Customer Reviews

Principles of Information Systems: A Managerial Approach

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Having both studied and taught IS, I'll make two separate sets of comments - one for professors and one for students.

Students first... There is a well-done website that accompanies the book, which includes outlines, sample tests & quizzes, and related study materials. The text is about average in terms of readability in comparison to other texts on the subject (IS texts tend to read a little on the dry side). Unless your professor insists on the latest edition, you may be able to get by with a previous edition, since the chapter structures & content haven't been re-arranged much for the last two editions. You must be advised on the issue of using previous editions, though, since Stair and Reynolds do a fair job of keeping the material up-to-date.

For professors... In my experience, IS texts seem to fall into either a highly technical or highly managerial category. Stair and Reynolds do a fair job of plotting a course between the two, although I have found that the "technical" chapters seem to be a little too much for undergraduate business students in their standard "MIS" course (I've never taught engineering students, but the same may hold true for the "managerial" chapters on the other side of the fence). The text is accompanied with ample instructor resources, including a CD and a website with slideshows, notes, outlines, and various other pedagogical tools. The testbank is easy to use, but can be somewhat challenging for an undergraduate business student, adequate for an undergraduate MIS student, and contains enough "difficult" questions that you should be able to use it for a MBA students as well. I would pick something else for a graduate MS/ MIS curriculum. Stair and Reynolds have also done a fair job of keeping the material up-to-date, which has resulted, after six editions, in a pretty decent proiduct. For me, the instructor resources make Stair and Reynolds a good choice by comparison to other IS texts.

mmm... If I didn't have to have this book as a course text, I would have soon discarded it. Maybe I'm missing the point of what PRINCIPLES of Information Systems are all about, but I get the distinct impression from this particular book that Principles of Information Systems is simply an exercise in 'reading someone's watch, then telling them the time'. The authors formalize with great diagrams, case histories and explanations, how Information Systems are structured in business today. However they only lightly touch on what principles (good logic if you wish), should be employed in designing a 'quality' Information System. The closest they really get to this is sometimes posing the issue in the question sections (answers not provided!). I know Information Systems is a lot more than simply knowing how existing ones structured but if you want to know more beyond this, don't expect to find answers in this book.

When I began this course, I felt lucky that I had already had a lot of experience in the world of e-commerce, just because I had problems paying attention to the book when I was reading it. I found myself doing two things at the same time in order to retain any of the information in it. It has a lot of information - but it's presented in an extremely boring manner. I put off reading quite a few chapters until the day before my final exam. The only thing of any interest were the case studies at the beginning of each chapter.

Prescribed to all new BCom students locally as part of an introductory informatics course, it serves it purpose colourfully and with lots of applications in real world situations. Not completely up to date on the newest issues, but worth a buy.

This book is seriously a cure for insomnia. Now note that I am an information systems major at James Madison University, and I do find the material interesting, but the way this book is written, it will put you to sleep. Better have other textbooks handy if you are planning to read this in order to switch to them to wake up before continuing. It is VERY dry reading. Otherwise, it's a good text, and does convey the point.

Excellent book for college students wanting background on Management Information Systems. Well annotated with practical examples and exercises. Prescribed for Freshman students at most South African Universities.

This book offers a complete view of the matter it deals with. It is an essential reference to anyone who wants to get a complete idea of how to use computers at work in the more efficient and effective way. As a teacher of Information System at Uniban, São Paulo, Brazil, I consider it a fundamental book that offers a creative and interesting insight in the subject. We had no doubt in adopting it as a basic text in the course we have, since the first year.

Although this book must be commended on the variety of topics and sub topics covered, it is very badly researched. Some sections I doubt were even researched at all, it seemed as if the author is just giving his opinion on how he "thinks" things are, and in the majority of these cases, he is at best only half right. My favorites are his lists like, Consists of..., Divided into the following..., Main elements are... etc. Some of these lists can only have been sucked out of his thumb, because they certainly were not based on any thoroughly researched facts.
IS is actually based on some very simple concepts that have grown and developed into today's seemingly complicated IS infrastructure and not the black and white boxes that Stair tries fit things into. I doubt the authors have much practical experience of IT, because they don't know the difference between marketing concepts and real IT concepts. These are just "selling techniques guys" not IS principles!

I would say that this book is not written for novices, but by novices. If you don't know any better then I think you will enjoy this book, because it will fit in well with a novices false preconceptions of how Information systems work. If you come from a practical IT background of 10 years + like myself and have actually witnessed the development of some of these technologies, this is a scary read.

One last note, colleges and universities that use this book as a reference are simply displaying their absolute ignorance about the subject that they profess to teach.

As a scientist and engineer I find some disturbingly stupid ideas presented in this book. For example, their definition of productivity on page 64: Productivity = (Output/Input) x 100% Output/Input makes no sense. Saying productivty is 30 reports for 40 hours work makes sense. Saying productivity is 75% means nothing. If you made the denominator one week instead of 40 hours, the productivity would be 3000%. What tremendous productivity gain and all I had to do was change hours to weeks. Percentages ONLY make sense when the numerator and denominator have the same units. What they are suggesting is stupid. By presenting the productivity (improperly) as a percent, they've eliminated all the useful information from the productivity value.

The authors really have no sense of how to present informative, useful statistics. Another example is Figure 3.8 on page 97, which purportedly shows the cost per megabyte of several different storage devices. They inconsistently choose the drive mechanism cost for some types and the storage media costs for others. For DAT tape and 3.5" diskettes they choose the media cost and for ZIP and JAZ drives you choose the drive cost. Why not use the cost of ZIP and JAZ media so that the table would present consistent, useful information? If this is typical of the rest of the book, I would be very doubtful of it presenting any useable rational information.

It was an informational book, discussing the importance of information systems.