The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh-ICAB IT Knowledge Class No- 4 A.H.M. Ariful Islam ACA

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The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Bangladesh-ICAB
IT Knowledge
Class No- 4
Dell A.H.M. Ariful Islam ACA

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Class-IV
Characteristics of Information System between and within
Organization
Types of Information: (Page 48) Two different types –
Internal information:
Information that has been generated from the operations of the
organization at various functional areas. The internal information gets
processed and summarized from junior to top most level of management.
This is information which is only available to the business. This
information will be private and accurate. Internal information may take
the form the followings:
Sales & Marketing
Order Processing
Pricing Analysis
Sales Trend forecasting
Manufacturing and Production
Machine control
Production planning
Facilities location
HR
Training
Compensation
HR Planning
Finance and Accounting
Accounts Receivable/ Payable
Budgeting
Profit Planning
And other functional areas wherever applicable

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External information:
The external information is collected from the external environment of the business organization.
External information is considered to affect the organizational performance from outside the
organization.
This is information which comes from outside the business. This is gathered via mainly
secondary information methods such as newspapers and magazines, the internet etc.
Examples might include:
 Census figures

 Telephone directories

 Judgments on court cases

 Computer users’ yearbook

 Legislation, for example

 The Data Protection Act

 National opinion polls

 Trade Journals

 Survey maps

 Professional publications

 Financial services agencies

 Industry standard

 The Internet

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Passive and Interactive Information System: (Page 49)
Passive Information System: Passive information systems are systems that will
answer queries based on the data that is held within them, but the data is not
altered.
Interactive Information System: An interactive system is one, that data can be
entered for processing which may alter the contents of the database.
Passive or Interactive
1) Electronic Encyclopaedia
2) A school secretary updating the attendance record of a pupil in the pupil file.
3) A stock control system in a supermarket.
4) A customer wants some work done or makes a payment.
5) A large chemical plant is controlled automatically from a central control
room. One process is to mix two chemicals at a specific temperature and
pressure. The process is to be computer controlled. Information about the
state of chemical processes in the plant is conveyed to the control room.
6) Student file in a school that can be accessed by members of the teaching
staff to find out where a student is at a particular time of day, or to look up
their telephone number in order to contact the parents; but it is not possible
for an ordinary teacher to alter it.
7) Customers contact a firm to ask for a quote for a standard piece of work.

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Answer: Passive
1) Electronic Encyclopaedia where queries can be used to search for data but
the user is not allowed to alter the data.
6) Student file in a school that can be accessed by members of the teaching
staff to find out where a student is at a particular time of day, or to look up
their telephone number in order to contact the parents; but it is not possible
for an ordinary teacher to alter it.
7) Customers contact a firm to ask for a quote for a standard piece of work.
This quote / estimate would be obtained from a database which remains
unchanged during the enquiry.
Answer: Interactive
2) A school secretary updating the attendance record of a pupil in the pupil file.
3) A stock control system in a supermarket is an interactive information
system because it not only gives information like the price and the
description of the goods for the till receipt (passive), but also updates the
number in stock immediately (interactive) so that when the next item is sold
the number in stock has already been altered.
4) If a customer wants some work done or makes a payment then the
customer’s record in a database would need to be altered to reflect this.
5) A large chemical plant is controlled automatically from a central control
room. One process is to mix two chemicals at a specific temperature and
pressure. The process is to be computer controlled. Information about the
state of chemical processes in the plant is conveyed to the control room.
operators need to alter automatic process

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Batch processing
Batch processing is the execution of a series of programs ("jobs") on a computer
without manual intervention. Jobs are set up so they can be run to completion
without human interaction. All input parameters are predefined through scripts,
command-line arguments, control files, or job control language.
Batch Processing and Rapid Response Processing: (Page 51)
Batch Processing: A batch processing system is used when the output does not
have to be produced immediately. Other factors are that the application will tend to
use a large amount of data that processing will tend to be of the same type for each
set of data and that human intervention is not necessary.
Rapid Response Processing: Rapid response processing referred to as real time
Processing. Real time processing can be thought of as being used in process
control where the results of the process are used to inform the next input. The
classic example is the airline booking systems. (Page 51)

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Knowledge-based system
Knowledge-based system
A knowledge-based system (KBS) is a computer program that reasons and uses a
knowledge base to solve complex problems. The term is broad and is used to refer
to many different kinds of systems.
A knowledge based system has two types of sub-systems: a knowledge base and an
inference engine. The knowledge base represents facts about the world,
The inference engine represents logical assertions and conditions about the world,
usually represented via IF-THEN rules.
Knowledge-Based systems were first developed by Artificial Intelligence
researchers. These early knowledge-based systems were primarily expert systems.
In fact the term is often used synonymously with expert systems. The difference is
in the view taken to describe the system. Expert system refers to the type of task
the system is trying to solve, to replace or aid a human expert in a complex task.
Knowledge-based system refers to the architecture of the system, that it represents
knowledge explicitly rather than as procedural code. While the earliest knowledge-
based systems were almost all expert systems, the same tools and architectures can
and have since been used for a whole host of other types of systems. I.e., virtually
all expert systems are knowledge-based systems but many knowledge-based
systems are not expert systems.
The first knowledge-based systems were rule based expert systems. One of the
most famous was Mycin a program for medical diagnosis. These early expert
systems represented facts about the world as simple assertions in a flat database
and used rules to reason about and as a result add to these assertions. Representing
knowledge explicitly via rules had several advantages:

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Advantage of Knowledge –based system:
1. Acquisition & Maintenance. Using rules meant that domain experts could
often define and maintain the rules themselves rather than via a programmer.
2. Explanation. Representing knowledge explicitly allowed systems to reason
about how they came to a conclusion and use this information to explain
results to users. For example, to follow the chain of inferences that led to a
diagnosis and use these facts to explain the diagnosis.
3. Reasoning. Decoupling the knowledge from the processing of that
knowledge enabled general purpose inference engines to be developed.
These systems could develop conclusions that followed from a data set that
the initial developers may not have even been aware of.
4. The knowledge-based became more structured, representing information
using similar techniques to object-oriented programming such as
hierarchies of classes and subclasses, relations between classes, and
behavior of objects.
Disadvantage:
As knowledge-based systems became more complex the techniques used to
represent the knowledge base became more sophisticated
As the knowledge base became more structured reasoning could occur both by
independent rules and by interactions within the knowledge base itself. For
example, procedures stored as demons on objects could fire and could replicate the
chaining behavior of rules.
Another advancement was the development of special purpose automated
reasoning systems called classifiers. Rather than statically declare the sub
assumption relations in a knowledge-base a classifier allows the developer to
simply declare facts about the world and let the classifier deduce the relations. In
this way a classifier also can play the role of an inference engine.

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Knowledge base (KB)
A knowledge base (KB) is a technology used to store complex structured and
unstructured information used by a computer system. The initial use of the term
was in connection with expert systems which were the first knowledge-based
systems.
The term "knowledge-base" was to distinguish from the more common widely
used term database. At the time (the 1970s) virtually all large Management
Information Systems stored their data in some type of hierarchical or relational
database. At this point in the history of Information Technology the distinction
between a database and a knowledge-base was clear and unambiguous. A database
had the following properties:
 Flat data. Data was usually represented in a tabular format with strings or
number in each field.
 Multiple users. A conventional database must support more than one user or
system logged into the same data at the same time.
 Transactions. An essential requirement for a database was to maintain
integrity and consistency among data that is accessed by concurrent users.
These are the so-called ACID properties: Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation,
and Durability.
 Large, long-lived data. A corporate database needed to support not just
thousands but hundreds of thousands or beyond rows of data. Such a
database usually needs to persist past the specific uses of any individual
program, it needs to store data for years and decades rather than for the life
of a program.

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Types of knowledge-based systems: (Page 53) three types –
Diagnostic: The user interface gives a series of questions, each of which has a
limited number of possible answers, each one of which leads to another question.
Gradually the amount of data in the knowledge base is reduced until there is only a
small amount of relevant data which must provide the answer to the query.
Advice Giving: An advice giving system is one that follows some process being
done and then offers advice on how to proceed if something needs to be done or
goes wrong.
Decision Making: A decision making knowledge based system is a system
which understands what is happening in a system and has been given enough rules
to be able to make and carry out decisions without further intervention.
Following are the different types of knowledge-based system -
a) Expert System
b) Neural Networks (NNs)
c) Case-based reasoning (CBR)
d) Genetic algorithms
e) Intelligent Agents
f) Data mining.

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Financial Reporting System and Role of IT (page no.-55)
Pivot table
In data processing, a pivot table is a data summarization tool found in data
visualization programs such as spreadsheets or business intelligence software.
Graphics
Graphics (from Greek γραφικός graphikos, 'something written' e.g. autograph)
are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen,
paper, or stone to inform, illustrate, or entertain.
International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS)
Structure of IFRS (page no. - 59)
Framework (page no.-60)
Objective of Financial Statements (page no.-61)
A financial statement should reflect true and fair view of the business affairs of the organization.
Qualitative Characteristics of Financial Statements (page no.-61)
Understandability
Reliability
Comparability
Relevance
True and Fair View
Elements of Financial Statements