Name: Amr Ahmed Elbaz ID: 20201155

business information systems

How Effective Managers Use Information Systems. (by Steven L. Alter)

Advances in computer-based information technology in recent years have led to a wide variety of systems that
managers are now using to make and implement decisions. By and large, these systems have been developed
from scratch for specific purposes and differ significantly from standard electronic data processing systems. Too
often, unfortunately, managers have little say in the development of these decision support sysems; at the same
time, non-managers who do develop them have a limited view of how they can be used. In spite of these
drawbacks, the author found that a number of the 56 systems he studied are successful. And the difference
between success and failure is the extent to which managers can use the system to increase their effectiveness
within their organizations. Thus, the author suggests that this is the criterion designers and managers should
jointly ascribe to in exploiting the capabilities of today’s technologies.

What can managers realistically expect from computers other than a pile of reports a foot deep dumped on their
desks every other week?

Everyone knows, for instance, that computers are great at listing receivables. But what about all the promises
and all the speculations over the past few decades about the role of the computer in management? While there
have been advances in basic information retrieval, processing, and display technologies, my recent study of 56
computerized decision support systems confirms the common wisdom that very few management functions
have actually been automated to date and all indications are that most cannot be.

Instead, my findings show what other researchers have reported: applications are being developed and used to
support the manager responsible for making and implementing decisions, rather than to replace him. In other
words, people in a growing number of organizations are using what are often called decision support systems to
improve their managerial effectiveness.1

Unfortunately my research also bore out the fact that while more and more practical applications are being
developed for the use of decision makers, three sizable stumbling blocks still stand in the way of others who
might benefit from them.

First, managers and computer users in many organizations are familiar with only a few of the types of systems
now in use. As a result, different types of innovative systems have often been conceived and nurtured by
internal or external “entrepreneurs,” not by the system users or their superiors.

Article (1)

1. Retrieval only—a shop floor information system.

In order to help production foremen improve the percentage yield on a newly developed 50—stage process for
manufacturing micro-circuits, the management of one company has installed an on-line, shop floor information
system. Operators submit daily piecework reports, which include yield, release date, identification of the person
who does the work, and so on. The foremen then juggle this information to obtain productivity data by
operation, operator, machine, and lot.

Thus they are able to use the system in a number of ways. They can monitor work flow, pinpoint yield problems,
and settle day-to-day questions such as who worked on which lot when, and which operators are ahead of or
behind schedule, or below standards. The foremen have 13 standard commands by which they can retrieve the
data stored in the system and display them on a cathode ray tube terminal. The commands permit them to tailor
reports to their needs.

Article (2)

2. Retrieval and analysis—a portfolio analysis system.

Before advising clients or making authorized trading decisions, the portfolio managers at a bank I studied use an
on-line system to analyze individual portfolios. The managers can bypass time-consuming manual methods and
obtain up-to-date and clearly organized portfolio information in either graphic or tabular form.

Depending on the situation, a manager can inspect both individual portfolios and groups of portfolios from
different viewpoints—for example, rank them in different ways, obtain breakdowns by industry or risk level, and
so on. With this kind of flexibility, the bank’s portfolio managers make more effective use of a vast amount of
information, most of which had existed prior to the system, but had been accessible only through tedious
manual analysis.

Article (3)

3. Multiple data bases plus analysis—sales information systems.

Greater flexibility was also the reason that two consumer products companies and one manufacturing company
I looked at developed sales information systems which are quite similar. Standard EDP functions were too
inflexible to produce ad hoc sales analysis reports in a timely and cost-effective manner for those in the
companies’ marketing and planning areas. In each case, information extracted from the EDP systems is now
maintained separately in order to have it handy and, in two instances, to be able to analyze it in conjunction
with externally purchased proprietary data bases and models.

Basically, each system is a vehicle by which a staff man or group tries to help decision makers. Their modus
operandi is incremental: identify a problem; bring the current system and existing expertise to bear on it;
develop a solution in the form of an analysis or additional system module; and incorporate the results into an
expanded version of the system.

Reference

Tan, F. B., & Gallupe, R. B. (2006). Aligning business and information systems thinking: A cognitive approach.
IEEE transactions on Engineering Management, 53(2), 223-237.

Baltzan, P., Phillips, A. L., Lynch, K., & Blakey, P. (2008). Business driven information systems. New York:
McGraw-Hill/Irwin.

Tegarden, D. P. (1999). Business information visualization. Communications of the Association for Information
Systems, 1(1), 4.