contribute to system development efforts. This requires an organized approach for thinking about systems, an approach that can be used successfully today and will still be valid five or ten years from now when today's technical and business terms are no longer at the cutting edge.

This third edition of Information Systems: A Management Perspective is built around a practical, widely applicable approach for analyzing computerized systems from a business viewpoint. Its ambitions go far beyond merely covering current vocabulary for talking about information systems and technology. It couches its entire coverage in terms of a systems analysis approach developed with the help of students who used these ideas to write papers about information systems in real business settings. This approach is called the work-centered analysis (WCA) method. It is based on the WCA framework, a way to summarize a system in terms of six elements, the business process through which human participants use information and technology to produce products (and services) for internal or external customers. To emphasize this integrating concept, each chapter begins with a case accompanied by a tabular "system snapshot" that summarizes the elements in that situation.

Chapter 2 explains how to use these elements to analyze virtually any system from a business viewpoint. The rest of the book explores each topic in more depth. The following table shows the part of the framework that each chapter emphasizes. It also shows how each chapter contributes to the ideas any business professional can use for thinking about any information system or any work system it supports.

How each chapter contributes to an understanding of systems

Primary emphasis	Chapter
	Chapter 1, The Challenge of Applying IT for Business Advantage, starts by summarizing the process of building a system and the technical advances that made today's IT-enabled systems possible. It gives examples of IT-enabled improvements in every functional area of business. It closes by citing challenges such as embracing technology without succumbing to hype and overselling and while accepting the difficulty of anticipating how technology will be adapted in practice. Chapter 2, Basic Concepts for Understanding Systems, explains the WCA framework and shows how it can be used from five different perspectives when examining a work system in more depth. It emphasizes the importance of understanding both an information system and the work system it supports.
	Chapter 3, Business Processes, shows how to examine a business process. It starts with graphical methods for summarizing processes. Then it discusses alternative process rationales, major characteristics that determine how well they perform, and performance variables themselves.
	Chapter 4, Information and Databases, starts by explaining data modeling, a general technique for understanding information requirements. It then discusses database management systems that store and control databases. It also talks about evaluating information and about the use of models.
	Chapter 5, Communication, Decision Making, and Different Types of Information Systems, presents basic ideas about communication and decision making and shows how these ideas are related to different types of information systems. Current techniques newly introduced in this chapter include intranets, extranets, knowledge management, OLAP, and data mining.
	Chapter 6, Product, Customer, and Competitive Advantage, looks at the two elements at the top of the framework and explains why the criteria customers use to evaluate the product of a work system are usually different from the criteria for evaluating the internal operation of the work system. It goes on to look at the competitive uses of information systems.
	Chapter 7, Human and Ethical Issues, focuses on positive and negative impacts of work systems and information systems on people at work. It points out that the success of any system in business depends on its participants. It closes by discussing ethical issues such as privacy, accuracy, property, and access.
	Chapter 8, Computer Hardware, starts with measures of performance for technology, provides an overview of different types of computer systems, and presents some of the technical choices for capturing data, storing and retrieving data, and displaying data. Chapter 9, Software, Programming, and Artificial Intelligence, discusses the evolution of programming languages and operating systems. It then looks at steps toward machine intelligence such as expert systems and neural networks. Chapter 10, Networks and Telecommunications, looks at different types of networks that link communication devices and computers. It closes by discussing standards and policy issues that affect the future of telecommunications.
	Chapter 11, Information Systems Planning, looks at the strategic and practical issues when deciding how to incorporate IT into a firm's business strategy. It covers a series of strategic issues, methods for selecting among proposed information system investments, and issues related to project management. Chapter 12, Building and Maintaining Information Systems, identifies the phases of any information system project, and shows how these phases are performed in four different approaches for building information systems.
	Chapter 13, Information System Security and Control, discusses risks related to project failure, accidents and malfunctions, and computer crime. It then explains some of the methods for minimizing these risks.

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