MIS AND THE INFORMATION
MIS AND THE INFORMATION
The goal of the MIS should be to provide the information which has a surprising value and which reduces the uncertainty. It should simultaneously build the data obtained in different ways. The designer of the MIS should take care of the data problems knowing that it may contain bias and error by the introduction of high-level validations, checking and controlling the procedures in the manual and computerized system. While designing the MIS, due regard should be given to the communication theory of transmitting the information from the source to the destination.
Special care should be taken to handle noise and distortion on the way to the destination. The presentation of information plays a significant role in controlling the noise and distortion which might interrupt while communicating information to the various destinations. The principles of summarization and classification should be carefully applied giving regard to the levels of management. Care should be taken in the process that no information is suppressed or overemphasized.
The utility of information increases if the MIS ensures that the information process the necessary attributes. The redundancy of the data and the information is inevitable on a limited scale. MIS should use the redundancy as a measure to control the error in communication.
The information is a quality product for the organization. The quality of information as an outgoing product can be measured four dimensions, which are, the utility, the satisfaction, the error, and the bias. The MIS should provide specific attention to these quality parameters. A failure to do so would result in wasteful expenditure in the development of the MIS and poor usage of investment in hardware and software.
The quality can be ensured if the inputs to the MIS are controlled on the factors of impartiality, validity, reliability, consistency, and age.
MIS should make a distinction between the different kinds of information for the purpose of communication. An action, decision-oriented information should be distinguished from non-action/ knowledge-oriented information. The information could be of the recurring type or an ad-hoc type. The MIS also needs to give performance control and knowledge database. A distinction between these factors will help make the decisions of communications, storage and also the frequency of reporting.
Since the decision maker is a human, it requires recognizing some aspects of human capabilities in the MIS design. These human capabilities differ from manager to manager and the designer has to skillfully deal with them. The difference in the capabilities arises on account of the perception in accessing the focus of the management control, the faith and the confidence in the information versus knowledge, the risk propensity, the tolerance and ambiguity, the manipulative intelligence, the experience in decision-making and the management style.
The MIS design should be such that it meets the needs of the total organization. For design consideration and for the operational convenience, the organization is divided into four levels, which are, the top, the middle, the supervisory and the operational. The top management uses the MIS to know the status by calling information of the current period in detail where the perceived value of information is the lowest and it usually insists on getting the information in a fixed format.
The MIS design, therefore, should ensure the input data quality by controlling the data for the factors, which are, impartiality, validity, reliability, consistency, and age. The data processing and the analysis thereof are further reported to the various levels and individuals with due regard to the differences in the individual management style and human capabilities.
Recognizing that the information may be misused if it falls into wrong hands, the MIS design should have the features of filtering, blocking, suppression and delayed delivery.
Since the MIS satisfies the information needs of the people in a particular organization, the design of the MIS cannot be common or universal for all the organizations. The principles of design do not change but when it comes to the applications, the design has to give regard to the organization structure, the culture, the attitudes and the beliefs of the people and the strengths and the weakness of the organization.
MIS till the end of the nineties played a role of providing information to organizations for decision-making with a rise in competition, organization that used MIS for driving the business, did better in competition. With the globalization of business, and internet and web technology making inroads in business operations, work culture in the organization changed rapidly. The traditional business model ‘make and sale’ changed to ‘sense and respond’ as customer became more knowledgeable and started demanding more and more requirements. In other words, the business became customer-centric and organization must sense customer expectations well in advance and fulfill them to survive and grow. For sense and respond model only information is not adequate, what is required is knowledge, an ability to forecast the probable expectations of the customers and sense them into deliverables of perceived value by the customer.
Modern MIS not only should provide information but also support management by providing the knowledge necessary at all levels of critical decision. Knowledge is a result of putting different information sets together and analyzing them and viewing them in a particular manner. The information has a ‘surprise value’ while knowledge provides a vision to solve the problem.
