sim assignment by aleem khan yousafzai

8/6/2019 sim assignment by aleem khan yousafzai

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INTRODUCTION

A well established and good information system plays an important role in the success of a

business, whether it is commercial, industrial or service oriented. Every action we take and

every decision we make, we need information. So we need quality information. Variouspathways of the information flows, the science of storing, processing and analyzing data. The

legal and ethical bounding of the data management was considered. Various tools of data

collection and sourcing were described with their relative effectiveness. In this assignment

the details about evaluating some decision making tools and techniques and sources of

analyzing data and information. How management information can affect an organization, to

select quality data and information and what is the impact of management information on

decision making. To get information from right sources, sharing it within the organization is

help full in the success of organization. I also discuss different systems which helps

management in decision making and mostly using in business operations.

Task 1

1.1 Key Application System in Business

There are different level and specialties in an organization. For each level there are different

types of systems. No single system can provide all the information an organization needs.

The organization is divided mainly into three levels that are strategic level, management level

and operational level and then it is future divided into functional areas. To provide the

accurate and timely information which helps the management in decision making on each

level separate system are using. Three main categories of information systems serve different

organizational levels. Operational level systems support operational managers/supervisors by

keeping track of the basic activities and transaction of the organization. The main purpose of

these level systems is to answer schedule questions and to track the flow of transactions of

the firm. (Clifton.hd, etal 1994) Management level system helps the managers to monitoring,

controlling, decision making, and administrative activities of middle level managers. These

systems typically provide repeated reports rather than instant information on operations.

Some management level systems support non routine decision making. They are tending to

focus on less structure decision for which information requirements are not always clear.

Strategic level systems helps senior management engage in and address strategic issues andlong term trends, both in side in organization and outside the organization. (Lucey,1997)

1.2 Transaction Processing System

Transaction processing system (TPS) is the basic business system that serves the operational

level ofthe organization. This is a computerize system that do and records the daily routine

transaction necessary to perform business. Examples are sale order entry, Hotel reservation

system, payroll system, employee record keeping and shipping. At the operation level, tasks,

resources, and goals are predefined and highly structured. The decision to award credit to a

customer, for instance, is made by a lower level supervisor according to predefined criteria.

(Lucey,1997) All that must be determined is weather the customer criteria. Transaction

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process systems are often so connected to a business that TPS failure for a few hour can lead

to a firm demise and perhaps other firm linked to it. Manager needs TPS to monitor the status

of internal operations and the firm relation to external environment. It also produces the

information for other type of systems.

1.3 Management Information System:

Management information system serves the management level of organization, providing

managers with reports and often online access to the organization current performance and

historical records. It summarize and report on the company basic operations. The basic

transaction data from TPS are compressed and are usually presented in long reports that are

produced on regular schedule. Typically management information system is oriented almost

exclusively to internal, not environmental or external events. It serves the function of

planning, controlling and decision making at the management level. As we know this is a

system on management level thats why it gets data mostly from TPS.

1.4 Decision Support System:

The objective of these types of systems are to support managers in their work especially

decision making. Decision support system tends to overlaps both TPS and MIS. It use

internal information from T P S and M I S. they often bring information from external

sources, such as current stock price or product price of the competitors. They acquire much of

their basic data from routine transaction processing and the result of analysis performed on

such data may be included in reports prepared by the office support system. DSS are

especially useful for semi structured problem solving is improved by interaction between the

manager and the computer system. Clearly by design, DSS have more analytical power than

other systems. They use a variety of modals to analyze data. DSS are designed to that users

can work with them directly, these system explicitly, include user friendly software. DSS is

interactive; the user can change assumptions, ask new questions, and include new data.

(lucey,1997)

1.5 Executive Support System

Executive support system is a reporting tool that helps in spinning organizations data into

useful summarized reports. Executive level managers use these reports for immediate access

to reports coming from all departments. Like billing, cost accounting, staffing and scheduling

etc. besides this quick access, some Executive support system tools also provide analysis

tools that forecast a series of performance outcomes overtime using the input data. It is very

useful for executives as it provides. Possible outcomes and quick reference to statistic and

numbers needed for decision making.

1.6 The role of Information to Support Decision Making

Information is the life blood of any business/organization. It can range from simple report to

complex system covering all aspect of a vast gathered. Information is in essence what you,

weather a manager or specialist in your profession, and need to know to run your business (or

part of it) successfully. The system is merely the mechanism to ensure that information is

available to you in the form you want it and when you need it. Strategic information systemsmay have an enormous effect on the profitability of an enterprise, management information

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system and data processing system may also have comparable effects. For example

companies who automated their stock control and delivery services in the 1980,s and who

were able to deliver commodities to consumer much quicker than their competitor achieved

large increase in profitability.

1.7 Criteria for Selecting Information to Support Decision Making

Richard Wurman (1989) says in his book INFORMATION ANXIETY that when

surrounded by a huge amounts of data many of us feels that these data do not provide the

required knowledge. This situation provides information nervousness: not understanding

information, feeling weighed down by the amount of information to be understood, not

knowing if certain information exists, not knowing where to find information. Knowing how

to identify, select and evaluate information resources are very important for any organization.

To select information that fulfills the purpose for which you need it. The following factor

should be kept in mind

1.7.1 Accuracy

The degree of accuracy of information relates to it usage. There is no point in striving for

great accuracy if this is no consequence. For example marketing director is not interested in

the value of sales accurate to within a penny, the nearest hundred pounds probably suffices

the financial accountant however, needs accuracy to the exact penny. Generally, the degree of

accuracy of information is known to its recipient.

1.7.2 Timelines and Updateness

For effective use the information should be provided on time. If the information comes too

early it maybe ignore or too late it maybe not useful and a waste of time and money. Timelineand up to datedness are allied. Timelines implies that the information is delivered punctually

after its preparation up to date means that it is accurate as at a certain stated date/time

1.7.3 Breavity

Too much detail can result in the overlooking of vital facts. Each recipient of information

should be provided only with his or her need. This suggests that a large amount of

information should, wherever possible, be split into smaller packets tailored to suit individual

recipients. The aim of brevity also indicates a need of specificity-the information should go

straight to the heart of the matter, especially if immediate action is called for.

1.7.4 Adequate

Information must be sufficient to fulfill the purpose and meet the necessities.

1.7.5 Relibilty

The source of information should be reliable and dependable.

1.7.6 Cost Effectivness

The cost of getting and gathering information should not exceed its benefit

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TASK2

2.1 Offering information and allowing access to it

Sharing and allowing information within organization is positive because this involves and

motivates the employees. But some information needs to be kept by the high level

management for security reasons. When providing information we need to think about what

is protected, ethical and legal responsibility.

2.1.1 Security consideration

It is very important to protect information and information system from an unacceptable

access, use, disclosure, disruption or destruction. We have to secure our confidential

information about the business, customers or finance or new product line because if they fallinto the hand of our competitors, this will be a big loss. Such a breach of security can lead the

business to bankruptcy. A security drift in handling information can cause failure of its

confidentiality, integrity and availability. Protection and security of these three are very

important.

Confidentiality means no unauthorized person or system should be allowed to get access

to information.

Integrity means that data cannot be customized without approval.

Availability means information must be available when they are needed.

2.1.2 Legal consideration

All organizations have to follow legal obligation in storing, processing and retrieving

information. Four legal areas relating to information management system are:

2.1.2 Confidentiality and privacy

According to (ICO.gov.uk), The Data Protection Act 1998 deals with it. So it must make

sure that the sourcing, sharing and storing information comply with the Data Protection Act.

According to this Act, it is the responsibility of the organizations to protect personal privacy

at all cost. A firm should access information it really need and they are not allowed to passpersonal information without a valid reason. The firm, keeping the information, is responsible

for its security and when the time of need is over the information should be destroyed.

Copyright and software protection

Contractual obligations

Information System and crime

2.2 Ethical consideration of information system

Organizations obtain information for some purpose so it should be used only for that needonly and access should not be allowed as the distribution of information may threats human

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dignity. Some ethical issues must be considered while collecting, handling and distributing

information. These ethical issues may be summarized by a mean of an acronym PAPA.

2.2.1 Privacy: Identifying the kind of information that should be kept to them and not

revealing them. And also knowing what information can be revealed to others.

2.2.2 Accuracy: identifying the accuracy of information itself and the responsible person

for its authenticity and accuracy

2.2.3 Property: identifying the location what information can be found where and how to

access this information

2.2.4 Accessibility: The kind of information, an organization or a person has the right to

obtain, under what conditions and with what safeguards.

2.3 The formats in which information can be offered

Information can be offer in organization in different ways. Its up to management how they

are offering it and sharing it. But to choose a way that the receiver of the information

understands it easily and uses it for which it is provided to them. The most common formats

are

2.3.1Data visualization

Data virtualization integrates data from different sources, without objective data faction. Data

virtualization provides a sole access point to control and view this data.It refers to the

management of data by technologies such as digital images, physical information systems,graphs, visuals and three dimension (3D) and etc. With this tool or technology decision

makers increase rapid way in to trustworthy information.

2.3.2 Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)

This tool and technology make the data more accessible and useful because it avoids the too

much data management expenses, useless agreement process, failure of status, customers, and

revenues due to a data violation

2.3.3 Knowledge mapping: knowledge mapping is keeping of records of the sources of

information needed within the organization and guiding the employees to those sources.

2.3.4 Organizational learning: The knowledge got within the organization by attending

different courses and training programs.

2.3.5 New feeds: Sometime we get information through different incidents or listening to

some stories etc.

2.3.6 Community of practice: Providing opportunity to the workers of different

departments to work together help them to get information and knowledge form the

experience of others and thus they develop their knowledge.

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organization especially public authorities to be open and provide information to public. The

electronic communication regulation 2003 act put responsibilities on different public

electronic communication service provides appropriate technical and organization measure to

safeguard the security of their services.

TASK 3

3.1 TOOLS AND TECHNIQUE TO SUPPORT DECISION MAKING

S. Jon and C. Diane (1997) says The decision making process is usually triggered by either

searching for a better way to achieve the objectives of the organization, or by the search to

find better objectives that more closely accord with the organizations current direction.

Most of the business fails due to its management bad decision. Decision which are based on

illogical information and imprudent way of analyzing and selecting information. For making

logical information and a good decision we have to use some models and tools that will help

us in selecting appropriate and will information to make these a base for our decision. To

make tactical and logical strategic decision making the following tools are help full.

3.1.1 Decision Support System

A tool that supports businesses and organizations in decision making activities is decision

support system that is a specific class of computerized information systems. A properly

designed decision support systems is an interactive software based system intend to help

decision makers compile useful information from data, document personal knowledge and or

business models to identify and solve problems and make decisions. Typically information

that decision support systems might gather and present would be:

- An inventory of all your current information assets.

- It can be use for marketing forecast to develop a sale forecast.

- Human resource management to calculate pay rise.

3.1.2 Data Mining

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden pattern from data. As more data is gathered,

with the amount of data doubling. Data mining is an important tool to alter this data intoinformation. Its use is common in profiling practices, such as marketing, observation,

deception recognition and scientific improvement. This method is also used in finding

comparisons in a collection of data and looks for interaction. Like any other tool, it only

functions in coincidence with the suitable raw material. It helps in finding correlation

between two variables and in clustering items of related principles.

3.1.3 Geographic Information system (GIS)

This technology for capturing, storing, inspection, integrating, manipulates, and displaying

data using digitized maps. Every authentication or digital article has an identifiedgeographical location.

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GIS provide support for making decision based on spatial data. The discovery manager may

use GIS to collect data in the form of a mineral possible map to decide precedence for future

searching.

In GIS is to fix on the kinds of remediation that would be cost valuable.

For example Banks are using GIS for scheming the following:

Branch and ATM locations

Customer demographics

Degree and passage patterns of business activities

Geographical area served by each branch

Market probable for banking activities

Strength and weaknesses against the competitors

Branch recital

3.1.4 Data Warehousing:

The data warehousing concept was proposed to provide an architectural model for the flow of

data from operational system to decision support environments. It works as a store of data,

where we can turn in the time when we need data and get data needed for our decisions. In

the absence of data warehouse, a large amount of idleness is required to support decisions.

3.1.5 Expert Systems:

Experts system is a computer application that performs task that would otherwise be

performed by a human expert. It is known as artificial intelligence. It helps decision maker incomplying with rules and regulations. It can also be used for providing training to new

employees. Expert systems is software that attempt to capture and reproduce the performance

of one or more human experts, most frequently in a specific problem domain, to help other

people in problem solving and decision making. There are many methods to be used to

capture knowledge from the source of expert knowledge and use it for decision making in the

organization.

3.1.6 Model

Models, charts and diagram are useful tools for a quick understanding of the process and canbe use for quick decision making. It can be use in forecasting and simulating.

3.2 Example of executive support system

Meditech is using an executive support system for the purpose to offer general accounting

product to hospital executives and department managers from multiple and single facilities

health care organization. It produces user define reports immediately which enable the

decision makers all level financial, clinical and statistical information from all departments,

faculties and corporations. The benefit from the system to executives and managers are:-

Summery and detail information from throughout the organization.

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routine transaction about the products and the seasonality effect by different people. The

several months data by the TPS is driven by seasonal demand curve for every product. It

withdraws that how many units would sell every week/month and on what price. The system

also uses sales history to forecast the customer sensitivity about the demand of the product if

the management wants to bring changing in price or making advertising of the products. Italso tells about the products distribution on different way. By providing this information the

management takes decisions.

3.4 Clinical decision support system

A clinical decision support system has been coined as a knowledge system. CDSS is

simply a DSS that is focused on using knowledge management in such a way to achieve

clinical advice for patient care based on some number of items of patient data. The main

purpose of the system is to assist doctors at the point of care. This means that a doctor would

act together with a CDSS to help conclude diagnosis, analysis, etc. of patient data. Previous

theories of the system were to use the system to literally make decisions for the doctors. The

doctors would input the information and wait for the system to output the right choice and

the doctor would simply act on that output. The new methodology of using the system to

assist forces the doctors to interact with the system utilizing both the doctors knowledge and

the system to make a better analysis of the patients data.

3.5 The voyage estimating system

A powerful D S S is the voyage estimating system of a subsidiary of a large American metals

company that exists primarily to carry bulk cargoes of coal, oil, ovens and finished products

for its parents company. The firm owns some vessels, charters others and bid for shipping

contracts in the open market to carry general cargo. The voyage estimating system calculates

financial and technical voyage details. Financial calculations include ship/time costs (fuel,

labor, capital), freight rates for various type of cargo, and port expenses. Technical details

include a myriad of factors, such as ship cargo capacity, speed, port distances, fuel and water

consumption, and loading pattern (location of cargo for different ports). The system can

answer question such as the following

Give a customer delivery schedule and an offer freight rate, which vessel should be assigned

at what rate to maximize profit? What is the optimal speed at which a particular vessel canoptimize its profit and still meet its delivery schedule? What is the optimal loading pattern for

a ship bound for the US west coast from MALAYSIA? The figure illustrates the DSS built

for this company. The system operates on a powerful desktop personal computer, providing a

system of means that makes it easy for users to enter data or obtain information. This voyage

estimating DSS draws heavily on analytical models. Other type of DSS is less modeled

driven, focusing instead of extracting useful information to support decision making from

massive quantities of data. For example intra west the largest ski operator in North America

collects and stores vast amounts of customer data from its web site, call centre, lodging

reservation, ski school and ski equipment rental stores. It uses special soft ware to analyze

these data to deter mine the value, revenue potential, and loyalty of each customer so

manager can make better decision on how to target marketing program.

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Task 4

In order for a business to perform well, the management must establish business mission,

plan and objectives. The purpose of the business which consists the individual aims and must

have assessable performance indicators. The business should consider internal strength and

weaknesses external threats and opportunities. Examining these business needs to identify

likely performance against its objectives. Based on these, business strategy is developed. The

business strategy will have management information strategy as a factor. The information

system strategy is playing the key role as more business relies increasingly on information

system.

Business information system strategy focuses on shaping what information system must offer

in order that business strategy can be realize. On the other hand business information

technology strategy is focused on determining what tools and technological system

development is needed in order to achieve the overall objectives of the business.

To make sure the strategic information system fits business plan, information system strategy

plays an important role .Within the information system strategy , the factors internal and

external to organization are taken into consideration. With help of PEST analysis and porter

Model both environmental and competitive forces with the industry external to the

organization are indentified.

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REFERENCES

1. Lucey,T.(1997), management information system,7th edition ,DP publication ltd, London

2. R. Wurman (1989) Information anxiety New York

3. HD Clifton, DC lnce, AG Sutcliffe (1994),business information systems,6th edition

financial time prentice hall

4. B. Christopher (2000) Management strategy and information technology ed. 2nd. The

Alden press Oxford

5. Adebayo FA, (2007), Management Information System for Managers,

6. Ado-Ekiti: Green Line Publishers.

7. S. Jon & C. Diane (1997) Planning and decision making 1ST ed. Pearson professional

Ltd. London

8. Adesina A (1988). Decision-Making in Educational Administration. In A.

9. Adeniran and E. O. Fagbamiye (eds.) Educational Administration.

10. www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/data_protection.aspx cited at 02:12

11. AM, 14/02/11

12. http://www.informationvaluechain.com/information-value-chain/business-strategy/, cited

at 08:25 PM, 05 /02/11

13. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_management#Information_management_concep

ts , cited at 04:37 PM, 29/01/11

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http://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/data_protection.aspx%20cited%20at%2002:12http://www.informationvaluechain.com/information-value-chain/business-strategy/http://www.informationvaluechain.com/information-value-chain/business-strategy/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_management#Information_management_conceptshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_management#Information_management_conceptshttp://www.ico.gov.uk/what_we_cover/data_protection.aspx%20cited%20at%2002:12http://www.informationvaluechain.com/information-value-chain/business-strategy/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_management#Information_management_conceptshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_management#Information_management_concepts

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sim assignment by aleem khan yousafzai