Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
•
Scheduling and job placement.
Employee schedules are developed for each employee,
showing his job assignments over the next week or month. Job placements are often
determined based on skills inventory reports showing which employee might be best
suited to a particular job. Sophisticated scheduling programs are often used in the airline
industry, the military, and many other areas to get the right people assigned to the right
jobs at the right time.
•
Wage and salary administration.
Another human resource MIS subsystem involves
determining wages, salaries, and benefits, including medical payments, savings plans, and
retirement accounts. Wage data, such as industry averages for positions, can be taken
from the corporate database and manipulated by the human resource MIS to provide
wage information and reports to higher levels of management.
•
Outplacement.
Employees leave a company for a variety of reasons. Outplacement
services are offered by many companies to help employees make the transition.
Outplacement
can include job counseling and training, job and executive search,
retirement and financial planning, and a variety of severance packages and options. Many
employees use the Internet to plan their future retirement or to find new jobs, using job
sites such as
www.monster.com
.
Other Management Information Systems
In addition to finance, manufacturing, marketing, and human resource MISs, some com-
panies have other functional management information systems. For example, most successful
companies have well-developed accounting functions and a supporting accounting MIS.
Also, many companies use geographic information systems for presenting data in a
useful form.
Accounting MISs
In some cases, accounting works closely with financial management. An
accounting MIS
performs a number of important activities, providing aggregate information on accounts
payable, accounts receivable, payroll, and many other applications. The organization's
enterprise resource planning and transaction processing system captures accounting data,
which is also used by most other functional information systems.
Some smaller companies hire outside accounting firms to assist them with their account-
ing functions. These outside companies produce reports for the firm using raw accounting
data. In addition, many excellent integrated accounting programs are available for personal
computers in small companies. Depending on the needs of the small organization and its
staff's computer experience, using these computerized accounting systems can be a very
cost-effective approach to managing information.
accounting MIS
An information system that
provides aggregate information
on accounts payable, accounts
receivable, payroll, and many
other applications.
Geographic Information Systems
Increasingly, managers want to see data presented in graphical form. A
geographic infor-
mation system (GIS)
is a computer system capable of assembling, storing, manipulating, and
displaying geographically referenced information, that is, data identified according to its
location. A GIS enables users to pair maps or map outlines with tabular data to describe
aspects of a particular geographic region. For example, sales managers might want to plot
total sales for each county in the states they serve. Using a GIS, they can specify that each
county be shaded to indicate the relative amount of sales—no shading or light shading rep-
resents no or little sales, and deeper shading represents more sales. Staples Inc., the large office
supply store chain, used a geographic information system to select new store locations. Find-
ing the best location is critical. It can cost up to $1 million for a failed store because of a poor
location. Staples uses a GIS tool from Tactician Corporation (
www.tactician.com
)
along with
software from SAS. Although many software products have seen declining revenues, the use
of GIS software is increasing.
We saw earlier in this chapter that management information systems (MISs) provide
useful summary reports to help solve structured and semistructured business problems.
Decision support systems (DSSs) offer the potential to assist in solving both semistructured
and unstructured problems. These systems are discussed next.
geographic information system
(GIS)
A computer system capable of
assembling, storing, manipulating,
and displaying geographic
information, that is, data identified
according to its location.
