Unit 30 Information Systems in Organisations Assignment

Introduction

In order to execute business operations in an effective manner, the organization needs to assimilate the information in a precise manner. If the collected information is not appropriate then it is likely that the results will be unexpected (Aken, 2012). Unit 30 information systems in organisations assignment deal with different information needs within different functional areas of organization, how different information systems are employed within an organization to take decisions related to different business operations after analysing the available information. In addition to this, the report also focuses on how information systems are employed to produce management information that are related to analysis of sales and marketing and other important departments.

Task 1

P1.1 Evaluate the information needs of the different functional areas of your chosen organization.

Tesco PLC is known in UK and other geographies across the globe as one of the leading grocery and general merchandise retailer. In terms of profit Tesco PLC led the table of retailers and has spread its branches in 12 countries and three continents. After the inception in 1919 by Jack Cohen, the name Tesco appeared first in the market in the year 1924. The company began its operation by offering grocery of high quality at lower prices and slowly diversified its reach to clothing, electronics, furniture, petrol, toys, software, financial services, telecoms, internet services and music downloads.

In order to maintain its position in the market, the management team of Tesco led their extra focus on each and every individual’s performance and provides them with equal opportunities to enhance their skills and capabilities. With the equal focus on cultural values and proper planning the management team is trying to establish a unique name in the market by gaining maximum trust and loyalty from its customers in different geographies by collecting relevant information about the market. These information are collected by deploying own information system by Tesco in order to reduce cost and get better results in collection.

The information need of different functional areas of Tesco is described below: -

• Finance Department: - The finance department of Tesco deals with all the budgeting for various operations and management of effective resource allocation. It also deals with paying bills for the goods and services, managing the payroll of employees, tracking different financial system employed for different departments, making annual reports for presenting the performance of the organization to the management and performing financial audit for expenditures and income (Boland, 2002). For performing these activities the finance department has to track the demands generated in different department for allotting the funds to fill the requirement, the department also needs to track the attendance of the employees by collecting the report from the human resource department for formulating the salaries of the employees, the finance department also has to perform auditing and for that the team keeps a record of the different financial statements for analysing it (Lissack, 2005). For formulating the overall annual report the finance department has to analyze the sales report on quarterly basis. These are some of the information that is required by the finance department of Tesco.
• Human Resource Department: - The human resource department deals with the allocation of human capital in different locations according to the need of the organization. It also deals with attracting new human capital, managing, provide training and supporting other departments of the organization. For performing these activities the department first has to collect information about the requirement of different department, and then analysing what sort of talent the department is looking for (Keller, 2009). After analysing it the department formulates its recruitment strategies. For employee retention the department also has to analyse the concern of different employees in order to formulate effective appraisal strategies and for that they need to collect data from employees about the same. In addition to this the human resource department also has to take care of the information about the areas, which needs improvement and to arrange effective training session for the employees (Aken, 2012). For recruiting new talent it also has to collect information about the profiles of applicants for allotting it to specific department matching their skills and capabilities.
• Sales: - Sales is the most important operation for any organization and thus it is for Tesco as well. Tesco holds a very large pool of products and sales team has to focus on each and every product in an appropriate manner to boost the sale for particular product. For executing this operation the sales team has to first collect relevant data to understand the current market demand of the different products. The team has to focus on those areas where the sale is low and for that the team has to collect information about the relevant reason for the same in order to formulate strategies for boosting the sale in that section (Boland, 2002). In addition to this the sales team of Tesco also required information about different sales and marketing strategies adopted by the competitors in order to adopt effective methodologies in their sales strategies. For doing effective sales for the company, the team also has to acquire knowledge about the market areas in which they are willing to sale their products. This knowledge is usually collected by interacting with customers in form of surveys, feedback sessions or interviews (Anderson, 2012). Sales department also requires information from marketing department so as to formulate sales strategies according to the current marketing campaign flooded by the marketing department in the market. The information consists of the target audience, the market areas to be focused, and the estimated sales target to be achieved with the help of particular marketing campaign. Marketing campaigns are an aid to the sales team and utilizing the information provided by the marketing team in an effective manner can help in crossing the set target of the organization.
• Training: - The training department is a sub division of human resource department but holds an important place in executing different business operations of the organization. For this department the information about various loopholes in different operations, the performance of employees, the requirement of new skills and technologies is required (Kumar, 2000). What are the available training modules that can be incorporated for the employees, what are the resources to be collected for practical sessions, the information about these aspects have to be collected by the training department of Tesco.
• Administration: - Administration department of Tesco holds an important role in ensuring that a well structured and convenient ambience of working for the employees is maintained within the organization (Aken, 2012). For this the department collects information about various disputes in the organization, monitoring that the employees are following the basic organizational culture and ethics while executing different business operations, any unfair means are not adopted by any employee, and none of the employee is indulged in any sort of misbehaviour or mishap that can affect the image of the Tesco in the market.

Task 2

P 2.1 Current trends in Information systems: Operational excellence, new products, services, business models, customer and supplier intimacy, improved decision making, and competitive advantage.

Executive Support System: - For assisting senior level professionals in the organization it includes DSS with special hardware and software applications. These are basically designed for particular senior level executive of an organization, which is easy to use and support need of external data (Kurtz, 2008). It helps the executive in determining the overall vision and scope of a strategy in solving business processes issues. It also helps in the situation of crisis and support strategic control. It can be stated that decision-making process includes three stages such as intelligence, choice and design.  For this process Management Information system provides the management with appropriate information for the effective decision making along with constant feedback on various operations of the organization. If the Management Information System is oriented towards financial information than it helps in decision-making process of various financial statements of the organization

The MIS generally required internal data sources and external data sources for processing and in return the system is capable in delivering demand report that is generated when someone requests for certain information about the operations (Wittmann, 2008).

It also helps in delivering exception report that is automatically generated when an unusual situation arises or management asks for sudden reports. It is also capable in delivering drill down reports that consists of detail information about a particular situation of an operation. Summary of previous day’s activities are provided by key inductor report and schedule report is produced periodically according to the time frame set by the management (Rocha, 2013). Management information system and executive support systems are the key systems that can be employed to feed the data related to customers in order to deliver their needs and requirements to the management team at a regular interval. This strategy is employed usually by collecting data on a constant basis and feeding it to the MIS system. This helps the organization in keeping themselves updated with the current market position and developing strategies for the upcoming products or services for the customers (Sekaran, 2006).

P 2.2 Evaluate the suitability of information systems for different functional areas of your chosen organization.

Different information systems are suitable for different departments according to the need and requirement of the department for various operations. If Management Information system is considered then it is effective in catering the requirements of senior, junior and middle level managers in various decision making processes, as handling the data manually and processing it again and again will take a lot of time and will be a cumbersome process for the managers that will directly affect the productivity of the operations (Zammuto, 2005). Therefore, MIS are employed do the analysis for managers. Human Resource Information System on the other hand is useful in tracking the records of human capital of the organization. Regularizing their attendance, performance check, calculating salaries is a tough task if done manually. Therefore, human resource information system is a cost effective measure for every organization for managing their human capital in an effective manner (Robinson, 2005). This system also helps employees in self servicing their needs they can track their record anytime, transaction records, salary slips, and time off balances at their convenient time. Data Warehouse System is suitable for big organizations who handle a lot of data for their different business operations. In order to handle such a large amount of data, Data Warehouse systems are an appropriate measure for placing the data in an organized and structured manner. Through Data Warehouse systems management team gets the flexibility of accessing the data whenever there is a requirement that saves a lot of time and efforts (Wood, 2009). These systems are also capable of answering to ‘what if ‘condition and therefore thus add on to its suitability for the organizations.

The suitability of executive support system and decision support system is limited to the management of the organizations when they are required to analyze the internal and external factors on a regular basis. These systems are suitable for organizations that operate in an environment where uncertainties are usual and they have to operate in regular changing environment like stock market, commodity or currency exchange.

Task 3

P 3.1 Describe how to use an information system to generate valid, accurate and useful information for any given problem of your choice.

Tesco PLC is a very big organization and in such a big organization, various issues arise for executing different business operations. In Tesco integration of different business processes is essential in order to synchronize the operations of different chains and this enterprise integration is a major challenge for the management team of Tesco PLC (Sekaran, 2006).  Enterprise integration basically deals with different applications running for executing various business operations on different platforms.  In order to evolve effective enterprise integration it is required to shift corporate politics. In general business applications are oriented towards specific functional area such as customer relationship management, accounts, finance, billing and sales. Due to this most of the IT groups align the software according to these functional areas. In order to evolve successful enterprise integration it is essential that the IT system not only establish a communication system between different computer systems but also among different departments of the organization. This will help in getting rid of single application and each application will be a part of an completely integrated application system (Zammuto, 2005).

The major constraint while the integration process is of taking a hold on the number of applications that are participating in the integration process. In most of the cases the different applications are packaged applications that are not designed for integration to a single process and in such situation developers tend to develop those applications accordingly (Rocha, 2013). In order to solve issues during integration process different integration patterns are effective measures.  These patterns are not a written code or software that are available in the market for integration process. For employing integration pattern it is required that the management team of Tesco should hire experts who have years of experience in measuring and analysing the patterns in which issues arise during integration process and what are the appropriate methodologies for solving them. For an effective integration of different applications it is required that the data should be shared in a significant manner to amalgamate it in collaborated manner (Wittmann, 2008). For this purpose integration process is classified as information portals, data replication, service oriented architectures, distributed business processes, business-to-business integration and shared business functions. The particular information required for developing different enterprise solutions for Tesco the company uses the MIS and ESS systems employed for decision-making process (Keller, 2009). The data collected by these systems are handed over to the developer’s team in order to analyze the required data that is required for developing synchronized enterprise integration for Tesco. The data is sent over a data warehouse that is located at the main headquarters of Tesco. This strategy will help the developers in accessing to the information of each and every center in a significant manner and applications can be integrated accordingly.

P 3.2 Evaluate alternative methods of solving the problem identified.

Enterprise integration is necessary for generalizing the application flow of the organization. The management team can also adopt alternative methodologies for processing different operations of different departments by employing database, client server, expert system, and artificial intelligence at different centres.

• Database: - Different centres can employ their own database for collecting data for their centres and analysing it for different business operations of their centres. The database can be classified according to the content they are designed to collect for such as numeric, images, bibliographic and full text. Setting own databases for different centres will increase the efficiency of accessing the information and will reduce the burden of integration (Robinson, 2005).
• Client Server: - To process different requests made by customers the management team of Tesco can deploy different client server for different centres to increase the processing speed of requests (Kumar, 2000). Client server sets up a relationship between different computer programs in which one is dedicated to the customer from whom the customer can make different requests and the other end is for the operations team that processes it. This system will also reduce the burden of enterprise integration for Tesco.
• Expert System: - This system is deployed for analysing different behaviour of humans within an organization (Capon, 2003). As Tesco is a very huge organization different employees cannot be analysed manually. IN addition to this their grievances and issues also cannot be considered individually. To handle such issues either enterprise integration of human resource system or expert system can be employed that is dedicated for the welfare of the employees.
• Artificial Intelligence: - There are various operations like checking bill at the exit, performing security check at the entrance of the Tesco store that requires manual assistance. In such areas either a centralized monitor system that is governed by central headquarters or artificial intelligence for each store can be employed. Artificial Intelligence for security checks will employ sensors that will check for tags on the products at the exit, metal detectors at the entrance, cameras. Artificial intelligence deploy a computers that are not intelligent to take decisions but are designed for executing particular operations while analyzing various factors.

The above stated measures will reduce the burden of enterprise integration for Tesco, which would be a very tedious task for the management team to do for all the stores and warehouses of Tesco. These will be limited to individual chains and may be aligned with central model in order to update details to the main corporate office about the various operations of Tesco (Rocha, 2013).  The above stated strategies will also help the organization in determining the effectiveness of different departments in executing their operations without external support. The management will also get to know the leadership qualities of the managers from different departments, as they will have to analyze and collect information by adopting different methodologies without central support. Coordination of different departments within different chains will be also evolved by adopting such strategies as different operations will be executed at an individual level.

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Conclusion

Different organizations have different information needs for their business operation and it is important that effective system is employed for collection, processing, analysing such information in order to achieve overall business objectives (Rajaraman, 2004). The above mentioned information system can be employed by these organizations according to the suitability of these systems to the organizations. It can be also stated that information systems are also efficient enough for solving different business related issues and can be employed for making effective problem solving policies.

References

Aken, J. (2012) Problem Solving In Organizations: Methodological Handbook For Business And Management Students, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Anderson, D. (2012) Quantitative Methods For Business, London: Cengage Learning.
Boland, R. (2002) Critical Issues In Information Systems Research, New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Capon, N. (2003) Corporate Strategic Planning, Colombo: Columbia University Press.
Keller, S. (2009) Big Tools For Young Thinkers: Using Creative Problem Solving Tools With Primary Students, Sydney: Prufrock Press Inc.
Kurtz, D. (2008) Contemporary Business, London: Cengage Learning.
Kumar, A. (2000) Principles Of  Business Management, New York: Atlantic Publishers.
Lissack, M. (2005) Managing Complexity In Organization: A View In Many Directions, London: Cengage Learning.
Rajaraman, V. (2004) Analysis And Design Of Information Systems, New Delhi: PHI Learning Pvt. Ltd.
Wittmann, R. (2008) Strategic Planning: How To Deliver Maximum Value Through Effective Business Strategy, London: Kogan Page Publications.
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