Management Information System

Q.1 In the current e-world any organisations massive operations are managed
by various types of information systems that help them to achieve their goals
of servicing their clients. This can be done by the growth of modern
organization. Discuss some of the essential features of modern organization.
A) Listing the features. B) Explaining each of them in brief.
Ans.

Some essential features of modern organisations

IT-Enabled organisation
Networked organisation
Dispersed organisation
Knowledge organisation

1. IT-Enabled organisation
The organisations discussed above are modern in the sense that they have built
into their structure the elements of information technology (IT) that enable them to
function in a manner appropriate to the demands of the environment. This is a
fundamental difference between a modern organisation and its older, premodern
incarnation. Tata Motors, for instance, upon its initiation in 1945 would also have put in
place built-in mechanisms to respond to its environment and to function in a manner
appropriate to that time. However, what distinguishes Tata Motors functioning then and
now is the difference in the current use of IT
to shape its functioning and responsiveness.

2. Networked organisation
Modern organisations function in a world of digital networks in addition to the
physical world that was the same for the old organisations. The organizations are linked
as nodes on the network where they receive and transmit information. Remaining on the
network requires sensing and responding to this flow of information. The digital network
consists of the Internet and telecommunication networks that rely on digits (ones and
zeros) to carry information across large distances. Responding to the digital information
available to organisations is also a modern challenge. Information is widely available
instantly and in multiple forms. Responding means taking those actions that will move
the organization towards its goals.

3. Dispersed organisation
Another key aspect of many large modern organisations is that they are highly
dispersed. Tata Motors, for instance, has operations in many cities in India and in other
parts of the world. The companies disperse their operations to best meet customer
needs or to locate functions where the resources such as skilled labour or raw materials
are available. Multinational organisations are well known to seek out new destinations for
their operations and also new markets.

4. Knowledge organisation
Modern organisations rely on knowledge workers to a much larger extent than
older organisations. These workers differ from blue-collar workers as their work
responsibilities involve accessing and dealing with knowledge about the work and the

environment, as opposed to repetitive manual labour related to production. Knowledge

workers enjoy greater autonomy in their work and the variety of work they have to
perform. A major function of modern organisations is to process information. They create
information about goods and services, accumulate it within the organisation and use it to
achieve their goals.
Q.2:- Marketing managers are keener to look for a least cost route that also
allow a sales person to meet all his customers. Identifying a least cost route
with this features is slightly complicated. Therefore, managers depend on
decision support tools to find the most cost effective routes to cover the
market. The travelling salesman problem is one of such tool. Describe the tool
with a diagram. A) Graphical representation of Travelling salesman problem B)
Describing the problem
Ans.

The travelling salesman problem

New Delhi
744
Bhopal

1407

Ranchi
Kolkata

2061

1401

Mumbai

2095
1996

Bangalore
1329

331

Chennai

The salesman has to cover all the cities in one tour at the lowest possible cost. The
salesman can start from Bangalore and then follow any sequence, such as Chennai
MumbaiBhopalNew DelhiKolkataRanchi or KolkataRanchiNew DelhiMumbai
BhopalChennai. If all the combinations of cities are counted, there are 720 ways in
which the salesman can cover all the cities after starting from Bangalore. Each of these
is called a tour. For the lowest cost tour the salesman would have to calculate the
distance covered for each possible tour and take the shortest one. If the salesman starts
the tour from any of the other six cities, the problem increases to 5040 possible tours! It
is very difficult to compute the lowest cost for such a large number of tours. Hence it is a
wise step to rely on a decision support system that can do the job efficiently. The
travelling salesman problem is a very well-known and well-researched problem. When
the number of cities increases to about 20, the possible tours increase to more than 2

1018 tours which are about 2 million trillion tours! Such a large number of calculations
become hard to complete, even for computers.
Q.3:- There are many examples of digital goods. Companies such as
Amazon.com are selling digital versions of books over their site. These digital
books can be read on special readers that display the pages on a screen. A)
List the important properties of information goods. B) Explain positive
feedback with diagrams
Ans.

Properties of information goods

Positive feedback
In a situation where there is a benefit for individual users when many others start using a
network technology, the benefit from using the network acts as a boost for all the users.
For example, when people start using e-mail that allows them to send messages and
documents to many others, they realise the benefit or value of the network and then are
encouraged to use it even more. Positive feedback has been observed in many
technologies that have network externalities. The growth in users of a network
technology that has positive feedback follows an S-shaped curve.

Number of users

Time
(b)

New Users starts using Facebook

(a)
Potential
users find it easy to join

They enjoy the experience

They encourage others to join

The S-shaped curve of positive feedback depicts the phenomenon explained above.
However, there are some issues that are pertinent. The fl at part of the curve, where
users are still adding to the network and the critical mass has not been reached, may
last for a long time. For example, the fax machine was at the fl at part of the curve for
over a hundred years before it reached critical mass and lots of organisations started
buying and using fax machines. The effect of positive feedback is strongly evident in
social networking sites such as Facebook. When people join the site and become users of
Facebook, they may like the experience.

Q.4:- Decision support systems (DSS) are used extensively across organisations

to assist managers with making decisions. Decision making by managers

involves the phases of intelligence, design, and choice, and DSS help mainly
with the choice part as they support structured and unstructured types of
decisions. A) Explaining decision making process. B) List and describing the
different types of decisions.
Ans.

Decision making

Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize winning researcher, showed that humans went
through three essential stages in the act of problem solving. He called these the
Intelligence, Design, and Choice stages. Decision making can also be considered as a
type of problem solving.
In the first stage, that of intelligence, they collect information about the issue from
the environment and the surrounding context. The person will seek all possible
information of how to travel by air, by train, by bus, or by a personal vehicle.
The next stage which is the design stage. The question addressed at this stage is as
follows: What criteria should be used to decide between the alternative possible
solutions to the problem? This question requires the decision maker to settle on the
criteria that are important, and then select or rank-order them.
At the next stage, that of choice, the criteria are applied to select the best answer
from the available choices. The criteria and parameters for the decision help curtail
the amount of search required to arrive at a decision. If the criteria are not specified
sharply then the number of alternatives to be considered to arrive at a decision may
be very large. This stage may also require returning to the intelligence gathering
activity, and then to the design stage to change or modify the criteria and the weights
used to apply them.

Types of Decision
a) Structured Decisions
b) Unstructured Decisions
c) Semi-structured Decisions

Structured Decisions

In a structured decision-making scenario, the relevant criteria, the data needed, and
the method of analysis are usually known and can be modelled by the system. For
example, the travelling salesman problem is a very well-known structured problem. In
this problem, the data on the number of cities the salesman has to visit, the distance
between the cities and the criterion for selecting the tour for the salesman, are all
known.

Unstructured Decisions

Unstructured problems do not have clearly defined parameters or criteria for selecting
solutions. Unstructured decision problems are usually solved by imposing some form
of structure in order to apply the analysis and select the best candidate for filling the
position of a Chief Executive Officer of a firm is an unstructured problem. The criteria
may not be sharply defined, the parameters by which to describe and evaluate the
candidates may also not be sharply identified, as they pertain to subjective concepts
like personality, leadership skills, vision, motivation, and so on.

Semi-structured Decisions

In it some parameters are specified, but other parameters have to be determined by

studying the problem domain carefully. The problem of finding the best marketing
campaign for a product, for example, in a semi-structured problem where some
parameters such as the budgets, the target population, etc., are known, but others
such as the effectiveness of the media may not be known. DSS are used in cases of
semi-structured problems with some assumptions and some imposition of structure.

Q.5:- What is crowdsourcing?

crowdsourcing?
Ans.

How does

the

site

Galaxy Zoo manage

Crowdsourcing
Enabling many people to contribute to pages, products, artistic creations and other
artifacts on the Internet. It is often used to describe projects that encourage
collaboration. It refers to the idea that a crowd of people, not necessarily known to each
other, participate in working on a project.
A very unusual crowdsourcing effort is known as the Galaxy Zoo (available at
www.galaxyzoo.org). The problem that Galaxy Zoo places before visitors is that of
classifying images of galaxies, which are star constellations in the universe, obtained
from the Hubble Space Telescope. The site is created by a consortium of universities that
do research on studying the universe. One of the first tasks that the site put out was that
of classifying the galaxy images into two groups spiral and elliptical galaxies. Although
the classification of
images can be done by software such as Neural Networks, the researchers knew that
humans were much better at this task. The project was initiated in 2007 with a million
images of galaxies to be classified, and the organizers assumed it would take about 2
years to complete the task. However, the site started receiving 70,000 classifications an
hour, and in 1 year received more than 50 million classifications (many galaxies were
classified multiple times). The classified galaxies were then considered for further
research. The participants

in this crowdsourcing exercise were often school children and ordinary citizens, not
necessarily scientists. After the success of the first round, the site set up another project
by taking images from the first classification effort, and asking more detailed questions
about the images. Within 14 months, the site had received over 60 million classifications.
Some volunteers of the site were also able to point to the objects in the images that
were outside the scope of the task, which drove the researchers to examine these new
objects and ask new questions thus opening up new areas of research.
Q6:- Data and information relating to individuals could be of sensitive nature.
Give some examples of such kind of data?
Ans. Data and information relating to individuals could be of sensitive nature. Some
examples of such kind of data are as follows:
Employees, who work extensively with computers, log in every morning when they
come to work and log out in the evening when they leave. During the working day,
every time they leave their desk or are not working on the computer, the system logs
their inactivity at work. For example, a United Airlines worker, in the USA, was
threatened with job loss on the grounds that she had spent more than the allotted
time in the bathroom, making her co-workers take up her work.
2. Medical records detailing illnesses and treatments, hospital visits, and medication
routines are all stored on organisational databases that contain personnel data. The
data is specific to individuals and, for some organisations, also contains details about
the individuals family members. In the USA, for example, the medical records of the
famous singer Britney Spears were read by employees of a hospital in which she was
treated. The employees later leaked the information to the press. Spears took legal
action against the hospital, which had to fire several employees.
3. Web surfing activities of individuals are also logged by corporate web servers.
Which sites individuals have visited, how long they have been on the site, and what
kind of material they have downloaded are also logged. A multinational media firm,
for example, threatened to fire an employee based on his visits to Yahoo.com from an
office computer. The firm had obtained details about the employees surfing
behaviour from server logs.
Security systems in some organisations, which are based on swipe cards or security
cards that enable doors and office buildings to be opened or accessed, retain records
of all individual movements across buildings and workplaces. Data pertaining to
individual movements is available in security logs. In the Vatican, for example, swipes
were re-introduced in 2008 to monitor the movement of employees. This was in
response to criticism that employees were slacking off. Even though the Pope was
not entirely in favour of such monitoring, it was introduced to improve efficiency of
staff.
Many organisations also check all incoming and outgoing e-mails of their personnel.
The e-mails are checked for content and attachments. Some organisations either
remove e-mails containing certain keywords, such as expletives, or flag them to warn
employees.