The Importance Of Management Information Systems

Background

Describe about The Importance of Management Information Systems?

Management Information systems have become a crucial part of businesses today. Without the Information Technology, survival becomes very difficult for most industries. MIS can be defined in several ways:

The MIS is a system which is used to give information support to an organization to facilitate faster and efficient decision making .

The MIS is system which integrates powers of man and machine for generating information which supports business operations, management and enables people to make decisions for an organization.

The Management Information System works with a database of an organization to provide information to people working with an organization.

The MIS is an Information and management System of an organization which is developed using computers

Management Information systems have helped various organizations that have been competing in a global market. Organizations can be made more competitive as well as efficient by allowing several key business processes or customer relationship building measures, dealer, and workforce to work using information technology. Management information systems are used by organizations for achieving six key objectives that include operation excellence, latest products, services, business models, customer or supplier relationships, better decision making, competitive advantage and daily survival.

An MIS must be able of handle any requirement based exception reporting. Such a requirement can be individual or of a group. It required MIS to maintain all the organizational data together and in such format whenever a need arises, data can be made available immediately. Data can be same but different users may require to view it in different formats. To address this need of varied data presentation, concept of Database emerged, and when MIS used this DATABASE, its processing became more effective. This compelled companies to generate more data. As data increased significantly, it became more complicated. Twitter generates over 7 TB of data every day, Facebook has more than 10 TB of it and certain enterprises are generating data of several Terabytes every hour.  Volumes of data are large but managing this data is difficult and thus, companies are usually overwhelmed. The large volumes makes it even difficult for MIS to make sense of data. This is why concept of Big Data came into existence.

Initially, MIS was used for processing organizational data, preparing reports and then present them to management at regular intervals. The system was used for managing the data from collection till processing. It required greater involvement of individuals as they had to manually choose from the processed data to use it as per the need. The concept was however modified later by separating data from information. The information is aobtained after analyzing data. The concept had to further evolve as need based exception reporting was required. The need was of an individual or of a group. MIS in today’s scenario manages databases, provides computing facilities for end user and provides some decision making tools to them. An MIS provides information that results from data analysis which is conducted as per certain academic concepts that include certain theories, some principles and key concepts in Management Science, Psychology and Behavioural Science. They  make the system more efficient as well as useful. These academic disciplines are used for designing of MIS, creating tools for decision support or for modelling.

Uses of MIS

In simple words, an information system accepts raw data and using one or more transmutation processes, generate information out of it, which can be used as an information product. It has certain functional elements related to organization and its environment. These are:

perception – initial data entry requires data to be captured or generated,

recording – physical data capture;

processing – data transformation as per definite needs of an organization;

transmission – Flow of data in the information system;

storage – In storage, the data is kept for anticipated future use;

retrieval – This means searching required data from from record;

presentation – communication and reporting

decision making – use of MIS for making decision that are somewhat controversial, except when the decisions involved are making use of data in the MIS (Adeotiâ€ÂAdekeye, 1997) .

To get general idea about organizations information requirements.

To analyze role of management and the ways they use information.

To argue how information is used for making decisions.

To indentify information need for daily operations of an organization.

Key features of a MIS

For understanding activities involved in information processing, a formal system should be used which can consider following concerns:

Handling high volume of data. 

Confirm the validity of data as well as transaction. 

Process complex data and perform multidimensional analysis. 

Quick searching and retrieving. 

Organizations have certain departments such as marketing, production, sales, inventory and maintenance that function separately as well as are connected with each other. Information is generated in abundance by these departments that the MIS ha st o integrate.

MIS also assist in creating a mechanism for eliminating data redundancies

MIS can be divided into sub systems that can be programmed individually. This would provide easy access to data as well as ensure accuracy of data and information. It also maintains consistency of the data (Tripathy, 2011).

Economy of scales is achieved when collective costs of different operations is less than the total cost of performing every operations individually. Using MIS, different operation in a business can be united such that the information can be made available from one department to other easy and fast.

Extract more information from data: The key aim of an MIS is to convert data into useful information. When the data required by a manager is unstructured, MIS can still organize this data in such a way that it looks like an information which can be directly used by managers for making decisions about critical projects.

Sharing of data: Data can be shared with authorized users using MIS so that they can access large amount of data. Different users can use same data. Latest data can also be added to the database very easily and results could be obtained through combination of old and new data.

Balance conflicting requirements: For smooth functioning of management, personal conflicts must be addressed and sorted using MIS when preparing a combined data which is to be supplied to all departments depending on their individual requirements such that departments do not become depended on each other when requiring information for any vital or critical project. They should be able to access similar information within a department such that their interpersonal disagreements are avoided.

Key Features of a MIS

Standards Enforcement:- MIS assists an organization in enforcement of standards for data. These standards may be used for data including names, usages and formats such that they have a uniformly all through the organization.

Control Redundancy: Earlier, the data was present in separate files but with MIS, this data is integrated into one database, which eliminates the need of creating multiple copies of this data. As repetition of data is avoided, redundancy would be controlled, and there would not be any need for checking data again and again.

Integration: Management information systems integrate the data from different locations and department keeping it in one place as whole and at the same time, separate records are created for storing this data. It becomes very easy to gain access to full data within the system of an organization.

Consistency: MIS provides consistent and accurate data. MIS has a system for detecting spelling or wrong entry errors while a user enters the data into the MIS system which eliminates several types of error in the initial stage itself.

Information Security : Security means preventing unauthorized users from accessing data using the MIS of the business. As MIS controls the operational data of the company, it can set authorization processes such that only legitimate users can have the access to  the organizational data.

Flexibility and Responsiveness: As data collected from multiple files are now stored in same database, responding to a data request from different areas becomes flexible and easy.

There are different types of Management Information Systems that are available in market. These MIS systems can give different types of benefits for organizations using them. However, their purposes could be related and could even be similar.

Transaction processing systems (TPS) are used for collecting and recording the data generated by daily operations of a firm. This system can primarily be used by lower levels of the management. MIS can generate specific scheduled reports on the basis of extracted data such that these reports summarize the data obtained from transaction processing systems (TPS) and can assist middle as well as operational level managers to get solutions for decision problems that can be both structured or semi structured.

§ Decision-support systems (DSS) are those computer based applications that are utilized by middle management for compiling information using a number of different sources such that problems could be solved or decisions could be made. Such decisions are exercised by top level executives of the firm.

§ Executive support systems (ESS) is one form of reporting tool which an give fast access to reports that are received from different ranks of organization or its departments such as accounting, HR or operations. Such a system can give vital information obtained from data that may be from internal or external source very easily such that this information can be presented to managers and top level executives.

Knowledge management system (KMS) is an information system which is used for supporting, creating, organizing and distributing of the business knowledge to company staff.

Key Benefits of Using MIS

Strategic information system (SIS) uses IT for building competitive advantage for a firm with respect to its products, services and business processes.

Functional business system (FBS) is focused on operations of the organization and its management specific applications that are used for supporting business function such as accounting, marketing and more.

MIS uses an approach which is data-centred and its derivation lies in longstanding database management domain. It is majorly based on processes like data collection, extraction, and analysis technologies (Chaudhuri, Dayal and Narasayya, 2015). Data management and data warehousing are foundations of BI&A 1.0. Designing data marts and extraction tools, transforming, ETL loading are vital for conversion and integration of enterprise data. Database queries, online analytical processing (OLAP), and tools for reporting use simple and intuitive  visuals that investigate significant characteristics of the data.

Business performance management (BPM) can be used for generating scorecards or dashboards for analyzing and visualizing a number of performance metrics. Other than these long-established reporting tools, business analysis and data mining methods are also used for analyzing associations, segmenting data and clustering or classifying data, using regression, anomaly detection techniques, and predictive modelling in several business applications. Many of these processing and analytics techniques are already used in some famous commercial MIS platforms that are made available by key IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, and SAP (Sallam, 2011). BI&A is data driven, highly applied and leverages on opportunities that a huge amount of data presents. For instance, it can perform domain-specific analytics which may be used in several decisive and impactful application areas. Some of these BI&A applications are listed down, and the data analytics, probable impacts, and some examples and studies are also presented: (1) ecommerce for market intelligence, (2) e-government and politics 2.0, (3) science and technology, (4) health and well-being, and (5) security or public safety.

Some big E-commerce vendors like Amazon and eBay have transformed the market significantly using innovative ways like product recommender systems on scalable recommender platforms. Some major internet based companies including  Google, Amazon, and Facebook are leaders are developing web analytics, cloud computing services, and social media applications. The generation of Web 2.0 content by customers on forums, crowd-sourcing systems, newsgroups and social media websites, provide new opportunities to researchers and practitioners to hear the voices of consumers from different business groups formed by customers, employees, investors, and media (Doan and Ramakrishnan, 2011).

Government or political processes become transparent and allow participation using online media which is multimedia-rich. BI&A research can be used in e-government or politics 2.0 applications. Mining of opinions, analyzing social network discussions using analytics can facilitate political participation online, encourage e-democracy, political blogs and forums analysis, e-government service delivery, build transparency as well as accountability (Chen 2009; Chen et al. 2007). For e-government applications, developers create semantic information directories and ontological information  for serving their target people.

Certain concepts of science and technology (S&T) use high-throughput sensors and instruments, principles of astrophysics and oceanography, use genomics and environmental research for innovating and developing understanding of big data. For instance, In astronomical science, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)5 is used for creating computing methods and big data for supporting and facilitating decision making from senses at macroscopic as well as microscopic level. This research field has become global and is expanding rapidly.

There are two key sources that can be used for obtaining health related big data use genomics (genotyping, gene expression, sequencing data) and pay–provider (electronic health records, insurance records, pharmacy prescription, patient feedback and responses) (Miller 2012a). The raw sequencing data that is received from people through health related information platforms is around four terabytes per person. From the pay–provider side, a data matrix can be used for carrying data of thousands of patients containing several related records and parameters (demographics, medications, outcomes) that are obtained over time from them. However, there are many challenges that are faced while extracting knowledge from health related big data. In past few years, electronic health records (EHR) are being used in various hospitals and clinics all over the world. The data collected in these records can provide significant clinical knowledge for understanding disease patterns of patients.

Huge data is generated every day on crime, terrorism, cyber threats, etc. is gathered through multiple sources by Intelligence, security, and public safety agencies which constitute multilingual open-source intelligence. There are many companies that face cyber threats irrespective of the size of their business and protection of intellectual assets and information infrastructure has become challenging. It is very difficult to process or analyze security related data for protection. One of the key challenges faced in security related researches is the information stovepipe or overload that results from accessing data from multiple sources, with different data formats, and in big volumes. Researches that are done on technologies for internet security, counter-terrorism, and applications that fight crime do not have any consistent framework that could resolve these data challenges. However, there are some of the information system and intelligence technologies like crime associations rule mining or clustering, analysis of criminal networks, spatial-temporal analysis, visualization, multilingual text analytics, analysis of sentiments, and of cyber attacks that can be used for performing researches on security informatics.

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