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Chapter 1 The Importance of MIS
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Q1-4 How Can You Use the Five-Component Model?

The five-component model in Figure 1-7 can help guide your learning and thinking about IS, both
now and in the future. To understand this framework better, first note in Figure 1-8 that these five
components are symmetric. The outermost components, hardware and people, are both actors;
they can take actions. The software and procedure components are both sets of instructions:
Software is instructions for hardware, and procedures are instructions for people. Finally, data is
the bridge between the computer side on the left and the human side on the right.
Now, when we automate a business task, we take work that people are doing by following pro-
cedures and move it so that computers will do that work, following instructions in software. Thus,
the process of automation is a process of moving work from the right side of Figure 1-8 to the left.

The Most Important Component—You

You are part of every information system that you use. When you consider the five components of an
information system, the last component, people, includes you. Your mind and your thinking are not
merely a component of the information systems you use; they are the most important component.
As you will learn later in this chapter, computer hardware and programs manipulate data, but no
matter how much data they manipulate, it is still just data. It is only humans that produce informa-
tion. When you take a set of data, say, a list of customer responses to a marketing campaign, that list,
no matter if it was produced using 10,000 servers and Hadoop (Chapter 9), is still just data. It does
not become information until you or some other human take it into your mind and are informed by it.
Even if you have the largest computer farm in the world and even if you are processing that
data with the most sophisticated programs, if you do not know what to do with the data those
programs produce, you are wasting your time and money. The quality of your thinking is what
determines the quality of the information that is produced.
Substantial cognitive research has shown that although you cannot increase your basic IQ,
you can dramatically increase the quality of your thinking. That is one reason we have emphasized
the need for you to use and develop your abstract reasoning. The effectiveness of an IS depends on
the abstract reasoning of the people who use it.

All Components Must Work

Information systems often encounter problems—despite our best efforts, they don’t work right.
And in these situations, blame is frequently placed on the wrong component. You will often hear
people complain that the computer doesn’t work, and certainly hardware or software is sometimes
at fault. But with the five-component model, you can be more specific, and you have more suspects
to consider. Sometimes the data is not in the right format or, worse, is incorrect. Sometimes, the
procedures are not clear and the people using the system are not properly trained. By using the
five-component model, you can better locate the cause of a problem and create effective solutions.

Actors
Instructions
Bridge

Hardware Software Data Procedures People

Computer Side Human Side
Automation moves work from human side to computer side
Figure 1-8
characteristics of the Five Increasing degree of difficulty of change
components