Automated Decision Making (ADS) pg 17

Operational Decisions, Managerial Decisions, Strategic Decisions

Examples of each in my life:

Operational: Menu Planning - What will be eaten, where will the ingrediants be purchased and when will purchasing occur happen.

Managerial: Who will do the shopping, how much can spent?

Strategic: Keeping frozen dinners

What are the three categories of managerial roles?

Interpersonal

Figurehead: Symbolic head, obliged to perform a number of routine duties of a legal or social nature.

• Queen of England

Leader: Responsible for the motivation and activation or subordinates; staffing, training and associated duties.

• Richard Branson

Liason: Maintains a self developed network of outside contacts and informers who provide favours and information.

• Liason Manager with industry and govt to keep abreast etc

Informational

Monitor: Seeks and recieves a wide variety of special information (much of it current) to develop a thorough understanding of the organisation and environment; emerges as the nerve centre of the orgs internal and external info.

Disseminator: Transmits information recieved from outsiders or subordinates to members of the org, some of it factual, some of it requiring interpretation, interrogation.

Spokesperson: Transmits information to outsiders about the orgs plans, policies, actions, results. Serves as an expert on the orgs industry.


Decisional

Entrepeneur: Searches the org and environment for opportinuties and initiates improvement projects to bring about change.

Disturbance Handler: Responsible for corrective action when the org faces important, unexpected disturbances.

Resource Allocator: Allocation of org resources of all kinds, approval of all significant org decisions.

Negotiator: Reps org at major negotiations.

Why is DSS hard to define? Umbrella term page 21

It is a context free expression that means different things to different people depending on the type of DSS they use.

The term DSS can be used as an umrella term to describe any computerised system that supports decision making in an organisation.

An organisation may have knowledge management systems.......etc

Hybrid Systems

The combination of 2 or more system types.

With customising, a system may be used either as an EIS or an MIS, for example.

Many different types of DSS combined into a Hybrid System

Summary of DSS Functions

To help management answer questions such as:

• What is?
• Why?
• What will be?
• Why?
• Which is the optimum solution?

Technologies for Decision-Making Processes

Structured (Programmed) : MIS, Management Science Models, Transaction Processing

Semistructured : DSS, KMS, GSS, CRM, SCM

Unstructured (Unprogrammed) : GSS, KMS, ES, Neural networks

Decision Support Frameworks

Structured Decision, Semistructured Decision, Unstructured Decision

How did DSS originate?

• Originally purely ‘number-crunching’
• Followed by simple spreadsheet and database applications (Visicalc and dBase 2)
• Leading to complex spreadsheet and database applications
• After which came interaction with end-users
• And, currently being incorporated, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence, etc.

Decision Support Systems (DSS)

• A sub-set of MSS
• For individuals or groups (GDSS)
• Designed to anticipate the questions and needs of the user
• May be specific or general and customisable
• May be used for:

- Current situations
- Forecasting
- Producing alternative solutions
- Grading those alternatives

Why do Management Roles need Decision Support?

Decision support = helping managers make better decisions.

• A wrong decision can have far-reaching consequences.
• No one person can remember (and recall) everything
• Frequently some form of calculating will be necessary
• A decision may be needed urgently

What form of support is needed?

Information that…

• is accurate
• is up-to-date
• is easy to assimilate
• is relevant
• has quick and easy access to specific records

Management Support Systems

Management Support System = MSS.

MSS = The application of technologies to support the performance of management tasks in general.

Sometimes applied more narrowly to Decision Support Systems (DSS) or Business Intelligence (BI).

Caution – MSS, DSS & BI are all sometimes used as context-free umbrella terms**.

Decision Support Systems and Business Intelligence can be considered as subsets of MSS.

Managerial Roles & Mintzberg’s 10 Management Roles

• Interpersonal
• Informational
• Decisional

Interpersonal

• Figurehead
• Leader
• Liaison

Informational

• Monitor
• Disseminator
• Spokesperson

Decisional

• Entrepreneur
• Disturbance Handler
• Resource Allocation
• Negotiator

Management functions

Management as an ‘interface of responsibility’ between a business unit / group / team and other business units or the business’ external environment.

The manager holds the responsibility for the performance of the business unit.

Management functions include:

• Receipt of requirements and interpretation of these into performance targets and schedules.
• Allocation of human and non-human resources.
• Monitoring of performance and behaviour.
• Improving performance and behaviour.
• Collection, summarising and reporting of performance measures.
• Troubleshooting
• Others ??

discuss at an introductory level how information technology can be used to assist managerial decision-making;

• Speedy computations
• Improved communications and collaboration
• Increased productivity of group members
• Improved data management
• Mnaging giant data warehouses
• Quality support
• Agility support
• Overcomming cognitive limits in processing and storing information
• Using the web
• Anywhere anytime support

Highly suitable for structured and semi structured problems.