Management Information System Characteristics

Management information

Management information system

Reviewing the evolution of management information systems and contrasing these with earlier data processing systems. Let us now examine some of the caracteristics of management information systems that are commonly accepted by many working in this new field. Although not all these characteristics may be encountered in any one system, they do identify, the general focus of interest among Management Information System practitioners.

The general focus Management Information System

1. The Management information system should support executive usage.
   This caracteristic serves to distinguish between transaction oriented system and those designed to provide information for managerial decision making. However it is dangerous to draw too shap a dividing line, for much information of interest to management can be obtained from lower level systems. indeed, there are those who assert that management information system are essentially parasitic in that they mere'y tap the basic operational system of the organization to obtain data which are the reworked, ummarized and otherwise transformed into management information. but regardless of origin, the data in a management information system are oriented to executive usage.
2. The Management information system should cross  organizational lines.
   Besides serving managerial users ar various levels, the managemen Information System should have the capability of providing data of value to managers in various functional units of the company, example, marketing management, financial management, engineering management. and if the Management Information System is to serve the top executive, whose concern extends to all functional units, it is mandatory that the data base contain information on all major operations. further, if information is to be integrated on a company-wide basista elements,all organizational units must participate.
   
   Participate here varies widely, however, depending on the nature of individual company operations. since most companies find it prudent to implement their information systems gradually, the initial management information system may be restricted to a single functional entity, then later axpanded to include others. the area selected for early implementation usually reflects the business orientation of the company, e.g., a marketing information system might be the first to be implemented by a consumer goods supplier having an agresive marketing program.
   
   It is some times difficult to apply the criterion of organizational comprehensiveness to large, higly decentralized companies with numerous self-sufficient operatingdivisions and a minimum central management staff-the kind of organization often designated as a conglomerate or a multimarket. Here each operating unit may possess its own management sistem information and data base tailored to the needs of its own subordinate functional units. in this environment it is often difficult to obtain consistent data at the corporate level from multiple uncoordinated divisional management informatin systems.
3. The Management information system should serve top management.
   Many management information system specialists believe that a management information system is not worthy of the name unless it directly serves the requirements of top management. other feel that this is unrealistic and that top management need not interface with system. It is certainly true that system does not extend to the most critical decisions of the company. intermediate level system are useful, but the objective of a management information system should be to serve all levels of the organization including top management.
4. The Management system information be responsive to unstructured request for information.
   This caracteristic is not present in most loer-level systems, even complex on-line system like those for airline reservations.there, the type of inquiries have been carefully prestructured, so that reservations agent can performonly such precisely defined tasks as selling a seat for a given flight or retrieving a passenger's record. a management information system on the other hand, while necessarily imposing some restrictions on the inquirier, permits the retrieval of information from a data  base in response to requests whose boundaries have not been completely predefined.
5. The Management information system should embody the techniques of management science.
   A we have noted, it is not sufficient for a management information system simply  to produce more comprehensive or more timely information. beyond this, there must be built into the system appropiate ststistical and mathematical aids to managerial decision making. these may take the form of simulation models, linear programing codes, and statistical packages for interactive usage by managers who are attemting to assess the future consequences of their decisions.
6. The Mangement information system should provide integrated and non-redundant information. as we shall see in subsequent chapters, system integration is a goal not easily attainable and it involves complex trade-offs in system design. it is a laudable objective to achieve a system design in which source data are captured and recorded only once and then placed in a data base accessible to all users  regardless of level, location , or function, as a practical matter, there may be considerable redundancy and duplication of information in the data base. This may result from reasons of the specialized information requirements of various individuals and organizational units. Therefore, the idea of  an integrated, non-redundant aggregation of data should be viewed as design objective that is frequently offset, at least in part, by other considerations.

Management information systems

Since few systems today can fulfill the definition of a management informatin system discussed in this chapter, and sice few exhibit the caracteristics we have attributed to management information systems, it would be diffcult to point out a full-fledged management information system operating in any organization at present. if , however, one did not  rigorously demand all the attributes we have suggested, many primitive Management information systems could be discovered in most industries. for example, there are numerous airline reservation systems that exhibit extensive tecnological capability in the form of remotely distributed terminals, mass random access files, real-time  responsiveness, advanced data mangement packages, e.g,. Although these systems do not fulfill the requirements presented in this chapter, in that they are primarily operational in nature, they do produce some management information as a by-product of their transaction processing.

Banks that have established an on-line central information file detailing relationships  between each customer and the bank may not possess a true management information system in that this file is primarily transaction oriented. still, there is information of value to management, including top management, contained in such a file. Many of those on-line system that employ advanced hardware and software,though not strictly speaking Management information systems, produce considerable data of significance to management and should perhaps be viewed as a sort of middle ground or transition point between traditional batch-processing systems and a fullfledged managemen information system.

*source ; planing and control system "Robert N. Antony " A frame work for Analysis

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