Information Management - Essay Example

Question1. Describe the information management issues raised by this case.

 A number of information management issues were identified in the case study. One was imperfect and insufficient user role-play in the system development process. At the time of the designing of the information system, Water Management was in the initial stage. Business processes were quite limited not helping the IT staff to take part with dedication to design for their own processes. The IT people had to learn by practice from manual processes.

Issues emerged from organizational and financial perspective coming in the way of an up-to-date and modern information system, as desired by KOBWA. Database management skills of the staff were weak and there were pressures to reduce costs.

The system development process was complex and risk-prone. The focus of the new information system was to manage flow and water demand information. Data exchange between different stakeholders of the project was not fully automated as their information systems were not designed for data and information exchange among other stakeholder agencies.

The implementation process of KOBWA happened at a time when roles were yet to be assigned to the new staff. The paper and spreadsheet-based processes had to be shifted to computer-based systems gradually for ease of functions in the operations. The deficiency of staff also presented a hurdle in the implementation process.

Question 2 KOBWA’s solution for managing water quality information uses many manual processes. How might this affect the quality and usefulness of the information?

Manual processes were used for preparing regular reports on the water quality status as the graphical display routines designed for checking flow data could not be leveraged for examining water quality data. Map displays were also documented manually. A close connection between the water quality data and the GIS databases was desired for raising water quality status maps. Getting the data from the field, DWAF, MNRE, and other data suppliers was again a manual process realized through spreadsheets or text export files from different agencies and transferring them into Hydstra™.

There was a good scope of committing errors due to non-automation of the processes; it needed many resources on checking data in the database. As manual processes required staff that was deficient, resources had to be employed for comprehending the reactionary change in the water quality with the flow and long & short-term routines. It could affect the standard and utility of the information as precious time got wasted in database maintenance and preparing status reports manually.