What is an information system?
Before talking about the state of information systems, it might be useful to give a clear definition of what an information system is and even what a system is.
A system is a group of items that operate together to reach a common goal. This is the basic difference between a system and a union of individualities: the parts of a system work together toward a vision.
An information system (we will sometimes abbreviate it as IS) furthers this definition as a group of items that share information to reach a common objective. Strictly speaking, an IS is not necessarily made of software, even though most of what we will talk about in this book is about computerized information systems. And, even in the most sophisticated IS, there remains a non-neglectable part of information that is not software-contained. This is a situation that we will talk about, but for the main part of this book, we will put ourselves in the hypothesis of software-based information...
