Information Systems Introducing
1.0 INTRODUCTION
This report will detail an analysis of an information system within an organisation that the author is familiar with. During 1999 as an undergraduate student, the author worked for a two months as a temporary customer service advisor within Barclaycall at Salford Quays, Salford Manchester UK. Barclaycall is part of the Barclays group of companies, which is one of the major banks in the UK (Reid et al. 1998). Using the same advisors and technology Barclaycall is both a business to public and a business-to-business call centre, though the customer's perception is that they are two separate organisations (Barclaycall and Businesscall). Barclaycall was launched in October 1994, and had 280,000 customers within the first year with an estimated 20,000 new customers joining each month (Weever 1996).
The role of customer service advisor involved answering customers' enquiries over the telephone using a sophisticated information system. An information system can be defined as a system of human and technical components that inputs, process, stores, outputs and communicates information (Heeks 2002d).
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English: The relationship between Information Scie...
1 GB of SDRAM mounted in a personal computer. An e...The primary user is the sales advisor, though the secondary user of the system, though they may not necessarily be aware of it is the customer.
The availability of both local area networks (LAN) and area networks (WAN) technology with computer telephony integration and workflow systems allows the system to retrieve customer details as the customer enters the system (Bocij et al, 1999). The software used by the advisors is windows based and uses simultaneously a computer telephony integration (CTI) software, and an intranet to inform the advisors of information to pass on to customers. The software is very user friendly, with prompts before any transaction is undertaken. The software is simple and is menu led that allows the advisor to carry out simple transactions such as...