Management Information System - Assignment Example

Management information system Lecture Management information system It has been said that many organizations today find themselves DATA RICH - INFORMATION POOR  KNOWLEDGE STARVED. In the modern world, many companies can be said to be “data rich”. This means that have an enormous amount of raw data than they know exactly what to do with them. Most of these businesses that are data rich often are circumstances where they are “information poor”. This simply means that these businesses are not receiving any useful information from the bulk data they have. Because of these, the organizations eventually become “knowledge starved” ( Lari , 2002). In modern business environment that has proved to be competitive over time, this has several effects that are negative to the organization. It is vital for the companies to process very huge volumes of information that are needed to be able to react and adopt to their changing environment and make business decisions that are good. It is easy to accept the fact that very many organizations are in a position whereby they purchase new technological software. There exists huge amount of information technology products to many businesses as solutions to their problems. The companies that do offer these new products as solutions are always quick in selling and promising good returns when investing in their products but for some business, this will never turn out to be a reality and is kind of a strong technique that they use in marketing and supplying their products. Salespersons and marketers want several organizations to think that they will provide an excellent return on investment to generate sales while using their products. In reality, many products in the market promise lucrative returns upon investing with them and take advantage of the value created by the system. Many systems seem to be function specific. This may not be helpful in many business and companies since the information required by the companies may be varying depending with the organizations. The explosive growth observed in growth of data has contributed to the rapid growth of IT and the world is continuing to accelerate in terms of the sheer volume of the amount of information. With technological advancement, there have been a growing information stores and an overall reduction in the cost and time that is required for analysis and this has adequately helped big data to cross the chasm from the innovation to its early adoption and use (Detlor, 2010). With the overall expansion of the digital era, the world of enterprise data also grows. For data management professionals, the good news is that the magnitude of data will not reach massive scales. In the meantime, the scale of data being handled in organizations deals only with unprecedented data growth that comes from a different sources and systems. The term “big data” emerged as a means of describing the growth in the amount of data along the technology and system required to leverage it. As with the growth of new technology, the term big data is yet to be used universally. The term is used in representing sets of data that cannot easily be managed or analyzed with the old or the common tools of data management, infrastructure and methods. Big data comes along with particular challenges including high volume, increased velocity and variety of data structures in some cases. The characteristics that come along with significant data in organizations bring new challenges to the analysis of data, search, integration of data, discovery of information and exploration, reporting and maintenance of the system. Today in modern business, despite the fact that products of information technology are being sold to companies to act as solutions to the problems facing them, questions pertaining data storage and processes exists. The scope of data is growing above the previous niches in several companies. It is no surprise that big sources of data from a variety of sources enter many companies systems. Hence, managing and organizing them becomes a difficult task to perform. Since the information is growing data faster rate than the solutions being provided to the companies, some data resembles the traditional data sources while others are unstructured and moves at a high velocity making it difficult to be analyzed, the companies still have a problem in data management ( Hong , Chi , Chao & Tang , 2003). With the growth of information technology, new software’s and hardware’s are invented for data storage and analysis. The new inventions are to help organizations ease pressure in their vast amount of data by managing them and safe storage. Despite the new technologies, several organizations are still facing data management, analysis and storage difficulties. They do not realize the dreams they were expecting the new technology to affect their data handling systems positively. With poor management, the company may lose valuable information making it unfit for the market competition. Information systems are vital for the survival of organizations in a highly competitive environment. Discuss this statement with reference to the following: Porter’s competitive forces model The world today has been shaped tremendously by the development in technology because it acts as the means through which several sectors of economics engage in while performing their duties. Various changes have been adopted with the advancement in technology, regarding the manner that business carries out their operations. Information system therefore can be said to be a wider system composed of different activities, variety of people and data that assists an organization to collect, analyse, store and spread the information through the mans of computers or any other manual ways of information dissemination. Information system focuses on ways of interface exploration that exists between the management, information and computer science (Caldas, 2003). Regardless of the business being operated, they all share a common asset. This does not matter whether the company specialises in manufacturing good or provision of services. This is a vital part of any entity in the business. This common asset being shared is information. Information enables businesses to determine their need of creating new products and services. Information is vital since it shows new market or to withdraw from the already existing market. With the information, the companies cannot be in positions to make goods, placing orders, no procurements of materials, no billing of customers and hence the business cannot survive for long. The modern world businesses are becoming more and more dependent information systems as a measure that they use to deal with the complex markets that they operate. The internal organisation in which the business works are a major point of concern concerning the organisation attributes. Accurate and complete information is the current tool that us being in use by business so that they can survive in the market that looks too competitive. Dynamic cooperation networks, mass customization of products and end-to-end process control are the major developments that have made it seem possible for several businesses to be able to recognise their goals. The requirements of business to information systems are rising at a rapid rate. This has even expanded and incorporated in sectors of construction and property especially the one dealing with designing of systems. The application and the use of information system have turned out to be a major attribute that s considerable supporting operational processes of the business. The use of information system in business has been noted to have several advantages. These include providing information that is relevant and necessary for the organisation to carry out its duties appropriately. The information system helps a business entity to proceed with the transactions in a manner that is faster and efficient. Information system seems to be vital in respect to the necessary data availability to proceed with the functions of the businesses. Information system is thought to be providing information that is of high quality. Despite this, its application in construction and property industries is still minimal. The information system may prove to be vital of the companies as it will provide useful information through identification of the potential competitors in the market, the competition that exists between rivals in the market, the buyers and suppliers bargaining powers and the threat of the substitute products. The company will use the available information once ready to make strategies on how to enter the market and dominate. Without the information system, companies may find it hard to penetrate the market chains to the top because of the stiff competition that already is in existence. (Gorla, Somers, & Wong, 2010) Porter’s forces do vary from one company to the other. The forces tend to have an influence on the profitability of the company since they have great effect on the prices of goods and services, costs and the investments capital that is essential for business competition and survival in the market. Porter’s model also helps in significantly making decisions strategically since the decisions will be used by the company managers in determining a company’s structure of competition in the market. Organisations can make use of the porter’s forces model to understand their situations when they look at each of the forces. When the organisation’s brainstorms the relevant factors for its market of the situation, it is and check against the factors that are listed for each of the forces, a reasonable strategy might be found. In a case where a new organization wants to enter the market and stabilise its product it will first have to gather information about the costs of products it wants to introduce in the market and how the consumers behave towards its purchase. The organisation must also collect relevant information on the other types of products that matches their brand and how the market behave upon introduction of such products and the likely impact they will have to suffer in case such products enter the market. The importance of such information will help the organisation strategize their brand, the cost they will have to charge the consumers and how to introduce it in the market to avoid wrong timing and pricing that might lead o immediate rejection. Taco Bell How did Taco Bell Use their IT Systems to gain competitive strategy. Taco Bell began gaining competition into the market world when it had the electronic point of sale introduced in place. The system not only allowed a chance to improve on taking orders and ways to handle cash, but also data on which food forecasting could be made. The idea transformed into a way that it reduced the time spent by customers in queuing to wait for certain kind of services done to them either during payment, when cash is handled by the machine, it is assumed to be accurate unless the person dealing with the system manipulated some variables. Otherwise, honesty while serving customers is enhanced. Another key area where information technology has saved most of Tacos burden is when it comes to computations needed to be done by every manager at the end of the day. The managers are usually needed to compile daily reports. Initially, it was done through manual reports but since the introduction of information technology, the managers find it easy to analyze the daily reports on 46 key performance measures, assist with production and lab our scheduling that helped in inventory control. These were to a great advantage because it reduced the time restaurant managers spent on paper work to about sixteen hours per week. Critical Questions, Directors should ask about their IT Among the critical questions most managers can be asked is how good can they think they can be able to manipulate data on the machines to give the exact or similar variables to another branch operated by Taco Bill? It means that at the end of the day is it possible to have made roughly similar figures because the restaurants under one title are providing similar terms of work conditions. Is it true that IT has lessened work that could be done by mankind to compute it into easy tasks? A part from the listed examples how could the managers help us prove that the statement is true? Is IT too much involving does it require one to be keen when it comes to computing data and making transactions? Why is it a yes or no for IT that makes it qualifies to be such involving? Has information Technology reflected a new style of operation as portrayed from the majority by word of mouth? References Hong , K.-S., Chi , Yen-Ping , Chao , Louis R. , & Tang , Jih-Hsing . (2003). An integrated system theory of information security management. Information Management & Computer Security. doi:10.1108/09685220310500153 Lari , Alireza . (2002). An integrated information system for quality management. Business Process Management Journal. doi:10.1108/14637150210425126 Caldas, M. P. (2003). Management information systems: managing the digital firm. Revista de Administração Contemporânea. doi:10.1590/S1415-65552003000100014 Detlor, B. (2010). Information management. International Journal of Information Management, 30, 103–108. doi:10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2009.12.001 Gorla, N., Somers, T. M., & Wong, B. (2010). Organizational impact of system quality, information quality, and service quality. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems. doi:10.1016/j.jsis.2010.05.001 Read More