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508 Part Three Key System Applications for the Digital Age

for organizing and evaluating ideas and for preserving the results of meetings,
enabling nonattendees to locate needed information after the meeting. GDSS
effectiveness depends on the nature of the problem and the group and on how
well a meeting is planned and conducted.

LEARNING TRACK MODULE

The following Learning Track provides content relevant to topics covered in
this chapter:
1. Building and Using Pivot Tables

Review Summary

1. What are the different types of decisions and how does the decision-making process work?
The different levels in an organization (strategic, management, operational) have different
decision-making requirements. Decisions can be structured, semistructured, or unstructured, with
structured decisions clustering at the operational level of the organization and unstructured decisions
at the strategic level. Decision making can be performed by individuals or groups and includes
employees as well as operational, middle, and senior managers. There are four stages in decision
making: intelligence, design, choice, and implementation. Systems to support decision making do not
always produce better manager and employee decisions that improve firm performance because of
problems with information quality, management filters, and organizational culture.

2. How do information systems support the activities of managers and management decision making?
Early classical models of managerial activities stress the functions of planning, organizing,
coordinating, deciding, and controlling. Contemporary research looking at the actual behavior of
managers has found that managers’ real activities are highly fragmented, variegated, and brief in
duration and that managers shy away from making grand, sweeping policy decisions.
Information technology provides new tools for managers to carry out both their traditional and
newer roles, enabling them to monitor, plan, and forecast with more precision and speed than ever
before and to respond more rapidly to the changing business environment. Information systems
have been most helpful to managers by providing support for their roles in disseminating information,
providing liaisons between organizational levels, and allocating resources. However, information
systems are less successful at supporting unstructured decisions. Where information systems are
useful, information quality, management filters, and organizational culture can degrade decision
making.

3. How do business intelligence and business analytics support decision making?
Business intelligence and analytics promise to deliver correct, nearly real-time information to
decision makers, and the analytic tools help them quickly understand the information and take action.
A business intelligence environment consists of data from the business environment, the BI
infrastructure, a BA toolset, managerial users and methods, a BI delivery platform (MIS, DSS, or ESS),
and the user interface. There are six analytic functionalities that BI systems deliver to achieve these
ends: predefined production reports, parameterized reports, dashboards and scorecards, ad hoc queries
and searches, the ability to drill down to detailed views of data, and the ability to model scenarios and
create forecasts.

4. How do different decision-making constituencies in an organization use business intelligence?
Operational and middle management are generally charged with monitoring the performance of
their firm. Most of the decisions they make are fairly structured. Management information systems
(MIS) producing routine production reports are typically used to support this type of decision making.

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