Provide Information to support Decision Making This article talks about an important subject in relation to our class which is the role or the usage of information in decision making. In this article, the author talked about the importance of having such an effective system to obtain, analyze and communicate information to support and take decisions, so decision will be taken based on qualitative and quantitative information. The author also touched on how information collecting is time and resources consuming. Thus, the author concern was how to get over this obstacle by introducing an effective ways to collect, record, analyze and communicate information. Frist, Obtaining information, when deciding on which information to obtain, the author encourages to first use the information available to your organization, such as financial, statistical, personal records and internal auditing or monitoring.
On the other hand obtaining information from outside of an organization and the author gave some ideas on how to do that effectively. Some of which are; using commission for social inspection (CSCI) reports or any other specialty commissioned research. Another way would be collecting information form service’s users or customers and in terms of collecting information from users, we will have two type of information; quantitative that provide statistical data, and qualitative information that most of the time provide information on how satisfied the customer is with the provided services. Therefore, the author think that when organizations want to collect information to support their decisions, they should ask themselves three main questions; why do we need this information?, what source should we use to obtain it?, what method will we use to obtain what we want?. Then, the author talked about recording and storing information, and in terms of recording information, he said that an effective system, a combination of manual and computerized system must be used with taking consideration of the organization’s and legal requirement. Therefore, confidential users’ information must respected and protected at all times, so only authorized people have an access to this information whether it is paper-based or computerized, and he also talked about the NHS general principles for storing information, such as access to resident-identifiable information should be on need-to-know basis. After that, he talked about analyzing information, selecting a very effective way to analyze information will provide us with a well-constructed conclusion that will definitely help in the decisions making process. Collecting and storing information without finding an effective way to analyze it is very useless. To do so, he encourages to keep the analysis as simple as possible by defining the objectives you wish to address in your analysis, and he gave an example on how to improve a restaurant menu based on analyzing customers’ responses. In my opinion, the author did a good job in stressing the importance of information in any organization and its impact on supporting and taking decisions. Then, he talked about how to obtain, store, record and analyze information.
However, I think that the methods he explained to collect, store, and analyze information could be replaced by one thing and that is the usage of information systems. As everyone know that information system is the back bone for any organization. A good information system provide companies with the abilities to easily store, evaluate and communicate information. The author encouraged to use word of mouth or paper-based questionnaire to get customers’ responses.
However, with the usage of information system, collecting information from customers has become so much easier. For example, the usage of reward cards in big supermarkets provide supermarkets with customers’ responses on what they like and what they usually buy. Then, whenever the supermarket has special offers on the stuff that a specific customer usually buy, they will notify him/her about those offers. Thus, whenever a customer scan their reward card, the system collect and analyze the information automatically and provide us with results.
Moreover, here are some example on how information system can help on the internal process of an organization; control the growth of the records, improve efficiency and productivity, to ensure compliance with companies’ policies, to minimize all kinds of risks, saving confidential information and reducing costs. All in all, the article was good in terms of explaining the importance of information in taking decisions. However, the methods the author talked about are traditional and that might be because the article was published in early 2004 and I think information system was not as known at that time.