Here is a compilation of term papers on ‘Management Information System (MIS)’ for class 11 and 12. Find paragraphs, long and short term papers on ‘Management Information System (MIS)’ especially written for college and IT students.
Term Paper on Management Information System (MIS)
Term Paper Contents:
- Term Paper on the Introduction to Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Definition of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Elements of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Functions of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Development Approach of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Configuration of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Criteria of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Models of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Sub-Systems of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Categories of Report for Management Information System
- Term Paper on Management Structure and Management Information System
- Term Paper on Data Processing and Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Application Areas of Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Deficiency of Early Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Requirements of a Successful Management Information System
- Term Paper on the Future of Management Information System
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Term Paper # 1. Introduction to Management Information System:
Management Information System is an all comprehensive information system which is primarily not concerned with the information generated by routine data processing operations, which are called structured information, because every step of processing has been laid out in detail and routine data is used to generate routine information at regular interval which are used by different departments for routine operations like paying salary and wages or preparing the cost sheets.
MIS is concerned with generation of non-structured information, whenever these are required. For example, suppose the company is proposing a major expansion for which people of special skill would be required.
Having decided on the quality and quantity of the human resource for the proposed expansion, it is necessary to know how many existing employees could be used for this purpose and what training is required to be given to whom.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Even though the employee data base is stored in the computer, if the computer system in the organization has been geared for doing only routine data processing, it would be extremely difficult to get this information which is of vital nature. Hence, Management Information System is primarily concerned with how to get unstructured information for decision making.
Basically all MIS are driven by operational data processing, that is, its required information mostly come from the data already stored for day-to-day operations, but it is processed in a different manner to quickly generate the required information.
In brief, an MIS may be described as an integrated man-machine combination for providing the required information to support different activities of an organization to ensure its financial stability and long-range profitability.
Term Paper # 2. Definition of Management Information System:
ADVERTISEMENTS:
Management Information System may be defined as a formal method of making available to management the accurate and timely information necessary to facilitate the decision-making process and enable the organisation’s planning, control and operational functions to be carried out effectively.
The system provides information on the past, present and projected future and on related events inside and outside the organisation. The purpose of MIS is to aid decision making and not to automate the decision making process itself. Secondly MIS should focus only on those decisions whose benefit/cost ratio is attractive.
i. Data:
Uninterpreted raw statement of facts.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
ii. Management:
The direction of an enterprise, (through planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling of its human and material resources) toward the achievement of a predetermined objective.
iii. Information:
An aggregate of facts so organized or utilized as to provide knowledge or intelligence. Information is the common element that holds an organisation together.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
iv. System:
An assembly of procedures, processes, methods, routines or techniques united by some form of regulated interaction to form an organized whole.
Term Paper # 3. Elements of Management Information System:
By now it should be clear what are the basic components of a Management Information System.
These are:
i. Management:
The user or customer of the information.
ii. Plant Personnel:
The activities of whom generate most of the data required to build up the database of the MIS.
iii. The Computer Hardware:
Where the data base is stored and which is used for generating the required information.
iv. The Computer Software:
Which processes the data from the database using the hardware to convert these to information.
v. Computer Personnel:
The supplier, who provide the information to the management, Maintenance Function with the technical health of the plant and machinery, and so on.
Term Paper # 4. Functions of Management Information System:
The MIS should provide management with the following four major information services:
i. Determination of information needs:
The beginning point is to attempt to answer such questions as given below:
a. How much information is needed? More information does not mean better performance.
b. How, when and by whom will the information be used?
c. In what form is it needed?
d. What information is necessary for planning and controlling operations at different organisational levels?
E. What information is needed to allocate resources?
f. What information is needed to evaluate performance?
ii. Information gathering and processing:
The purpose of this service is to improve the overall quality of the information. It includes five component services. Evaluation involves determining how much confidence can be placed in a particular piece of information. Such factors as the credibility of the source, and reliability and validity of the data, must be determined.
Abstraction involves editing and reducing incoming information and data in order to provide the managers with only that information which is relevant to their particular task. Once information has been gathered, the service of indexing is important in order to provide classification for storage and retrieval purposes.
Dissemination entails getting the right information to the right manager at the right time. Indeed, this is the overriding purpose of an MIS. The final information processing service is that of storage. An organization has no natural memory so every MIS must provide for storage of information in order that it can be used again if needed. Modern electronic information storage equipment has greatly improved the “memory” capabilities of organizations.
iii. Information use:
How information is utilized depends greatly on its quality (accuracy), how it is presented (form), and its timeliness. This all relates to the basic need determined in the beginning. If the right questions are asked in the beginning, and the system is planned carefully, the user will be provided with relevant information. Remember that the major goal is to provide the right information to the right decision maker at the right time.
This brings up the point that timeliness may take precedence over accuracy. If information is not available when it is needed then its accuracy is not important. In most cases, however, both are critical and timeliness is determined by the nature of the decisions that must be made.
For example, a sales manager may find accurate weekly reports of sales for each company product to be adequate, while an air-traffic controller needs accurate information every second. The functions of an MIS are presented in below figure.
Term Paper # 5. Development Approach of Management Information System:
The Management Information System of an organization would depend on various factors and vary from organization to organization, as the style of management, management culture, organization culture and even industrial culture are different, not to talk of structure, product, services, etc. However, generally, two approaches are available, one based on Functional Classification and another based on Resource Management.
i. Resource Based Approach:
The resources of an industrial organization, apart from money, are its assets (both fixed and current) represented in the form of plant and machinery, inventory, debtors (suppliers), creditors (customers), and employees termed as Human Resource.
Since these resources are more or less used in different divisions and departments of the organization, generally this approach eliminates duplication of data, as sometimes different departments tend to maintain their own database when dealing with activities under their control. However, even that duplication, called data redundancy, can be eliminated to a large extent by building up a suitable common database under a competent Data Base Administrator (DBA).
However, apart from data on fixed assets and money, it may be quite complicated to develop an information system on the basis of resource management only.
ii. Functional Approach:
This is the most common approach, generally followed, as the information system is built upon different functions carried out in business organizations — where the departments are also formed on functional basis. For example, the Finance Function deals with mainly money as a resource, Personnel Function almost exclusively deals with the employee related matters, and so on.
Term Paper # 6. Configuration of Management Information System:
i. The Management Information System can be developed directly on the operational Data Processing System, by sharing the same database. In such a case there may be conflict at times because both the operational control system and management information system may try to access the same data base simultaneously. But the advantage is that the MIS would always have the updated data captured by the operational system.
ii. The data for the Management Information System could be kept in a separate computer which is linked with the computer being used by the operational system. Here MIS will naturally not interfere with the Operational System, but if the data transfer from the operational database is not regularly made, the database of the MIS may become updated.
iii. It could be a Distributed Database, with local data being stored in different regions, with MIS having access to all these databases for information generation.
Term Paper # 7. Criteria of Management Information System:
The category of reports broadly specified could be for any level of management and to make them relevant, we have to also classify them from the point of timing and detail. It is to be remembered, as information is a resource, getting this resource involves expenditure of other resources, money being a major item.
i. Frequency of Decision Making:
How frequently such decisions are required to be made, all decisions are not required to made in a fixed pattern. For example, a company may have a special reward scheme under which rewards are announced half-yearly, In such a case the required information report’s frequency would be twice an year.
ii. Response Time Required:
How quickly the information is required. Some managers are in the habit of asking for information “immediately”, which may not be such urgent. A judicious decision, as to response time, has to be taken.
iii. Degree of Processing Required:
With super fast processing power of computers in generating information, there is often a tendency to get some information to absolute detail, which may not be necessary. For example, when an annual cash budget is prepared it is not necessary to have the figure in Rupees and Paise, they could easily be rounded off to Rs lakhs in large organizations.
It is to be remembered, that apart from additional cost in processing, the manager may also become confused by tonnes of information and fail to take correct decision.
iv. Amount of Information Required:
There is an economic law developed by the Italian economist Wilfred Pareto, which is also known as 80/20 law. This law also applies in case of information system, which implies that 20% of the information generated may meet the 80% of the need of information of a manager for a particular decision making. One should always restrict himself to the specific information required, not asking for something which “may be” required.
Term Paper # 8. Models of Management Information System:
Different models have been suggested by different experts, two of which are briefly discussed below:
Bowman’s Three-Stage Model:
This model three stages for successful MIS implementation:
Level 1:
Based on the long range corporate planning process, called Strategic Planning, the strategic Management Information System [MIS] Planning is undertaken to decide on what information the system should be able to provide in what manner. It starts with the needs of the Top Level of Management, which are identified first.
Level 2:
Assessing the total requirement of information need of the organization, both for strategic, tactical, and operational decision making, using the top-down approach. A large number of information are generated within the organization itself, which can meet many of the needs of the top level and middle level and so these are now identified, going to lower levels step by step to define these.
Level 3:
Committing resources to build up, maintain, and operate the Management Information System.
Earl’s 3-Level Model:
The three levels have been defined as:
i. Information System Strategy: ISS
ii. Information Technology Strategy: ITS
iii. Information Management Strategy: IMS
i. Information System Strategy:
The starting point, as before, is the overall business strategy, which with continuous reference to different levels, ultimately defines the total information requirement of the organization at various levels.
ii. Information Technology Strategy:
At this stage attempt is made to evaluate and determine how the available computer technology and its anticipated future developments would be able to cater to the requirement defined at ISS level. It also takes into account the networking and other communication facilities.
Not only the hardware portion of the computer system, but the availability of relevant software with scope for modification are also-taken into consideration, to draw the IT Strategy to be followed.
iii. Information Management Strategy:
The final level involves overall strategy which is concerned with planning in detail how the organization will manage its both information system and technology, to meet organizational need for information. It decides upon degree of centralization, the rules and regulations, authority, and funding of the total system development. It is a mixture of both the top-down and bottom-up approach. A provision for periodical auditing of the MIS is also provided.
Whatever be the model followed or strategy adopted for building up a Management Information System, total commitment from the top level of management is a must — lip service will not help.
Term Paper # 9. Sub-Systems of Management Information System:
i. Transaction Processing:
Transaction Processing – deals with sales orders, material receipts issues, remuneration payment, etc., all the routine operations. Each deal between two persons or organizations constitute a transaction, be it buying or selling, receiving or giving materials or services.
ii. Operational Control:
Operational Control – deals with planning and controlling of day to day operations, which generate the data which is processed under the sub-system known as Operational Control.
iii. Management Control:
Management Control — this is synonymous with tactical planning, which uses more information than it generates.
iv. Strategic Planning:
Strategic Planning – this is concerned with both internal and external information for the specific purpose of long time survival.
Term Paper # 10. Categories of Report for Management Information System:
i. Schedule Reports:
The information which are generated at regular intervals like bank over-draft position, sales achieved, age analysis of sundry debtors, payment commitments to be met in the coming week, etc.
ii. Exception Reports:
These information are action oriented, that is, it calls for certain actions of corrective nature to ensure that the target profitability is achieved. The Variance Analysis report, which points out the variations from planned performance is one of this type. Again, this report would be in different form for different levels of management.
For the Operational Level, it will give the full details because at this stage corrective actions would be initiated. For higher levels of Management the report would get progressively condensed highlighting only the major variations, as for them, it is mainly for information and discussion for taking major remedial steps, if required, like replacing a machine.
iii. Prediction Reports:
The information generated by these kind of reports are used for forecasting of future operations, like preparation of investment proposals, operational budget, sales forecasting, etc.
iv. Demand Reports:
These reports cater to the information required to solve a problem which has suddenly cropped up and are of totally unstructured type, depending on what the problem is.
v. Hybrid Reports:
This involves both the factors of problems and exceptions.
Term Paper # 11. Management Structure and Management Information System:
Management of business organizations, to ensure their profitability and viability engage themselves in planning, organizing, and controlling various operations of the business, the management having different levels for different types of activities.
i. The Top Management Level:
The level called Strategic Level, involves drawing up long range goals and directions which the organization has to follow in the coming years. This strategic planning activity takes into account both opportunities and threats from the environment and the strength and weakness of the organization in different areas, generally called SWOT [Strength – Weakness – Opportunity – Threat] Analysis.
Such an analysis calls for very critical information on competitors, economic situation, government policies, technological changes, etc., so that proper decision can be taken and goals set. These strategic plans are invariably broad based, as it involves longer horizon. Since future is always uncertain and threats and opportunities are in abundance in environment, the decision making activities at this level is generally unstructured.
A unstructured decision making is one where one does not know beforehand what are the steps necessary to be taken to solve the problem in hand, or simply, how to solve a specific problem is not known, a non-routine decision making process. For example, if you have never assembled a bicycle from its components, when you try do it first time, it will be an unstructured decision making for you, not knowing definitely how to proceed to assemble the bicycle.
Some of the decisions taken at this strategic level could be:
a. Increasing the market share from, say 26% to 35% in 5 years time.
b. Investing for modernization to reduce cost of production by 12%.
c. Fully computerizing the routine operations in 2 years time and building up a computerized MIS there after in next 1 year’s time.
Generally, the Board of Directors is considered to be as the Top Level of Management.
ii. The Middle Level:
The level called Tactical Level, as far as planning is concerned, is more specific as it deals only with the coming financial year of operations. This level, taking into account the long range plan as the base, decides on how to achieve the yearly target and arrange for the resources, which department or function would do what.
Naturally, their need for information is of different nature, with more stress on information generated within the organisation. The Middle Level is more or less engaged in semi-structured-decision making, as they have some exposure and experience in dealing with such problems in the past.
Generally, they prepare the comprehensive annual budget in collaboration with the accounts department, which quantifies operational performance in terms of monetary units, as ultimately the performance of an organisation is evaluated in terms of its profitability and financial stability.
iii. The Junior Level:
The level called Operational Level is engaged in meeting the targets by setting up weekly, daily goals and targets, deploying resources, continuously monitoring actual performance by comparing with the budgeted parameters and taking corrective actions based on the deviations from the budget, called variance — they are, we can say, are the persons in the actual battle field.
Here again, the need for information is of different nature, being more detailed and exception oriented. But the type of information required are more or less of routine nature, coming into the category of structured decision making.
[The Management Structure is shown as a triangle tapering at the top, because as one goes up in the hierarchy, the number of persons holding such positions get reduced.]
Term Paper # 12. Data Processing and Management Information System:
Data Processing, also called Transaction Processing as it involves processing business transactions, is basically a routine process of converting data to information, where the information generated are mainly for operational control, the third and the lowest level of management.
For example, payroll accounting is a routine data processing job done month after month to compute the salary and wages payable to each employees based on their attendance and or performance. The total procedure for recording attendance / performance are clearly defined, routinely these data are collected, converted to a form for entering into the computer, and then after some standard processing the pay bills are prepared in a fixed format.
This operation also needs records of each employees, as to their name address, grade, basic, DA, etc. and it is a massive data base for a large organization. Generating the pay-bill for accounting, pay-slips to be given to employees, provident fund deduction statement, denomination of currency notes required to pay salary and wages in cash, bank statements to be sent to bank for employees whose accounts are credited with their salaries, etc., are routine statements and these are taken care of fully by the computer software prepared for doing this payroll accounting.
If the programming has been done properly and the data given are correctly recorded, then the information generated would be correct. But, suppose, for department wise costing of products, the Costing Department wants a listing, that is an information statement, of how much salary and wages have been paid in each department or cost centre, that becomes a formidable task, even though the data is there and the fast processing device, the computer is available. Why?
The reason is when the payroll accounting was computerized, the objective was to transfer a manual operation to computer to do it quickly with less manpower and accurately and nobody thought of using it for product costing. No body also thought, that other than payroll accounting the database could also be used for any other purposes.
The requirement of the costing department in this regard, however, could be fully met, if the personnel number allotted to each employee is linked with the code numbers of the departments, which are cost centres. Assuming it is done, a problem would be encountered when employees are transferred from one department to another and if this data is not made available to the computer centre for updating the employee’s record, changing his cost centre code.
This procedure, if properly done, would also cater to routine operation and would come under data processing, which is also called Transaction Processing, as each processing involves transaction with each employee — paying for his or her service. Then what is management information system, is it something different from data processing?
Term Paper # 13. Application Areas of Management Information System:
The broad areas where MIS is extensively used are:
i. Order Processing:
No organization can survive unless the products manufactured by it are sold or the services provided are availed by the customers. Hence procuring orders for its products and services is an important function and it is entrusted to the Marketing Department, who creates and also maintains existing customers, sells the products/services, realizes outstanding, provides after sales service, carries out advertisement campaigns and even market research. Hundreds of useful information can be produced from the data generated by this function.
The information could be on:
Products sold / services provided — region wise, product wise, sales force wise, which would show growth/decay and help in taking tactical decisions and making future projections. Some of the information is also used in strategic decision making.
Customers complaints handling — an analysis will show the quality of the goods sold or services provided.
After Sales Service — in case of durable consumer goods, the quality of after sales service, not only enhances sales but also reflects how the organization is fulfilling the needs of its customers.
Credit Policy Management — in many cases, products are sold on credit and if one is not careful, the sales force may provide higher credit to secure more sales and some of these may remain unrealised for a long time. Information in this area, with age wise analysis, in close cooperation with the finance function, always help to improve business profitability.
The information on competitor’s products and services are often collected by the marketing function, as they are directly in touch with the market.
ii. Purchasing:
Purchasing is a sub-system of the Materials Management function, with Stores being another important area. Purchasing is another area which is of critical importance, as their mission is to provide the right quantity of material of right quality and at right cost at right time to the manufacturing function, maintenance function and other departments. It is extremely important to build up a database of vendors, with their performance rating, so that quality goods can be purchased at minimum expenses.
It is also necessary to develop new vendors, as depending on a single vendor can be at times dangerous. The creditors are created by the Purchase Department who finance a part of the working capital of the organization. In this area a close cooperation between the finance function is necessary so that the suppliers are paid on time, as otherwise not only future supplies will be disturbed, the quality will suffer and the cost will go up.
iii. Inventory Control:
The material purchased, the partially processed ones called work-in- progress, components obtained, and the finished products all represent money in different physical shapes and sizes. Any reduction in expenditure by bringing down stock holding always contributes to business profitability.
The ABC Analysis, FSN Analysis, VED Analysis etc., various Operation Research Techniques which are available to determine the optimum stock level, reordering level, and economic ordering quantity of stores and spares with the dual objective of bringing down holding level but at the same time ensuring that production stoppages do not take place due to stock out. Fund management is closely tied up with inventory and higher profitability can be achieved with better inventory control.
iv. Payroll:
Employee dissatisfaction always has an adverse effect on organisational performance and hence every organisation which has gone for computerization has invariably started with payroll system, to ensure that employees are correctly paid on time and also statutory obligations in this area is fulfilled. Other than payroll accounting, an useful MIS can be built around employee data, so that succession plan, training and development actions, recruitment etc., can be done on systematic manner.
v. Financial Accounting:
Though preparation of annual financial account is a statutory obligation, a lot of contribution in profitability can be made by preparing such accounts on short duration and analyzing the trend of various items for taking corrective measures.
vi. Cost & Management Accounting:
No organization can survive in the long run without an effective cost accounting system, which is closely integrated with the financial accounting system. Application of Budgetary Planning and Control with Marginal Cost Techniques is the only way to evaluate the performance of hundreds of man-machine combinations performing in the organization
to ensure profitability of the organization. The area called Management Accounting has over the years, become the main function which provides the top management with vital information for strategic decisions.
Apart from the specific areas mentioned above there are a number of areas where computerization for information generation greatly contributes to improved organizational performance, which varies from one organization to another. But careful selection should be made, followed by critical analysis to ensure that costly resources are not wasted to generate trivial information in the name of building a Management Information System.
Term Paper # 14. Deficiency of Early Management Information System:
i. Total lack of appropriate touch — there was no on-line, or real-time processing choices to get information quickly. The question of interconnecting computers of different offices of the same organization did not exist.
ii. The then computer operations being highly complicated, the system was very much error prone, making large number of mistakes in the generated information.
iii. It was more or less a static system, since to introduce any changes in the computer processing involved long time; highly insensitive to environmental changes.
iv. There used to be large communication gap between the user departments and the computer personnel, who had a false sense of superiority and so was very much uncooperative. Moreover, the languages used by each was different from the other — computer professionals did not know what was debit or credit and the accountants did not know what was bit or byte.
Term Paper # 15. Requirements of a Successful Management Information System:
i. It should provide timely, relevant, accurate data to the management in a manner required by them.
ii. It should be flexible enough to move with the changes in operation and environment.
iii. It should have the reliability to ensure that decision based on the information generated by the system do not lead to disasters.
iv. It should be a simple system to operate and maintain, not calling for high skill on the person of the users.
v. The system must be cost-effective. It should not be developed in such a way that the resources spent on developing it is much more than the benefits derived from it.
vi. The system must be need based, fully catering to the needs of all the levels of management.
vii. Must have a common database with a structure simple enough to the user from the logical point of view, that is how the user will see it.
viii. The system must be secured enough to prevent unauthorized copying of vital information by anybody.
ix. The system should have the capability of recovering from disasters caused by hardware or software failures.
x. The system should not be accessible to unauthorized persons in any manner, who can destroy the vital database.
xi. The system should preferably be inter-connected so that senior executives can directly interact with the database to generate their own information quickly
Term Paper # 16. The Future of Management Information System:
Although some individuals still refer to MIS as a mirage, many organisations are operating with an MIS that is very effective. These organisations have been dissatisfied with the quantity and quality of the information provided to managers and have realised that to develop an effectively functioning integrated MIS involves a great deal more than expanding or automating the data gathering process.
Certainly, one of the major reasons for the increased interest in the concept of information systems has been the rapid growth in information technology. However, the study of information systems is not the study of computers. The study of management information systems is part of a much larger task, the study of more effective methods of managing organisations.
To Conclude:
Management information systems, computers, and many management science models have made it possible to reduce the number of decisions required by some managers, especially at the operations level.
These are in areas where the problems are deterministic and arise with great regularity (e.g. inventory decisions) and pre-established decision rules can, therefore, be developed. However, it is difficult to foresee the elimination of the manager as the critical factor in an effective MIS. Even with the increased sophistication of computers, most decision making is as we have noted, a human activity.