FAILURES OF PAST DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEMS

FAILURES OF PAST DECISION-SUPPORT SYSTEMS
'The marketing, department in your company has been concerned about the performance of the West Coast Region and the sales numbers from the monthly report this month arc drastically low. The marketing Vice president, is agitated and wants to get some reports front the IT department to analyze the performance over the past two years, product by product, and compared to monthly targets. He wants to make quick strategic decisions to rectify the situation. The CIO wants your boss to deliver the reports as soon as possible. Your boss runs to you and asks you to stop everything and work on the reports. There are no regular reports from any system to give the marketing department what they want. You have to gather the data from multiple applications and start from scratch. Does this sound familiar'?

At one time or another in your career in information technology. You must have been exposed to situations like this. Sometimes, you may be able to get the information required for such ad hoe reports from the databases or files of one application. Usually this is not so. You may have to go to several applications, perhaps running on different plat-forms in your company environment, to get the information. What happens next'? The marketing department likes the ad hoc repot I!: you have produced. 13ut now they would like reports in a different form, containing more information that they did not think of originally. After the second round, they find that the contents of the reports are still not exactly ■■ hat they wanted. They may also find inconsistencies among, the data obtained from different applications.

'the  fact is that for nearly two decades or more, IT departments have been attempting to provide information to key personnel in their companies Inc making strategic decisions. Sometimes an IT. Department could `produce ad hoc reports from .a single application. In most cases. The reports would need data from multiple systems, requiring the writing of extract programs to create intermediary files that could be used to produce the ad hoc reports. Most of these attempts by IT in the past ended in failure. The users could not clearly define what they wanted in ale first place. Once they saw the first set of reports, they wanted more data in different formats. The chain continued. 

This was mainly because of the very nature of the process of making strategic decisions. Information needed for strategic decision making has to be available in in interactive manner. The user must be able to query online, get results, and query some insre Question & Answer 70-246 Real Test Exam Microsoft 70-246 Exam Features Microsoft 70-246 real exam Microsoft Exam 70-246 guide microsoft 70-246 exam resting engine. The, information must be in a for-mat suitable for analysis. In order to appreciate the reasons for the failure of IT to provide strategic information in the past. we need to consider how IT was attempting to do this all these years. Let us, therefore, quickly run through a brief history of decision support systems.

Opportunities and Risks

Opportunities and Risks
We have looked at the information crisis that exists in every enterprise and grasped that in spite of lots of operational data in the enterprise, data suitable for strategic decision making is not available. Yet the current state of the technology can make it possible to provide strategic information. While we are still discussing the escalating need for strategic inter -'nation by companies. let us ask some basic questions 70-341 exam - Microsoft 70-341 Exam Questions and Answers - Exam 70-341 real pdf test - Download 70-341 - 70-341 testing engine. What arc the opportunities avail-able to companies resulting from the possible use of strategic information? What are the threats and risks resulting from the lack of strategic information available in companies?  

Here are some examples of the opportunities made available to companies through the use of strategic information:

•  A business unit of a leading long-distance telephone carrier empowers its sales personnel to make better business decisions and thereby capture 11101C business in a highly competitive, multibillion-dollar market. A Web-accessible solution gathers internal and external data to provide strategic information.
• Availability of strategic information at one of the largest banks in the United States with assets in the $250 billion range allows users to make quick decisions to retain their valued customers.
• In the case of a large health management organization, significant improvements in health care programs are realized, resulting in a 22% decrease in emergency row visits, 29% decrease at hospital admissions for asthmatic children. Potentially sii01… saving screenings for .hundreds of diabetics, improved vaccination rates, and mart than 100,000 performance reports created annually for physicians and pharmacists
• At one of the top five U.S. retailers. Strategic information combined with Web-enabled analysis tools enables merchants to gain insights into their customer base,  manage inventories more tightly, and keep the right products in front of the people at the right place at the right time.
• A community-based pharmacy that competes on a national scale with more (ha 800 franchised pharmacies coast to coast gains in-depth understanding of what vas miners buy, resulting in reduced inventory levels, improved effectiveness of promotions and marketing campaigns, and improved profitability for the company.
• On the other hand, consider the following cases where risks and threats of 'failures existed before strategic information was made available for analysis and decision making:
• With an average fleet of about 150,000 vehicles, a nationwide car rental comp. can easily gel into the red at the bottom line if fleet management is not &cell The fleet is the biggest cost in that business. With intensified competition, potential for failure is immense if the fleet is not managed effectively. Car idle time must be kept to an absolute minimum. In attempting to accomplish this, failure to have the right class of car available in the right place at the right time, all washed and ready. Can lead to serious loss of business.
• For a world-leading supplier of Systems and components to automobile and light truck equipment manufacturers, serious challenges laced included inconsistent data computations across nearly 100 plants. Inability to benchmark quality metrics, and time-consuming manual collection of data. Reports needed to support decision making took weeks. It was never easy to get company-wide integrated information.
• For a large utility company that provided electricity to about 25 million consumers in five Mid-Atlantic States in the United States, deregulation could result in a few winners and lots of losers. Remaining competitive and perhaps even surviving itself depended on eentra117.in12. Strategic information from various sources, streamlining data access, and facilitating analysis of the information by the business units. .

Computer Technology

• Computer Technology
• Human/machine interface
• Processing Options

Figure 1-3 illustrates these waves or explosive growth, what is our current position in the technology revolution'? Hardware economics and miniaturization allow a workstation on every desk and provide increasing power at reducing costs. New software provides easy-to-use systems. Open systems architecture creates cooperation and enables usage of multivendor software. Improved connectivity, networking, and the Internet open tip interaction with an enormous number of systems and data-bases. All of these improvements in technology are meritorious. These have made computing faster, cheaper, and widely available. But what is their relevance to the escalating need for strategic information? Let us understand how the current state of the technology is conductive to providing strategic information 70-342 Real Questions 70-342 practice questions 70-342 guide download microsoft 70-342 pdf 70-342 objectives.

Providing strategic in requires collection Or large volumes of corporate data and storing it in suitable formats. Technology advances in data storage and reduction in storage costs readily accommodate data storage needs fm: strategic decision-support systems. Analysts, executives, and managers use strategic information interactively to analyze and spot business trends. The user will ask a question and get the results, then ask an-other question, look at the results, and ask yet another question. 

This interactive process continues. 

Tremendous advances in interface software make such interactive analysis possible. Processing large volumes or data and providing interactive analysis requires extra computing power. The explosive increase in computing power and its lower costs make provision of strategic information feasible. What we could not accomplish a few years earlier for providing strategic information is now possible with the current advanced stage of information technology.