Where has MIS Gone?

The administrator has the ultimate responsibility for the public service organization’s strategic and operational performance. The execution of these and other functions while remaining within appropriate span of control is enabled by the agency’s management information system or MIS. Ideally, this highly summarized information is presented in as real time as possible to give the administrator complete organizational overview and monitor how processes are managed, all within a period of minutes.

While MIS at present is enabled with high speed data processing, it was the need for real-time management information that spurred the development of the digital computing machine. Before the advent of desktops and laptops, executives of small agencies or high growth organizations were provided daily cash need forecast one pagers that were manually calculated from accounting ledgers. Unfortunately as computing power grew exponentially, the administrator has been inundated with arrays of data that have not been through the analytics phase of the information cycle. In order to glean management information, the executive must assume the role of analyst. To remedy this situation, the executive has to specify to directly reporting managers the organization’s management information requirement and perhaps a suggestion of how such a system may be configured.

High level review of management information, or reports of analysis, and how it is derived from data begins with the digital computing hardware: mainframes, works stations, desktops or laptops. In these devices one may find memory or storage drives and the central processing unit or CPU. The CPU holds the operating system, performs logic and arithmetic operations on data, and is the virtual space where processing takes place.

Stored in memory devices, are “bits”, the smallest unit of data on a digital computer that assumes values of either 1 or 0. It is a contraction of the term “binary digit.” By grouping into 8, 16 or 64 adjacent bits, a “byte” is formed, allowing data to be processed by the computer for it has information that indicates location in memory, processing character, etc. To facilitate development of applications (“apps”), most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII or American Standard Code for Information Interchange.

Several separated text or numerical data elements make up a “record,” and a group of records similar in data content makes a “file”. With the use of apps or queries that are highly user oriented, data elements from a file or related files may be combined into a new file. The reporting manager significantly summarizes this file in the analysis phase and attaches a conclusion for presentation of the resulting management information to the administrator.

By Noel Jagolino, contributing management consultant