Management Information Systems

Chapter 10 : Applying Concepts : Ans 2 . I intend to make my career in an Information Systems department . The aim of my study is to understand the concepts of Management Information Systems and join the IS department of an organization hopefully becoming the IS manager after six to eight years of working in the department . The specialty of the IS department lies in the amount of information it is dealing with from several sources . Organizing it is a complex task that requires much hindsight and cleverness . I wish to learn the art of information

management which will allow me to be promoted to the level of IS department manager in future . It is true that the IS department 's job is far from being very simple . There is a great deal of structured and unstructured decision making going on . I would expect my responsibilities to be limited to reporting to the IS manager of any developments in the information procuring methods or the addition or removal of information sources . The rest would include routine processing of information and low risk decision making

There would be several occasions where decision-making and problem solving would be required in my job . An example of such an occasion could be the situation where a new information source is introduced and the IS manager designates me to extract information from that source . It is important to understand that information sources are all not the same . There is a certain degree of comfort level each source will desire that will have to be provided in to extract maximum possible information . Providing this comfort and ease of communication is an unstructured decision that I will be faced with each time a new source is introduced (Morrill , 1999 )The production of routine reports is a structured decision that will be recurring after a fixed time interval Although most IT workers might not term this as a true decision , but there is a level of uncertainty involved as to the information needed to be included in the reports which actually give it a decisional standpoint

Although most reports would contain predetermined information , there are some parts which may need to be included at certain times and not at other times . Merging information from different sources is another unstructured decision that will persist during my job experience Putting the different information as it comes in a logical way so that it can be retrieved meaningfully is a difficult task . Since databases understand the storing of information into records and fields only , the information gathered has to be correctly identified and sorted into the correct fields so that producing meaningful information from this data becomes an easy task

Updating the information database is an unstructured decision requiring lot of information and analysis . The information for this type of decision comes from a variety of sources and is influenced by the practices of other organizations to a great extent . Furthermore , this decision cannot be structured due to the unequal time intervals with...