Management of Information within an Organization - Research Paper Example

 Hypothesis statement This research paper aims at helping the company mangers to explore the management of information within an organization and particularly its objectives and learning outcomes expected from this study of portfolio is to be able to demonstrate competence in management of varying methods that are used in collection and analysis of research and the underpinning rationale for their application. Another objective is to be able to manage the synthesis of information and/or data by the use of appropriate procedures and technologies, while at same time being able to appreciate and comprehend the role of information systems in maintenance of accurate and secure information for the modern organizational environment. This paper also would enable business mangers to demonstrate practical skills in utilizing a wide range of IT tools for dissemination, analysis and presentation of data and information. TASK 1/PART A-MANAGEMENT OF INFORMATION Scenario 5: Promotions/Events You are managing a small independent promotions organisation based in a suburb of Birmingham. You provide and promote a wide range of events and conferences across the city making use of a range of different venues which you can book as necessary. The company produces a series of themed brochures and publicity material, operates a web site for the benefit of customers and takes bookings through the Internet and by telephone. The events you promote cover a sphere of activities from drama and music to sport and specialist conferences. You have three members of staff working for you in the office and a telesales team. You, as manager, have overall responsibility for the IT systems within the organisation. PORTFOLIO 1-FIND THE BEST CUSTOMERS Search for the company’s best customers. You will use this to identify customers to contact with special offers. Selecting appropriate fields to make this a useful query, find all the previous customers (yes in criteria) who have also paid their balance. Sort the query by surname. Save the query with an appropriate name including your name and print it. Put it in your portfolio. Close the query. Remember that the assignment task also requires you to explain the business reason for your query, the search criteria you used, and your reason for selecting the query the specific fields and an explanation of how this function helps your business to be more efficient. PORTFOLIO 2-USING TWO TABLES IN THE SAME DATABASE IN ORDER TO USE COMBINED DATA You are now going to import another table into your database. This table contains a selection of events. By storing the two sets of data in one database, you can use them together to show combined information: for example the customer details, their chosen event, and cost. In order to link the two tables so that you can achieve this flexibility, each record in the event table must have a unique reference number, this is also displayed in the customer table, thus identifying which event customer has chosen. You can then use this Reference No field to create a relationship between the two tables. Import another table Click on the tables tab. From the field menu, select get external data and import. The import dialog box will appear. In the look in the box, select the teaching directory. Open the IM folder (double click). Click once on the MRI events database, and then click on the import button. From the import object box, ensure that the tables tab is selected then click once on the events table to select it (make it blue), and click OK. The table events will be displayed in your database objects dialog box. Rename the events table to include your name Open the table and study the type of data it contains. Have a look at the design view as well. Close the table. Efficiency in customer information management utilizing flexible and demand CRM policy solution The manger of this company should strive to consolidate the company’s extensive customer data which has been dispersed throughout emails, spreadsheets, and other various databases, hence it requires a solution that would help organize the information of their customers without having to waste lots of money and time deploying an application where they would not be able to leverage its functionality in full. Business policy statement: Data Protection Act 1998 DPA (1998) refers to a Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom which outlines the law of UK as far as data procession is concerned on belonging to living people who are identifiable. It’s the primary piece of law that governs the personal data protection in the United Kingdom. This legislation does not however mention privacy but it was enacted in order to bring United Kingdom legislations to comply with those of the European Directive of 1995 which requires all members’ countries to protect the fundamental freedoms and rights of citizens/people and especially the peoples’ right to privacy in respect to personal data procession. This in essence provides private people with a means of controlling their private information, and most of this act does not apply to domestic utilization like personal address book keeping. But anyone who holds data of personal nature would be obliged legally to comply with this directive Act, but subjected to some exceptions. This Act on the other hand outlines several principles of protection of data. This Data Protection Act 1998 helped consolidate and replace earlier law/legislation like the 1987’s Access to Personal Files Act and the 1984’s Data Protection Act. This act also aims at implementing the European Protection of Data Directive and as also been refined through electronic marketing and communication, by subsequent laws/legislations. Like the Electronic and Privacy Communications Regulations of 2003 has changed the consent requirement for most activities of electronic marketing to positive consents for instance an opt inbox. Exemptions to this rule still exist for marketing activities of related services and products to enquirers and customers who still exist in a business. Principles/policy The company would only use the data for the specific roles it was intended for during its first collection, it would also avoid disclosing the data to other parties without seeking consent from the individual owners of the information, unless there exist a legislation or other reason that overrides the legal reasons to share the information for instance crime or fraud detection and prevention. It would also be an offence should third parties obtain personal information from the company without proper authorization from the relevant individuals. Private individuals on the other hand would also be having unrestricted access to the information that the company holds concerning them, but is subjected to some exemptions for instance information about them being held in order to detect and prevent crimes and frauds. The personal information on the other would be kept not longer tha is required and necessary and should be updated regularly. The company would not also sent information to areas outside the European Economic Area unless the private individuals whom the information is about has provided consent or adequate security and protection is installed, for instance the use of contract forms that are prescribed in order to govern data transmission. The company would also have to register with the registrar of information commission in order to process entries of personal data except information processing for very simple and domestic use. The company should also put in place adequate security measures in order to be allowed to process personal information and may include technical measures like firewalls and other organizational measures like training of the members of staff. The company would also be required to have factually incorrect information corrected by the concerned subjects without including matters of opinion. This legislation/policy would only be protecting identifiable private individuals who are still alive, while aggregated or anonymized data would not benefit with this kind of protection as long as aggregation or anonymization has been conducted in an irreversible manner. Individuals are identifiable through use of addresses, names, email addresses, or telephone numbers. This act only is applicable to data being or being intended to be held by the company concerned, on automated equipments like computers or being held in files or databases. Also paper address book are also categorized as filing system that is relevant for instance the diaries that help support commercial purposes like the diaries of the salespeople. The legislation also stipulates that the data needs to be processed lawfully and fairly, and in order to be categorized as processed fairly, the six conditions below should be applicable to the concerned data, and include the fact that the subject of the data ie the person whose data is to be processed, must consent to the data procession. The procession of data should also commence only if its required in order to perform a contract, or so because its required for certain procession of the required legal obligation other than commencement of a contract. The processing should also be important for the protection of interests of the subject data, or should it be necessary for the carrying out of the public functions. It would also be legal should processing is so that to allow pursuing of the legitimate interests of control of data or control of third parties, as long as it does not prejudice the interests of the data subject. The company should also identify sensitive personal information/data that have to be processed in accordance with the strictest rules/conditions and especially all consents should be explicit. This Act has been structured so that all personal data processing is protected by the act while at same time providing some limited exceptions like in section 28, concerning the national security. This exemption provides that all data processing that are necessary to provide national security are exempted from any principle of data protection. Another exemption is that of section 29 of the Act that entails taxations and crimes. This sections postulates that data that is processed in order to detect and prevent crime, prosecution or apprehension of offenders, or that deals with assessment and collection of taxes would be exempted from principle one of the data protection. The final is in section 36 that deals with domestic purposes of data, which says that any processing of data for the sake of individuals purposes, or for family or household reasons is exempted from all the protection principles of data processing. TASK 2/PART 2-MANAGEMENT OF RESEARCH Brief business description The business is about independent promotion of events based in a suburb of Birmingham and am the managing it. The organization deals with provision and promotion of a wide range of events and conferences across the city utilizing a range of various venues which can be book as required by the customers. The firm has produced a series of themed publicity materials like brochures, while at same time operating a web site for the benefit of its customers and takes bookings through the internet and also through individual phone numbers. The events that we promote in this organization cover a sphere of activities from music and drama to sporting activities and specialist conferences. The company has three staff members who are working in the company office and a telesales team, while I being the overall manager have got the responsibility for all the IT systems within the organization. Problem areas The company shareholders have left all the day to day activities of the organizations to me being the manager, hence am responsible of taking interest in the company’s progress. This organization has been in operation since 2006 and the problem has been that the number of customers has not increased as required while the expenditure has remained so high contrary to the original vision of the business plan. The shareholders require immediate improvements in these areas to attain their satisfaction hence, in order to improve the business conditions, the management has decided to investigate reasons that has made customer morale and loyalty to plummet over the years. Objectives/ Aim of the research The aim of this research is therefore to investigate using questionnaires as a primary research technique, the reasons that discourage customers from actively getting engaged with the company and analyzing the factors that have contributed to low customer retention over the three years since inception of the company. Another objective of this research is to analyze the advantages and limitations of the selected technique of primary research that is questionnaire method while at same time justifying the method. This research would also explain how research method would be administered in this context involving the selection and size of population samples as deemed appropriate. This paper would also evaluate the attached questionnaire that the shareholders used to find out about the customer service that the company provides. It would go ahead and comment on the suitability of the same and, where appropriate, suggest improvements. This paper would assess how well the questionnaire can investigate customer service and finally, it would also analyze the data gathered by the shareholders concerning the customer service, and it would also outline appropriate recommendations to the owners as a result of the research findings from their questionnaire. Primary research method: questionnaires This is a research tool/instrument that consists of a series of prompts and questions for the purpose of information gathering form the targeted respondents. Questionnaires are often designed for statistical analysis of results/responses.It usually consist of several questions that respondent has to provide answers for is a prescribed format, and a difference is provide between closed and open-ended questions. The closed-ended question allows the respondent to pick an answer, whereas an open-ended question asks respondents to formulate her own answers. The response fro the open-ended questions have to mutually exclusive and exhaustive, and they can be ordinal-polytomous questions, dichotomous questions, nominal-polytomous questions or continuous/bounded questions. The answers of open-ended questions respondents would have to be coded into a response scale after the administration. Advantages and limitations In comparison with other forms of surveys, questionnaires are relatively cheap, and do not require much efforts from the administrator relative to telephone/verbal surveys. The questionnaires also often have standardized answers hence making it simple to during data compilation, however this standardization of answers may frustrate both the respondents and the compilers. Another limitation of questionnaires is that the respondents have to read the questions before having to respond to them. Hence, for certain demographic categories, performing surveys using questionnaire might be impractical. A questionnaire also faces numerous problems that are connected with construction of questions and wording that are in existence in some forms opinion polls. Justification of questionnaires Though use of questionnaires exposes users to several challenges, still its the best method of chosen especially when sampling the customer responses in the company in question. This is because they are very cost effective in comparison with the face to face interviews, due to the large samples sizes and expansive geographical location of the respondents/customers. It’s even more advantageous as the number of questions to be asked in research increases. Questionnaires are also easy to analyze through data tabulation and entry which is easy to conduct by the use of computer software packages. They are also familiar and acceptable to most people involved since almost everyone has at least had some experience in completion of the same and also they do generally make involved people apprehensive. On the other hand, they do minimize bias, since they have uniform presentation of questions without any middle-man biases. Also visual and verbal clues are absent in this mode of survey that may influence the respondent, while opinions of researchers also do not affect answers that respondents are to offer. Finally, questionnaires are les intrusive compared to the face-to-face and telephone surveys, since whenever respondent receives a questionnaire through mail, he/she would be free to respond on his own appropriate time-table, unlike other survey techniques that require respondents to response immediately hence feels interrupted by the research instrument. Questionnaires administration There are several modes of administering questionnaires, and include the face-to-face mode of administration where an interviewer orally presents the question items. Another mode is the pencil-and-paper mode, where the items of questionnaire are presented on paper and respondents provide answers using pencils. The computerized questionnaire mode of administration is quite advanced and entails the presentation of the question items on the computer terminal. Finally, there exist the adaptive computerized administrations of questionnaires, where some items selection are presented on computer and based on items answers provided; computer selects items that follow which optimize the respondent’s estimated trait or ability. Evaluation of attached questionnaire This assists both the company management and the shareholders to assess the performance of the company and be able to identify areas that require improvement in the service provision to its customers. The customers, through this questionnaire have been given the chance to rate the organization in several areas of performance evaluation including provision of services in the ordering or the booking category. The customers have to assess the speed at which services are provided, the friendliness of the services, the selection of products on offer, and the knowledge of staff concerning the products that they are offering. Any discrepancies indicated by poor ratings would beckon for corrective measures to be instituted. On the internet site, the customers rate organization by assessing the usefulness of the site in terms of its user friendliness, lay out of the site, and the whether the user utilize the site often. While for the product, the managers/shareholders would have chance of knowing whether customers would recommend the products to their friends, whether they would come back for subsequent purchases, and whether they got satisfied with the services they were given, including the overall quality of the services that organization offers. This is vital as it helps management to improve of product and service quality for the satisfaction of the customers. Finally, the shareholders/manager would assess the amount of money that customers spend on its products and services; hence this is important since they would be able to assess its sales capacity. Gender would also help to know whether ladies buy more or the gents who buy well, while the time of visit would enable management to know when to expect more customers in order to prepare to receive them. Analysis of the customer service questionnaire data Data coding has been obtained originally with amendments below: 1-For excellent 2-For Good 3-For Fair 4-For Poor 5-For Can’t Say The questionnaire below indicate need for improvement in product and service delivery by the company in order to satisfy and retain more customers as indicated by the ratings. As far as comments made by customers on question 16 is concerned, few customers have expressed positive comments hence indicating to the shareholders and management that a lot still needs to be conducted towards satisfaction of the customers are the sole providers of income of the company. Suggested improvements Include the fact that the website should be made friendlier to users both internal and external users. The products quality and services delivery should be work on in order to meet the customer specific needs, and also the information system should be designed in such a way as the marketing team should be able to conduct the customers for a repeat sales while at same time allowing new customers to assess the company products and services. ID No Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 1 5 5 5 2 4 4 4 5 5 2 5 1 1 1 No comment 2 4 4 3 2 5 1 5 2 5 1 1 2 2 3 Good 3 2 3 2 2 3 4 4 2 5 5 3 1 1 1 I prefer the Internet 4 5 1 3 5 1 1 5 3 5 3 4 5 2 1 Friendly 5 1 2 1 3 5 5 2 1 3 4 4 2 1 5   6 5 3 2 1 5 4 2 3 1 2 2 5 2 1 No comment 7 3 4 4 1 3 5 4 3 2 1 3 4 1 3 helpful but slow 8 3 2 5 3 1 3 5 5 2 1 2 3 1 2   9 3 4 2 4 2 4 3 5 4 5 3 3 1 2 Friendly 10 1 3 3 1 1 4 5 1 5 1 5 4 1 1 need to listen to customers more 11 5 2 4 2 5 3 5 5 2 2 2 5 2 1   12 2 3 5 5 5 3 2 2 1 3 1 5 1 2 No comment 13 1 2 1 4 5 4 4 5 5 3 1 2 1 4   14 2 3 5 1 3 2 3 2 2 5 1 1 1 2 Great stuff 15 2 2 1 4 2 1 2 4 1 4 4 2 2 1 She was really nice but didn't speak English 16 5 3 1 5 2 3 2 3 2 5 1 5 1 1 Could do better 17 3 2 4 2 3 5 4 1 1 4 5 3 1 4 No comment 18 4 3 4 2 2 3 1 3 4 4 1 2 2 2 Three stars 19 4 5 3 2 2 5 2 1 5 5 2 1 1 5 Grumpy woman 20 3 1 5 1 3 3 4 3 1 5 2 2 1 2 Excellent service 21 3 1 5 2 2 1 1 4 2 2 4 2 1 1   22 4 5 3 5 1 4 3 5 3 1 1 1 1 4 Fast and efficient 23 2 1 4 2 3 3 4 4 2 2 1 2 1 2 Happy staff 24 1 3 5 2 1 2 2 5 1 1 4 1 2 3 He didn’t now what he was on about 25 3 1 1 2 2 3 1 4 2 1 1 2 2 3 I came because my friend said it would be a good idea but I will not come back again TOTALS 76 68 81 65 71 80 83 89 76 72 63 66 33 57 ID No Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4 Q5 Q6 Q7 Q8 Q9 Q10 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 26 1 1 4 2 3 4 1 5 4 3 5 3 1 3 Good service 27 3 2 5 4 1 4 3 3 3 1 3 5 1 1 train staff better 28 3 5 1 1 5 1 2 5 4 5 2 3 2 5 Didn’t know what was on offer 29 1 1 3 1 3 1 2 2 5 1 2 5 1 1 Slow 30 2 5 2 5 1 4 5 2 2 5 3 5 2 3 Slow 31 5 1 2 1 1 1 2 3 5 5 2 1 1 3 You could at least smile when I crack a joke 32 2 4 5 5 5 3 3 1 3 2 5 4 1 2 Careless 33 4 5 5 3 2 5 1 1 1 2 5 2 2 3 Can't say 34 5 2 4 3 1 4 3 4 3 2 2 3 1 4 See you next week! 35 2 4 4 4 2 5 5 4 5 4 3 2 1 4 Yum 36 4 5 5 2 4 1 1 3 5 4 1 5 1 4 Couldn’t answer my questions 37 4 4 5 3 1 2 1 2 5 3 1 2 2 2 Love it 38 5 1 5 1 3 5 4 1 3 2 2 5 2 4 Good 39 1 5 4 1 3 1 4 4 1 5 2 5 2 5 Price is brail 40 3 3 2 3 5 1 3 5 2 3 2 1 1 1 did not understand what I wanted 41 1 4 4 3 4 1 2 1 1 4 1 4 2 5 Was better last time 42 2 4 4 5 3 5 1 1 3 5 3 1 1 1 Waste of time filling this form in 43 5 4 5 1 5 5 2 5 3 3 5 3 2 3 Ask too many useless questions 44 4 5 3 3 1 5 1 2 5 4 5 4 1 4 need to speak more clearly 45 1 5 4 2 2 4 4 3 5 5 1 2 1 5 Slow 46 1 4 4 2 5 3 2 3 1 1 3 5 2 4 need to know more about business 47 5 2 1 4 5 3 4 4 5 5 4 5 2 5 Fast 48 2 5 3 4 5 1 3 5 4 4 3 2 2 3 Don't know 49 1 2 1 1 2 3 5 5 5 4 3 5 1 5 Where to you buy your clothes 50 3 5 1 2 3 1 2 1 2 4 5 2 2 3 It is my birthday TOTALS 70 89 86 66 88 73 70 75 90 79 76 84 37 87 TOTALS 146 157 167 131 159 153 153 164 166 151 139 150 70 144 References Remote sensing and geographical information system for natural resources management, Joint publication of Indian Society of Remote Sensing and National Natural Resources Management System, Dept. of Space, 1998, University of Michigan McCloy K.R., 1995, Resource management information systems: process and practice, 2nd Ed., Taylor & Francis: ISBN0748401202, 9780748401208 Anderson K & Kerr C., 2002, Customer relationship management, 3rd Ed., McGraw-Hill Professional: ISBN0071379541, 9780071379540 Laudon K.C., 2002, Management Information Systems: Managing the Digital Firm, 10/e, Pearson Education Pride W. 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