Importance of Management Information System.

Answer: Today, every student, regardless of his or her area of specialization, must have a solid foundation in the theory and principles of information systems. There are several reasons for this.

First, in an information-based society, the primary output of organizational workers consists of information and knowledge. As the complexity and sophistication of managing businesses increase, global and international economic pressures mount, political forces reshape the world in which we live and technology becomes intricately woven into the fabric of business, knowledge of computers and information systems is becoming essential for most employees.

Second, computers and information systems are already an integral part of our everyday lives; we use them in libraries, in banks and at home. For example, PIDEAC (Personal Identification and Entry Access Control), a company based in Yellow Springs, Ohio, has developed a system that encodes information about the shape of a person’s hand and stores it on a plastic card’s magnetic strip. The card has many different uses. Users can gain access to anything from a bank’s ATM to a high-security building by entering the card in a computer and placing their hand with the data encoded on the card. When a match is found, it gives the individual access to the system. PIDEAC even allows for minor changes due to hand injures or swelling.

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Why organization’s Need Information Systems?
Today, few if any medium—or large-sized companies can survive without computers and information systems. In this section, we identify some reasons why organizations need information systems.

1. Meeting global challenge: The world has become a small place; the competition faced by a business is no longer limited by national boundaries. Companies therefore strive to produce high-quality goods and services that can bring many benefits, such as increased profits and market share, the challenges of running a global company are also significant.
2. Capturing Opportunities in the Marketplace: Successful companies are those that can identify strategic growth opportunities in the market place are known as strategic information systems (SIS). These systems have catapulted some companies to the top of their industries, leaving their competitors far behind.
3. Supporting corporate strategy: Companies use three basic strategies to compete successfully in the marketplace:

• They stay ahead of the competition by providing goods and services at a lower price than their competitors.
• They produce highly specialized or unique goods and services that allow them to stand apart from their competitors.
• They find a market niche and focus on meeting the needs of this special group.

These three strategies are not mutually exclusively; a company can use them in combination. Regardless of the strategy a company uses to stay ahead of the competition, information systems and technologies play an important role in the implementation of business strategies.

1. Linking department whose functions are different: Some years ago, departments or units with different functions in a business, such as accounting, finance, marketing, manufacturing and human resources, were viewed as separate business entities. Often the efforts of these departments were not coordinated; this resulted in inefficiencies and lost opportunities for the company. Today, most companies treat these apparently different departments as parts of a cohesive unit whose members must work together to achieve the overall goals of the business.
2. Enhancing worker productivity: The pervasiveness of computers and information systems in business has made them essential tools in many tasks, such as managing the shop floor, evaluating the performance of employees, tracking customers, reordering items, and generating the payroll.
3. Increase the quality of goods and services: Quality is a leading for top and middle managers around the world, regardless of the products and services that their companies produce. Total quality management (TQM) is one of the most popular and most widely used approached for enhancing quality in an organization. Quality-oriented efforts and decisions are highly information-intensive, so computers help a company achieve its quality goals by providing the right information to the right people at the right time.