Question
CIS 500 — Information Systems for Decision-Making
Assignment 1: The CEO’s Challenge
You’ve just left an all-hands meeting at your company*. The CEO was very upset at the rise of shadow IT projects — a major indicator that the company’s internal information system has failed to meet its needs.Because the current information system is inadequate, inefficient, and outdated, the CEO is inviting everyone in the organization to propose a new operational, decision support, or enterprise information system to replace it. The executives have allocated $5 million to fund the most promising idea.This is your chance to make a difference in the company (not to mention your own career). Write your proposal as a memo that the entire C-suite will review. Include at least these points, in your own words, to be persuasive:
- Identify the main functions of your proposed information system and why they are important to the business.
- Describe what types of data your information system will hold and how data quality will be ensured.
- Explain how the old information system handles the functions you mentioned, the problems that occur, and why your information system will handle things better.
- Offer evidence of feasibility: Show that similar information systems have been built successfully and that they save more money than they cost.
Sample paper
Information Systems for Decision-Making
The proposed information system is a decision support system that will help overcome logistical and warehousing challenges faced by the company. The system will allow users to compile and analyze massive amounts of data for improved decision-making and communication. Decision support systems enable users to make better use of data by facilitate accurate decisions (Linden, Liu, & Colot, 2017). The system will allow users to display data in a way that they can derive meaning. For instance, presenting certain data graphically allows users to examine trends and make logical conclusions. The expected benefits from the new system are improved decision-making, timeliness in solving problems, improved customer relations, and high efficiency in dealing with various problems at the company. This short memo provides key details concerning the proposed decision support system.
The decision support system will serve several functions in the organization. One of the functions is to provide real time order details to customers. With regard to this, the system should be able to provide important real time information to customers such as the status of the goods, delivery date, delivery location, and among other details. This calls for a decision support system that can support and provide uninterrupted communication to customers about their orders. Another function of the proposed system is to support interoperability with both internal and external information systems. This will be crucial in ensuring that the company can share information quickly across multiple systems both internally and externally. The support system will allow mobile application integration. This will ensure that customers can track their orders or receive details about the status of their goods via their mobile phones. Lastly, the decision support system will fulfill an administrative role. With regard to this, the new system will allow the company to monitor employees involved in logistics and warehousing.
The information system will hold different types of data. The decision support system will integrate features from different categories of decision support systems such as data-driven, document-driven, and knowledge-driven decision support systems. As such, the system will capture diverse data such as production data, distribution data, transportation data, port logistical data, customer data, employee data, transaction data, and competitor data. There are several ways to improve the quality of data captured by the system. The first way is to ensure the accuracy of data. Accuracy refers to the correctness of data, which can be achieved by improving the data collection methods (Wang, Pierce, & Fisher, 2014). Another way of improving quality is to ensure completeness of data. This ensures that data captures all the relevant points. It is important to ensure data validity, which involves ensuring data is in the right format and adheres to all rules. Timeliness can also improve data quality, whereby data is availed to users at the right time.
The old information system has not been able to meet the current demands of the modern logistics and warehouse management. The system enables the company to track customer orders and including transportation. The information system also allows for a wide variety of product management activities including managing fluctuations in the demand of goods, managing inaccurate orders, time management, and handling damaged goods. The old information system does not provide frequent communication to customers about the status of their goods during transit. Customers receive notifications when goods arrive at the point of collection. This is a challenge since most customers prefer real time information about their goods. Another challenge with the system is failure to take advantage of massive data relating to big data and cloud computing to improve on decision-making. The new system will eliminate these challenges by improving communication to customers and making use of bid data and cloud computing to improve on decision-making.
The new decision support system will be economically viable. The new system will replace the old information system and provide numerous benefits to users not available in the old system. Adopting the new information system will enable the company to fulfill all customer expectations. As such, this will lead to high customer satisfaction and loyalty. The company will also attract new customers through word of mouth. By leveraging on the power of big data analytics, the new system will allow the company to stay focused on new market developments. As such, the company will be able to take advantage of new opportunities in the market quite fast and thus beat the competition.
References
Linden, I., Liu, S., & Colot, C. (2017). Decision Support Systems VII. Data, Information and Knowledge Visualization in Decision Support Systems: Third International Conference, ICDSST 2017, Namur, Belgium, May 29-31, 2017, Proceedings.
Wang, R.Y., Pierce, E. M., & Fisher, C. W. (2014). Information quality. Routledge.
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