Management Information Systems (MIS) is the study of three major factors
People
Technology
Organizations
How do you study these factors together? Actually, you can only study them if you have an interest in technology and the desire to use technology to improve people’s lives.
In the business world, MIS is a major which concentrates on solving business problems and creating new opportunities with technology. In fact, in MIS, modern and computerized systems gather relevant data, both from inside and outside an organization. This data is then processed, integrated, and stored in a centralized database (or data warehouse) where it is constantly updated and made accessible to all who have the authority to access it, in a form that suits their purpose. For instance, Amazon could use a computer database to keep track of which products sell best.
Previously, the MIS department was originally the whole of information technology. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, practitioners and business schools referred to MIS rather than IT. Enterprise computing’s main role was to help the CEO and CFO with information systems management for a few key run-the-business tasks, such as order entry, accounting and budgeting. Programmers carefully wrote codes on a mainframe to carry out these functions because no enterprise applications existed. Can you guess the results if businesses still run manual accounting? The CFO oversaw MIS, ensuring that the developers and administrators delivered what accounting needed.
Further in the 1980s, with the appearance of PCs that ran spreadsheets, the scope of computing’s responsibilities started to alter. Personal spreadsheets took business-critical processes out of the domain of upper management; MIS expected to benefit a more extensive scope of clients, deploying external as well as internal software programs. Therefore, the name of the department changed to reflect this new set of internal customers, becoming Information Systems (IS). The MIS department became one, still-vital part of the overall IS department.