ICT SERVING ORGANISATIONS

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UNIT 2 ICT SERVING ORGANISATIONS
Roger Cain
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Functional Structure

• Organisations are also usually split by type of
  activity

• There may for example be separate marketing,
  production and financial sections

• A diverse company may also be split by type of
  product, technology or geography

• this type of structure may shorten the line of
  command and speed decision making but it may
  lead to sub-optimisation .

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• This is where different groups in an
  organisation follow their own goals, which
  probably unknown to them are in conflict with
  those of other parts of the organisation or
  indeed those of the organisation as a whole

• CMM packaging

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Example of a Conventional Structure(1)
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Example of a Conventional Structure(2)
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Management Structure

• Depending on their responsibilities and
  position in the organisations hierarchy,
  managers can be put into three categories

(a) Strategic Management - Senior Management
These managers are responsible for defining the
organisations objectives, making policies and
strategic planning. Their prime responsibility
is to shareholders or the equivalent

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(b) Tactical Management - Middle Management
These managers will take the strategic plans
and policies and develop tactics to make them
work. They are responsible for tactical and
operational planning and management control
( c) Operational - Junior Management These
managers are responsible for routine planning and
control .
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The characteristics of each of these three types
of information can be summarised in the following
table
Characteristic
Strategic
Tactical
Operational
Largely External
Internal External
Largely Internal
Source
Scope
Very Wide
Intermediate
Well defined narrow
Aggregated to some extent
Detailed
Level of Detail
Broad aggregated
Currency
Historical Forecast
Recent
Very recent
Timeliness
Not urgent
Fairly up to date
Urgent up to date
Frequency of Use
Infrequent
Regular
Frequent
Required Accuracy
Low
Fairly Accurate
Highly Accurate
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Data and Information
Introduction
Although the terms information and data are often
used interchangeably in everyday language, for
our purposes it is important to make a
distinction between them

• The word data means facts. Data consists of
  numbers, letters, symbols,events and
  transactions, which have been recorded but not
  yet processed into a form, which is suitable
  for making decisions
  .

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• Data on its own is not generally useful,
  whereas I information is.

Data Meaning Information
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• Information is data, which has been processed
  in such a way that it has meaning to the
  recipient. Who in a business context may then
  use it to improve the quality of decision making

• For example in cost accounting a large number
  of facts are recorded about materials, times,
  costs, and other transactions. These are then
  classified and summarised to produce accounts,
  which in turn are organised into reports
  designed to help management plan and control the
  organisations activities
  .

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• Note that as data is converted into
  information, some of the detail is eliminated
  and replaced by summaries, which are easier to
  interpret

• Data processing is the conversion of data into
  information as follows

• INPUT data
• PROCESSING manually or by machine
• OUTPUT information

• Data processing can be seen as a system, whose
  interfaces with its environment are data and
  information
  .