Business Environment and Concepts
1. Business structure
2. Economic concepts
3. Financial management
4. Information technology
5. Planning and Measurement
BEC exam structure and weightage
Business Environment and Concepts
1. Business structure
2. Economic concepts
3. Financial management
4. Information technology
5. Planning and Measurement
Application sent...
Hello,
I finally sent my application to be enrolled as a student, they may take six weeks to process my application. I already sent examination fees along with application for business and environment and concepts. by the time the application is processed I want to get ready for the exam, which will be going to be my first exam.
I'm also thinking to prepare some other base material and software other than the book I already have. I'm also planning to prepare for auditing in parallel. so that I can give four months of preparation for auditing. Which I decided to go for Becker. I didn't yet purchased Becker books. I call becker and found that for a single subject the castle cost 900 plus dollars and if we take all the four subjects then they will give one subject for free. And I don't need to sum it to you.
I checked the gleam packages yesterday and read some of their free online material and also did some multiple choice questions. I need to take second opinion for this before I buy this costly materials. One of my husband's CPA friend suggested me to take Becker classes, let me see I get Any better deals.
Right now I'm preparing for a business environment and concepts and want to know down the speed so that I could have an idea of of how much time I will take to complete the whole syllabus to give good reading first and then we'll do the exercises.
As summer is here my weekends are hard to count and I must get the most out of weekdays.
I probably give a reading the whole text book before proceeding to memorise it, prepared notes and then flashcards.
I finally sent my application to be enrolled as a student, they may take six weeks to process my application. I already sent examination fees along with application for business and environment and concepts. by the time the application is processed I want to get ready for the exam, which will be going to be my first exam.
I'm also thinking to prepare some other base material and software other than the book I already have. I'm also planning to prepare for auditing in parallel. so that I can give four months of preparation for auditing. Which I decided to go for Becker. I didn't yet purchased Becker books. I call becker and found that for a single subject the castle cost 900 plus dollars and if we take all the four subjects then they will give one subject for free. And I don't need to sum it to you.
I checked the gleam packages yesterday and read some of their free online material and also did some multiple choice questions. I need to take second opinion for this before I buy this costly materials. One of my husband's CPA friend suggested me to take Becker classes, let me see I get Any better deals.
Right now I'm preparing for a business environment and concepts and want to know down the speed so that I could have an idea of of how much time I will take to complete the whole syllabus to give good reading first and then we'll do the exercises.
As summer is here my weekends are hard to count and I must get the most out of weekdays.
I probably give a reading the whole text book before proceeding to memorise it, prepared notes and then flashcards.
Information technology- scope
After going to the definition of information systems and clearly understanding the process , we need to understand more about the manual systems and the computer systems and how the computer systems are superior over manual systems.
we need to understand the types of computer systems, they characteristics and different types of computers like the supercomputers, mainframe computers, minicomputers, microcomputers, personal computers and PDAs.
And they will proceed to understanding the hardware that is a physical equipmentin the computer
Like the central processing unit, a a Ari thematic/ logic unitand the primary memory and then we will proceed to study about secondary storage, secondary storage devices,RAID, different types of storage devices like computer disks etc.
and then familiarise yourself with the different computer terms relating to Information Systems and then make a study on input devices like a keying data ,online entry ,turnaround documents and automated source data input devicesetc
And we will proceed then to to read more about promising of data, as we used the word data we will learn more about date structure enter data file structure, database systems data dictionary is and structured query language.
we need to make a study on networks and about Internet and different terminology relating to it different technologies of networking and latest trends , telecommunications and finally we will read about effect of a computer on internal control.
Last but not the least is the concept of flowcharting and this briefs about the information technology portion in our business enrolment and concepts.
we need to understand the types of computer systems, they characteristics and different types of computers like the supercomputers, mainframe computers, minicomputers, microcomputers, personal computers and PDAs.
And they will proceed to understanding the hardware that is a physical equipmentin the computer
Like the central processing unit, a a Ari thematic/ logic unitand the primary memory and then we will proceed to study about secondary storage, secondary storage devices,RAID, different types of storage devices like computer disks etc.
and then familiarise yourself with the different computer terms relating to Information Systems and then make a study on input devices like a keying data ,online entry ,turnaround documents and automated source data input devicesetc
And we will proceed then to to read more about promising of data, as we used the word data we will learn more about date structure enter data file structure, database systems data dictionary is and structured query language.
we need to make a study on networks and about Internet and different terminology relating to it different technologies of networking and latest trends , telecommunications and finally we will read about effect of a computer on internal control.
Last but not the least is the concept of flowcharting and this briefs about the information technology portion in our business enrolment and concepts.
Information system - Definition
Definition:
Information systems are the means by which people and organisations, utilising technologies,gather, process, store, use and disseminate information.
Information systems support different types of decisions at different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Major types of Information systems include structural databases and information management software that can include the following;
* Transaction Process Systems (TPS)
* Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS)
* Management Information Systems (MIS)
* Decision Support Systems (DSS)
* Executive Support Systems (ESS)
* Expert systems
Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) :
Transaction processing systems record daily routine transactions such as sales orders from customers, or bank deposits and withdrawals. TPS are vital for the organization, as they gather all the input necessary for other types of systems. Think about how one could generate a monthly sales report for middle management or critical marketing information to senior managers without TPS. TPS provide the basic input to the company's database. A failure in the TPS often means disaster for the organization. Imagine what happens when the reservation system at Turkish Airlines fails: all operations stop, no transactions can be carried out until the system is up again. Long queues form in front of ATMs and tellers when a bank's TPS crashes.
Management information systems:
A management information system (MIS) is a system or process that provides
the information necessary to manage an organization effectively. MIS and the
information it generates are generally considered essential components of
prudent and reasonable business decisions.
The importance of maintaining a consistent approach to the development,
use, and review of MIS systems within the institution must be an ongoing
concern of both bank management and OCC examiners. MIS should have a
clearly defined framework of guidelines, policies or practices, standards, and
procedures for the organization. These should be followed throughout the
institution in the development, maintenance, and use of all MIS.
MIS is viewed and used at many levels by management. It should be
supportive of the institution's longer term strategic goals and objectives. To
the other extreme it is also those everyday financial accounting systems that
are used to ensure basic control is maintained over financial recordkeeping
activities.
More about management information system can be found under this link
http://www.occ.treas.gov/handbook/mis.pdf
Enterprise Collaboration Systems:
Enterprise Collaboration Systems is a type of information system (IS). ECS is a combination of groupware, tools, Internet, extranets and other networks needed to support enterprise-wide communications, such as the sharing of documents and knowledge to specific teams and individuals within the enterprise. Some examples of enterprise communication tools include e-mail, videoconferencing, collaborative document sharing, project management tools and others. The objective of an ECS is to provide each user with the tools for managing communications, documents and other information that individuals need to manage their own tasks efficiently in their departments.
Decision Support Systems (DSS):
Decision Support Systems (DSS) are a specific class of computerized information system that supports business and organizational decision-making activities. A properly-designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.
Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present would be:
* an inventory of all of your current information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),
* comparative sales figures between one week and the next,
* projected revenue figures based on new product sales assumptions;
* the consequences of different decision alternatives, given past experience in a context that is described.
Links:
http://www.tech-faq.com/decision-support-system.shtml
http://dssresources.com/papers/whatisadss/
Executive support system:
A ESS (or DSS more in general) is a software system under control of one of many decision-makers that assists in their activity of decision making by providing and organised set of tools intended to impart structure to portions of the decision making situation and to improve the ultimate effectiveness of the decision outcome".
Sharing the same concepts of a DSS, an ESS focuses more in the end-user requirements of maximum interactivity and user-friendlyness. An ESS can be understood as a friendly, fully customised and interactive DSS to be mostly used by top executives and policy-makers to get permanent and updated assessment in relation to key questions (information and knowledge).
While a complete DSS will have efficient links to external large databases and advanced models, an ESS focuses only on interactive and executive assessment tools, those which can be used personally by end-users. An ESS requires a previous expert work filtering information and knowledge into meaningful indicators and tools.
Because of ESS definition, its design and implementation must integrate future users as much as feasible, since a ESS represents both a challenge and an opportunity to improve their working processes. Although software development play an integral role in any Executive Support System design (and more in general in the Decision Support System world) the analysis of ESS and DSS is about how people think and make decisions Anyway a ESS will induce organisational changes which can not be succesful in complex institutions unless they are clearly preceived and desired since the begining. Recent developments on ESS and DSS tend to integrate the multiple decisions being taken by the institution, so they become Organisational DSS.
An ODSS is therefore a participative process, instead of a mandatory product. In the figure, the green circle represents the domain area of a typical Executive Support System.
Links : http://www.mcrit.com/ASSEMBLING/ASSEMB_CENTRAL/WhatESS.htmit is
Expert system:
An expert system is software that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts, most commonly in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence. A wide variety of methods can be used to simulate the performance of the expert however common to most or all are 1) the creation of a so-called "knowledgebase" which uses some knowledge representation formalism to capture the Subject Matter Experts (SME) knowledge and 2) a process of gathering that knowledge from the SME and codifying it according to the formalism, which is called knowledge engineering. Expert systems may or may not have learning components but a third common element is that once the system is developed it is proven by being placed in the same real world problem solving situation as the human SME, typically as an aid to human workers or a supplement to some information system.
As a premiere application of computing and artificial intelligence, the topic of expert systems has many points of contact with general systems theory, operations research, business process reengineering and various topics in applied mathematics and management science.
Links :
http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aies/www.bus.orst.edu/faculty/brownc/es_tutor/es_tutor.htm
http://www.wtec.org/loyola/kb/c1_s1.htm
Information systems are the means by which people and organisations, utilising technologies,gather, process, store, use and disseminate information.
Information systems support different types of decisions at different levels of the organizational hierarchy. Major types of Information systems include structural databases and information management software that can include the following;
* Transaction Process Systems (TPS)
* Enterprise Collaboration Systems (ECS)
* Management Information Systems (MIS)
* Decision Support Systems (DSS)
* Executive Support Systems (ESS)
* Expert systems
Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) :
Transaction processing systems record daily routine transactions such as sales orders from customers, or bank deposits and withdrawals. TPS are vital for the organization, as they gather all the input necessary for other types of systems. Think about how one could generate a monthly sales report for middle management or critical marketing information to senior managers without TPS. TPS provide the basic input to the company's database. A failure in the TPS often means disaster for the organization. Imagine what happens when the reservation system at Turkish Airlines fails: all operations stop, no transactions can be carried out until the system is up again. Long queues form in front of ATMs and tellers when a bank's TPS crashes.
Management information systems:
A management information system (MIS) is a system or process that provides
the information necessary to manage an organization effectively. MIS and the
information it generates are generally considered essential components of
prudent and reasonable business decisions.
The importance of maintaining a consistent approach to the development,
use, and review of MIS systems within the institution must be an ongoing
concern of both bank management and OCC examiners. MIS should have a
clearly defined framework of guidelines, policies or practices, standards, and
procedures for the organization. These should be followed throughout the
institution in the development, maintenance, and use of all MIS.
MIS is viewed and used at many levels by management. It should be
supportive of the institution's longer term strategic goals and objectives. To
the other extreme it is also those everyday financial accounting systems that
are used to ensure basic control is maintained over financial recordkeeping
activities.
More about management information system can be found under this link
http://www.occ.treas.gov/handbook/mis.pdf
Enterprise Collaboration Systems:
Enterprise Collaboration Systems is a type of information system (IS). ECS is a combination of groupware, tools, Internet, extranets and other networks needed to support enterprise-wide communications, such as the sharing of documents and knowledge to specific teams and individuals within the enterprise. Some examples of enterprise communication tools include e-mail, videoconferencing, collaborative document sharing, project management tools and others. The objective of an ECS is to provide each user with the tools for managing communications, documents and other information that individuals need to manage their own tasks efficiently in their departments.
Decision Support Systems (DSS):
Decision Support Systems (DSS) are a specific class of computerized information system that supports business and organizational decision-making activities. A properly-designed DSS is an interactive software-based system intended to help decision makers compile useful information from raw data, documents, personal knowledge, and/or business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions.
Typical information that a decision support application might gather and present would be:
* an inventory of all of your current information assets (including legacy and relational data sources, cubes, data warehouses, and data marts),
* comparative sales figures between one week and the next,
* projected revenue figures based on new product sales assumptions;
* the consequences of different decision alternatives, given past experience in a context that is described.
Links:
http://www.tech-faq.com/decision-support-system.shtml
http://dssresources.com/papers/whatisadss/
Executive support system:
A ESS (or DSS more in general) is a software system under control of one of many decision-makers that assists in their activity of decision making by providing and organised set of tools intended to impart structure to portions of the decision making situation and to improve the ultimate effectiveness of the decision outcome".
Sharing the same concepts of a DSS, an ESS focuses more in the end-user requirements of maximum interactivity and user-friendlyness. An ESS can be understood as a friendly, fully customised and interactive DSS to be mostly used by top executives and policy-makers to get permanent and updated assessment in relation to key questions (information and knowledge).
While a complete DSS will have efficient links to external large databases and advanced models, an ESS focuses only on interactive and executive assessment tools, those which can be used personally by end-users. An ESS requires a previous expert work filtering information and knowledge into meaningful indicators and tools.
Because of ESS definition, its design and implementation must integrate future users as much as feasible, since a ESS represents both a challenge and an opportunity to improve their working processes. Although software development play an integral role in any Executive Support System design (and more in general in the Decision Support System world) the analysis of ESS and DSS is about how people think and make decisions Anyway a ESS will induce organisational changes which can not be succesful in complex institutions unless they are clearly preceived and desired since the begining. Recent developments on ESS and DSS tend to integrate the multiple decisions being taken by the institution, so they become Organisational DSS.
An ODSS is therefore a participative process, instead of a mandatory product. In the figure, the green circle represents the domain area of a typical Executive Support System.
Links : http://www.mcrit.com/ASSEMBLING/ASSEMB_CENTRAL/WhatESS.htmit is
Expert system:
An expert system is software that attempts to reproduce the performance of one or more human experts, most commonly in a specific problem domain, and is a traditional application and/or subfield of artificial intelligence. A wide variety of methods can be used to simulate the performance of the expert however common to most or all are 1) the creation of a so-called "knowledgebase" which uses some knowledge representation formalism to capture the Subject Matter Experts (SME) knowledge and 2) a process of gathering that knowledge from the SME and codifying it according to the formalism, which is called knowledge engineering. Expert systems may or may not have learning components but a third common element is that once the system is developed it is proven by being placed in the same real world problem solving situation as the human SME, typically as an aid to human workers or a supplement to some information system.
As a premiere application of computing and artificial intelligence, the topic of expert systems has many points of contact with general systems theory, operations research, business process reengineering and various topics in applied mathematics and management science.
Links :
http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/aies/www.bus.orst.edu/faculty/brownc/es_tutor/es_tutor.htm
http://www.wtec.org/loyola/kb/c1_s1.htm
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