Chapter 9 : Enabling Organization-Decision Making

MAKING BUSINESS DECISION

The Decision-Making Process

- The process of making decision plays a crucial role in communication and leader-ship for operational, managerial, and strategic projects.

Decision-Making Essentials

- A few key concepts about organizational structure will help our discussion of MIS decision making tools.

OPERATIONAL

-  At the operational level,employees develop, control,and maintain core business business required to run the day-to-day operations. 

-Considered as structured decisions, which arise in situations where establish processes offer potential solutions.

MANAGERIAL

- At the managerial level, employees are continuously evaluating company operations to hone the firm's abilities to identify, adapt to, and leverage change. 

- It is considered semi-structured decisions, they occur in situations in which a few established processes help to evaluate potential solutions, but not enough to lead to a definite recommended decision.

STRATEGIC

- At the strategic level, manegers develop overall business strategic, goals, and objectives as part of the company's strategic plan. 

- It is highly unstructured decisions, occurring situations in which no procedures or rules exist to guide decision makers towards the correct choice.

SUPPORT : ENHANCING DECISION MAKING WITH MIS

Operational Support Systems

- Transactional information encompasses all the information contained within a single business process or unit of work. Primary purpose is to support the performance of daily operational or structured decisions.

- Online transactional processing (OLTP) is the capture of transaction and event information using technology.

- A transactional processing system (TPS) is the basic business system that serves the operational level (analysts) and assists in making structured.

- Input for a TPS are source documents.

Managerial Support Systems

- Analytical information encompassess all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performance of managerial anlysis or semistructured decisions.

- Online analytical processing (OLAP) is the manipulation of information to create business intelligence in support of strategic decision making.

- Decision support systems (DSSs) model information using OLAP which provides assistance in evaluating and choosing among different course of action. 

- The common DSS analysis techniques are :

• What-if analysis - checks the impacts of a change in a variable or assumption on that model.

• Sensitive analysis - a special case of what-if analysis, is the study of the impact on the other variables when one variables is changed repeatedly.
• Goal-seeking analysis - finds the inputs necessary to achieve goal such as a desired level of output.
• Optimization analysis- an extension of goal-seeking analysis, finds the optimum value for a target variable by repeatedly changing other variables.

Strategic Support Systems

- An executive information systems (EIS) is a specialized DSS that supports senior-level executives and unstructured, long-term, nonroutine decisions requiring judgment, evaluation, and sight.

- Visualization produces graphical displays of patterns and complex relationships in large amount of data.

- A common tool that supports visualization is a digital dashboard.

- Digital dashboard offer the following capabilities :

• Consolidation- the aggregation of data from simple-\ roll-ups to complex groupings of interrelated information.
• Drill-down- enables users to view details, and details of details, of information.
• Slice-and-Dice- the ability to look at information from different perspectives.

THE FUTURE : ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

- Artificial intelligence (AI) stimulates human thinking and behaviour, such as the ability to reason and learn.

- Intelligence systems are various commercial applications of artificial intelligence.

- The most familiar categories of AI systems are :

•  Expert systems- computerized advisory programs that imitate the reasoning processes of experts in solving difficult problems
• Neutral networks- attempts to emulate the way the human brain works ;Fuzzy logic – a mathematical method of handling imprecise or subjective information
• Generic algorithms -an artificial intelligent system that mimics the evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem
• Intelligent agents- special-purposed knowledge-based information system that accomplishes specific tasks on behalf of its users;Multi-agent systems, Agent-based modelling
• Virtual reality- computer-simulated environment that can be a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world