Information System Functions, Challenges & Open Source Vulnerability

This essay explores the functions of information systems (IS) and the challenges encountered by Donhauefavret contractors. It identifies three key entities within an IS: organizational units, IS professionals (programmers, managers, analysts), and technology (software/hardware). A significant portion of the essay discusses challenges associated with open-source software, including vulnerabilities, inadequate support, and a steep learning curve. The essay focuses on vulnerability as a grand challenge, highlighting the risk of malicious code modifications by individuals with ill intentions, potentially disrupting organizational functions. The document concludes by referencing several academic sources that support the analysis of the topic. Desklib provides access to this and many other solved assignments.

Running Head: INFORMATION SYSTEM
INFORMATION SYSTEM
Name of Student
Name of University
Author’s Note

1INFORMATION SYSTEM
In this particular assignment, it would be discussed how does Information System (IS)
function, and the challenges faced by the organization named Donhauefavret contractors. It
would further select a grand challenge and discuss why it was chosen as a grand challenge.
Information system function usually has three entities. The first entity is organizational
unit that is usually known as department of information system (Klukas, Chen & Pape, 2014).
The second entity is programmers, information system managers, project leaders as well as
system analysts that form a group. The entities also include some of the external specialists like
hardware vendors and infrastructures. The third portion of thes system includes the technology,
software and hardware. The information system present in the open source software of the
particular organization encounters various challenges. These challenges are as follows.
 Vulnerability: Since numerous people have the access to source code, it can result
in increasing its chances to exposing them vulnerabilities. This is because not
everyone referring to code has good intentions. Most of the contributors of open
source utilize their access in order to find out loopholes as well as fix them
(Baltru, Robinson & Morency, 2016). There are numerous contributors who
would exploit their access in order to create vulnerabilities and produce bugs for
polluting hardware and steal the identities. This challenge is one of the greatest
among all which can lead to serious issues in functioning of the organization.
 Inadequate support: The community of open source is very large but still it faces
difficulty in looking for support to solve a problem. One more factor in open
source is that people do not know who actually designed the code. In this case, it
is very difficult to find out who is responsible for such vulnerabilities. In this
challenge the organization might faces serious issues regarding recruiting skilled

2INFORMATION SYSTEM
professionals (Rognes, Flouri & Nichols, 2016). Skilled professionals are
important in handling open source softwares; it reduces the chance of
vulnerabilities.
 Steep learning curve: Open source might not be straightforward and easy to use.
Some operating systems like Linux are comparatively steeper and cannot be
learned very quickly. Linux is technically very superior compared to many other
types of software but many users find it difficult (Lopez-Calderon & Luck,
2014). Hiring the appropriate resources with good skills is a very difficult task.
Professionals who are not skilled in operating systems like Linux create
difficulties for the organization.
The chosen challenge in the case of this organization is vulnerability. Vulnerability of
open source may result in serious problems occurring in the organization. The development
teams of organization rely on the open source software for accelerating the deliveries of
innovation (Baltru, Robinson & Morency, 2016). The agile as well as traditional processes of
development are often pre-built and reusable software components of open source. The
vulnerability of ill intentions of the code developers might be a huge risk for the organization
because it may cause dysfunctional activities that take place under the organization. In case a
professional with wrong intention edits the source code and this code is referred to by the
organizations it might not achieve its desired outcomes. These are the reasons why this challenge
has been selected as the grand one.

3INFORMATION SYSTEM
References
Baltruaitis, T., Robinson, P., & Morency, L. P. (2016, March). Openface: an open source facialš
behavior analysis toolkit. In Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2016 IEEE
Winter Conference on (pp. 1-10). IEEE.
Klukas, C., Chen, D., & Pape, J. M. (2014). IAP: an open-source information system for high-
throughput plant phenotyping. Plant physiology, pp-113.
Lopez-Calderon, J., & Luck, S. J. (2014). ERPLAB: an open-source toolbox for the analysis of
event-related potentials. Frontiers in human neuroscience, 8, 213.
Rognes, T., Flouri, T., Nichols, B., Quince, C., & Mahé, F. (2016). VSEARCH: a versatile open
source tool for metagenomics. PeerJ, 4, e2584.