.: Chapter 9 : Enabling the Organization

Making Business Decisions

Decision making process - plays a crucial role in communication and leadership for operational, managerial, and strategic projects
Decision making essentials (managerial decision making challenges)

Innovation in communication and globalization have resulted in a dramatic increase in the variables and dimensions people need to consider when making a decision, problem solving or appraising an opportunity

Time is of the essence and people simply don not have time to sift through all the information manually

Manager must apply sophisticated analysis technique, such as Porter's strategies or forecasting, to make strategic decisions

Due to the intensely competitive global business environment, companies must offer far more than just a great product to succeed

Problem identification - Define the problem as clearly and precisely as possible
Data collection - Gather problem-related data, including who, what, where, when,why, and how. Be sure to gather facts, not rumours or opinions about the problem
Solution generation - Detail every solution possible, including ideas that seem fart etched
Solution test - Evaluate solutions in terms of feasibility (can it be completed?), suitability (is it permanent or a temporary fix?), and acceptability (can all participants from a consensus?)
Solution selection - Select the solution that best solution that best solves the problem and meets the needs of the business
Solution implementation - If the solution solves the problems, then the decisions made were correct. If not, then the decisions were incorrect and the process begins again

At this level, employees are continuously evaluating company operations to hone the firm's abilities to identify, adapt to, and leverage change
These types of decisions are considered semi-structured decisions they occur in situations in which few established processes help to evaluate potential solutions, but not enough to lead to a definite recommended decisions

At this level, managers develop overall business strategies, goals, and objectives as part of the company's strategic plan
Strategic decisions are highly unstructured decisions, occurring in situations in which no procedures or rules exist to guide decision makers toward the correct choice

Enhancing Decision Making with MIS

Transactional information encompasses all the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performance of daily operational or structured decisions
Online transaction processing (OLTP) is the capture of transaction and event information using technology to

Analytical information encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performance of managerial analysis or semi-structured 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 courses of action

Executive information system (EIS) is a specialized DSS that supports senior-level executives and unstructured, long term, non routine decisions requiring judgement, evaluation, and insight

Interaction between TPS and DSS to Support Semi-structured Decisions

The Future : Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) simulates human thinking and behaviour, such as the ability to reason and learn
Intelligence systems are various commercial applications of artificial intelligence
Expert systems are computerized advisory programs that imitate the reasoning processes of experts in solving difficult problems
Neural networks (artificial neural network) is a category of AI that attempts to emulate the way the human brain works

Learning and adjusting to new circumstances on their own
Lending themselves to massive parallel processing
Functioning without complete or well-structured information
Coping with huge volumes of information with many dependent variables
Analyzing non linear relationships in information (they have been called fancy regression analysis systems)
Fuzzy logic is a mathematical method of handling imprecise or subjective information

Genetic algorithms is an artificial intelligence system that mimics the evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest process to generate increasingly better solutions to a problem
Intelligent agents is a special-purpose knowledge-based information system that accomplishes specific tasks on behalf of its users
Virtual reality is a computer-stimulated environment that can be a simulation of the real world or an imaginary world