Management Information Systems
Management information system comprises a co-relation between individuals, technologies, and organizations, it helps to process the recorded data to get information that helps in decision making in our day to day activities. It helps to make effective decisions, record keeping, and providing ways to communicate well within an organization. There are 3 levels of users in an organization and information system that they use — operational management, tactical management, and strategic management.
Following points shed more light on how MIS is used in various situations –
1. Role of MIS in Human Resources — Due to the increasing size of the company it becomes difficult to manage employee-related information, attendance summary, reporting systems, etc. The MIS helped the managers in integrating available employee information as well as inter-department information in the organization and to prevent redundant information. The Transaction processing systems (MIS) provided top management in making structured decisions and various advantages such as generating reports with the help of cutting-edge technology which have characteristics of useful information that help to improve decision making for management tasks.
2. Role of MIS in the Business organization — Every business these days need an information system to maintain activities right from the base level to the final product delivery to streamline each step. The MIS is tactical management that helps supervisors in monitoring and controlling activities and help to summarize internal data into meaningful reports to help support management activities.
3. Role of MIS in decision making — With growing technology we come across numerous solutions for companies and in turn create a new workplace environment that requires computer-based communication amongst employees. This is called strategic management and helps to provide decision making for structural problems, coordination of managers and employees, prepares strategic goals, detection, and correction of problems, etc. When it comes to decision making, we should look at the pros and cons as well as the consequences and work on maximizing the positive benefits.
The key features of the management information systems that are being used in the business planning and execution stages in various sectors such as healthcare, work systems, and supply chain management. As aforementioned, the effect of MIS can be known by the way it is applied in the business. It helps to provide structure to the business tasks and applies decision making in planning and controlling activities that help businesses achieve their success and meet the objectives. MIS is not just an analysis of data and statistics; it also helps to send out alerts/emails based on the need of managers at different levels in the organization. It also helps the manager to find the differences between the final output compared to the initial objective that was set. The MIS issues are sometimes the technical system error and the other challenge can be personal differences of the people involves. This can be overcome by making an integrating MIS which will fasten the data processing and avoid redundancy and will help to make communication effective between different departments.
Conclusion
We have come across MIS many times even if we didn’t at that time, it has been existing for decades and has improved miraculously with time. It is an integrated system that has evolved with time and changed decision making in business to a different level. Taking an example of MIS in school administration has changed the decision making, planning, and data storing process of student information, policies, school rules and regulation easier for school administrators. It has made school business processing easier and provides several advantages for data processing of a large system in school such as data retrieval, data search, secure and better storage and has completely replaced the manual way of data entry. Talking about companies or any form, they initially faced issues while changing from the manual approach to computerized versions as there wasn’t enough study or material to make it understandable for all. There were other issues of internet networks being, no proper execution or trained workplace to have an effective transition. But this was overcome by dividing into teams and providing initial training to give a walkthrough and sample run situations to make it more comprehensive for all. This planned and strategic approach helped to provide structure and make individuals understand better the system and meet the deliverables timelines.
