in which the many different factors that affect a business are all brought together to perform a function. For instance, the management, marketing, and communications systems are all subsystems that bring information on regulation, people, energy, relevant data, materials, capital, technology, and opportunities into the organization to produce products and services under a set of guidelines. In addition to this, these same subsystems communicate feedback from customers to the appropriate areas in the organization so that the internal processing can be modified to better suit the customer or environment. Examples of such subsystems would be office automation, distributed data processing, electronic funds transfer, decision support, and telecommunications (Weil, 1982, pp. 3-10). The architecture of the system should consist of applications for the various levels of organization, like operations, management control, and strategic planning, and applications oriented to various management activities, like planning, control, and decisionmaking. The s
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