Information Systems Paper
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CIS/205
XXXX X, 2011
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Information systems greatly affect the business process in an organization. To understand the impact we must first understand what a business process is. A business process is a collection of related activities that produce something of value to an organization, stakeholders, or customers (Turban & Volonino, 2010). For example, a business process can define how to stock raw materials into inventory or it may define the entire manufacturing process for building finish goods. The business process is the heart of any operations as it defines how to conduct business on a daily basis. The role of information systems is to affect these processes by improving their efficiency. The scope of this paper is to describe a business process within my current place of employment. This paper will also describe inefficiencies and improvements.
Business Process Defined
The student lending process is when a student applies for a student loan at a local credit union bank. Once the student applies for the loan, the bank will hand the student a packet of documents, which need to be completed and faxed. Once the faxed documents are received, the long tedious process begins. First, we have one person taking all the faxes received, which are in e-mail form and prints it on paper. At this point, the sorter has hard copies of the documents, and they proceeds to sort them by student number. A manila folder with the student number is created if the document is new or it is placed in the existing folder. At the end of the day, all these sorted documents are placed onto a cart and walked to the student lending department.
The student lending department takes these vast amount of documents and begin the verification process. The verification process checks for document completion and errors. The student lending representative will call the student and discuss any of the aforementioned verifications. If...