Section III. Automating business processes

Two themes of this book are (1) how to use IT to improve business processes, and (2) how to use IT to make better decisions. Both serve the main purpose of IT: to help a firm implement a business strategy.

This section is about process automation. By the end of this section, you should be able to:

• Define a business process
• Explain why we would want to model business processes
• Use a simple modeling technique
• Create a simple data model
• Create a database in Microsoft Access
• Write queries in Access
• Create reports in Access
• Create simple interfaces in Access

Here's the contents of the section:

• Chapter 7. Modeling processes
  • Introduction
  • What a business process is
  • Why process modeling is worth doing
  • Basic modeling techniques
  • Creating OMM diagrams with Microsoft Word
  • Basic modeling and cakes
  • Circles and a program
  • Data flow and order fulfillment
  • Improving order fulfillment
  • Modeling modeling
  • Summary
  • Exercises
• Chapter 8. Storing data
  • What databases are for
  • Data modeling
  • Data dictionary
  • From ERD to database
  • Creating databases in Microsoft Access
  • Querying data in Microsoft Access
  • Creating reports in Microsoft Access
  • Summary
  • Exercises
• Chapter 9. Interfaces
  • What interfaces are for
  • Types of interfaces
  • Creating forms in Microsoft Access
  • The form wizard
  • Combo boxes
  • Subforms
  • Custom programming
  • Menus
  • Processes + data + interfaces = information systems
  • Summary
  • Exercises
• Chapter 10. Case: university grading system
  • Business context
  • Process: Add students
  • Process: Setup courses
  • Process: Enroll students in courses
  • Process: Recording scores
  • Process: Assigning grades
  • Process: Reviewing grades
  • Data model
  • Database
  • Implementing the adding and enrolling student process
  • Implementing the course setup process
  • Implementing the recording scores process
  • Implementing the assign grades process
  • Implementing the grade reviewing process
  • Summary
  • Exercises