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Your guide: Miss HiraExplains computers with chai, cricket and your phone.
Your book defines an information system as an organized set of components coordinated to perform a designated function. Each component is related to the others, and each one's work helps the whole system.
Take a car (Fig. 1.1). Its engine, wheels and brakes each play a unique task, but together they make the car move. Every computer, organism, machine or device works the same way.
Systems Theory studies how systems and sub-systems operate, integrate, grow and change with time. A system can be a physical object like a car, a process like university admission, or an abstract object like a formula.
Section 1.1.1 says a system is described by four things: its objective, its components, communication among the components, and the environment it works in. A thermostat is a simple system; the human body or a computer network is complex.
Objective: every system has a goal. Components: the building blocks, each with a role. Environment: everything outside that interacts with it. Communication: the components working together, like the CPU fetching data from memory.
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Your book defines an information system as an organized set of components coordinated to perform a designated function. Each component is related to the others, and each one's work helps the whole system.
Take a car (Fig. 1.1). Its engine, wheels and brakes each play a unique task, but together they make the car move. Every computer, organism, machine or device works the same way.
Systems Theory studies how systems and sub-systems operate, integrate, grow and change with time. A system can be a physical object like a car, a process like university admission, or an abstract object like a formula.
Section 1.1.1 says a system is described by four things: its objective, its components, communication among the components, and the environment it works in. A thermostat is a simple system; the human body or a computer network is complex.
Objective: every system has a goal. Components: the building blocks, each with a role. Environment: everything outside that interacts with it. Communication: the components working together, like the CPU fetching data from memory.
Four words describe any system: objective, components, environment, communication. Learn them in this order and use them for every example.
Q1. Your book lists three types of system objectives. Name them with one example each.
Information processing (brain), supporting other systems (cell phone), achieving specific goals (thermostat), as in Fig. 1.2.
Q2. A weather monitoring system: describe how it interacts with its environment.
Inputs from sensors, outputs to users, in a dynamic environment.
✗ Listing only inputs, outputs and processes as the basic concepts of a system.
✓ Your book's four: objective, components, environment, communication.
✗ Calling an environment static just because it changes slowly.
✓ Static means it does not change unless the system gives an output. If it changes on its own, it is dynamic.
✗ Putting a part of the system, like the CPU, in its environment.
✓ The environment is everything external to the system that interacts with it.
1. What is one of the fundamental concepts of any system?
(b) Exercise MCQ 2 (p. 22); section 1.1.1.
2. What is an example of a simple system?
(d) Exercise MCQ 3 (p. 22); p. 3.
3. What type of environment remains unchanged unless the system provides an output?
(a) Exercise MCQ 4 (p. 22); p. 5.
4. What are the basic components of a system, as your book describes it?
(c) Exercise MCQ 5 (p. 22); p. 3.
5. A cell phone provides a platform to run different applications. Which objective type is this?
(b) Types of System Objectives, p. 3.
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