CHAPTER 6 : VALUING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION

CHAPTER 6 : VALUING ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION

Information is data converted into a meaningful and useful context. Therefore, information will be important to an organization to run their business.

Successfully collecting, compiling, sorting, and analyzing information can provide tremendous insight into how an organization is performing.

Employees must be able to obtain and analyze the many different levels, formats, and granularities of organizational information to make decisions.

These are the traits of the value of information.

1. Information Type : Transactional and Analytical

TRANSACTIONAL INFORMATION :

1. Transactional information encompasses all the information contained within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support daily operational tasks.
2. Levels, formats, and granularities of organizational information :


Information Levels comprises of
- individual knowledge, goals and strategies
- Departmental goals, revenues, expenses, processes and strategies
- Enterprise revenues, expenses, processes and strategies

Information Formats comprises of
- Documents - letters, memos, faxes, reports etc.
- Presentation - product, strategy, process, financial etc.
- Spreadsheet - sales, marketing, competitor, order
- Databases - employee, customer, supplier, manufacturer

Information Granularities comprises of
- Details (fine) reports of each salesperson, product and part
- Summary of reports for all sales personnel, all products and all parts
- Aggregate (coarse) of reports across departments, organizations and companies

ANALYTICAL INFORMATION :

1. Analytical information encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of managerial analysis tasks.
2. Examples of analytical information are product statistics, sales projections, future growth and trends.
3. Analytical information makes it possible to do many things that previously were difficult to accomplish such as spot business trends, prevent diseases, and fight crime.

2. Information Timeliness

Timeliness is an aspect of information that depends on the situation.
Real-time information – immediate, up-to-date information.
Real-time system – provides real-time information in response to query requests.

3.Information Quality

Business decisions are only as good as the quality of the information used to make the decisions.
There are characteristics of high-quality information :

Accuracy- Are all the values correct? For example, is the name spelled correctly? Is the dollar amount recorded properly?
Consistency - Is aggregate or summary information in agreement with detailed information?
- For example, do all total fields equal the true total of the individual fields?
Uniqueness - Is each transaction, entity, and event represented only once in the information? For example, are there any duplicate customers?
Timeliness - Is the information current with respect to the business requirements? For example, is information updated weekly, daily, or hourly?

These are also examples of low quality information :
1. Missing information (e.g. No first name of customer given)
2. Incomplete information (e.g. No street name in customer’s address)
3. Probable duplicate information (similar names, address and phone number but customer’s name spelled differently)
4. Potential wrong information (fax and telephone number are the same)
5. Inaccurate information (invalid e-mail given)
6. Incomplete information (missing numbers in fax numbers)

How these information have low quality?

* Online customers intentionally enter inaccurate information to protect their privacy.
* Information from different systems have different entry standards and formats.
* Call center operators enter abbreviated or erroneous information by accident or to save time.
* Third party and external information contains inconsistencies, inaccuracies, and errors.

Potential business effects resulting from low quality information include :
* Inability to accurately track customers
* Difficulty identifying valuable customers
* Inability to identify selling opportunities
* Marketing to nonexistent customers
* Difficulty tracking revenue due to inaccurate invoices
* Inability to build strong customer relationships