3.3 Categories of Information Used By Organisations Flashcards
What is knowledge management and creation?
- Process of bringing together all of the information held by an organisation, to gain a better insight.
- Example: Lets multinational companies bring together their findings, so branches can learn more from each other.
Give some advantages and disadvantages of knowledge management and creation?
Adv: Gives the business opportunities to expand
Disadv: If some sections of the company don’t collect detail information it could mean it is meaningless for the other branches.
What is management information system (MIS)?
- Designed to protect key information needed to assist the management process and also it can be seen as a report of recent data.
- There are two parts. First part: software that manages. Second part: need a human to analyse the information.
- Example: This software can tell you how much time is wasted by employees as a result of them being late or not being at work. Also, it can show the employees what impact the time that has been lost can cause.
Give some advantages and disadvantages of MIS?
Adv: Considers a wide range of data sources, its regular reports can be essential for good decision making.
Disadv: MIS wont make the decisions and it means it is still up to managers to make the decisions.
What is marketing, promotion and sales?
- Information gathered from customers can be used to tailer advertising/selling to friends.
- Example: Loyalty cards allow business to see buying habits and trends.
Give some advantages and disadvantages of marketing, promotion and sales?
Adv: Companies can target advertising to increase sales. By considering surveys they can meet the needs of customers
Disadv: Badly worked surveys can be misleading for organisations. Information may also be location dependent, such as trends.
What is financial analysis and modelling?
- Measurements based on the value of sales is termed financial analysis and can be used to show information such as the top selling brands or periods during the year when sales are high.
- Example: If a company was to invest in expansion of their infrastructure, a financial analysis model would seek out long term and short term costs involved, allowing the business to make rational decisions regarding their budget.
Give some advantages and disadvantages of financial analysis and modelling?
- Adv: Can maximise profits. Will meet demands of people who buy.
- Disadv: The data can be sensitive as it involves the success and failure of a business and if competitors got hold of this information, they could use it to their advantage.
What is contact management?
- This is the management of all contact between a business and other people.
- Example: You can use contact manager software to store all of the communication details between the business and your supplier. It can have details from contact numbers, addresses, date and times about when you spoke with them last and also topics that you were speaking about.
Give some advantages and disadvantages of contact management?
- Adv: better customer services, orders, feedback and activity will be in one place so this means you can respond to any questions quickly and receive more customers as a result of high satisfaction of current customers.
- Disadv: quite expensive as you may need highly skilled technicians to setup this software and if the software goes down it could delay the time it takes to respond to customer problems.
What is decision making?
- Information is researched so that a decision may be made; figures are gathered so that future plans may be generated and contacts are managed so that the correct equipment is available for a specific event.
- Example: A marketing department in a business could research whether or not a certain product’s sales figures have increased or not as a result of advertising being put in place. This means that they can make the decision to either continue advertising products or just to stop it as it is not working and it is costing the business loads of money.
Give some advantages and disadvantages of decision making?
- Adv: save a business lots of money if another organisation has conducted the research, also, you can get the results quick.
- Disadv: If the business decides to ignore negative information and doesn’t acknowledge any issues, that will also be a poor use of decision making.
What is Internal and external communication?
- Internal and external communication is when you are communicating with those within the business such as staff and those outside the business like customers.
- Example: A business manager may communicate with his employees via emails. This could be to tell the employees about some new regulations that are in place. Also, if the business wants to tell customers about any new promotions they could tell them via letters.
Give some advantages and disadvantages of internal and external communication?
- Adv: sensitive information can be sent to individual employees privately, and can inform customers about new promotions, maypersuade them tobuy products from the business.
- Disadv: The internal communication information could end up being biased as they want to make the information look better than it was. The external communication information could not be relevant or up to date. Also, a company could accidently share information that was meant to be internal information, externally it lead to problems for the company.
What is big data?
- Big Data is large quantities of data constantly coming into the business, every day. It is too large to be analysed and stored like normal data. This means that using big data provides a better insight.
- Example: When a business such asCapgemini, has lots of information stored about there clients. So for example they may have stored contact details, addresses and much more.
