More on Cutback Management: Hard Questions for Hard Times 论文

摘要

Automated Management Information Systems Are an Illusion: There are No Such Things. This is almost true! Most management information systems are automated clerical systems or, at best, automated routine management tasks. (In DMV, for example, these included license restoration and driver training notification subroutines.) Very few, if any, organizations have a completely automated MIS. It is possible that very few need them. Perhaps the whole point of this discussion is that there is a tremendous gap between the theory of MIS and its operational feasibility in a government agency. That the potential for sound management information flow and reports exists seems in little doubt, and executives cannot in good conscience ignore this means of improving agency operations. But management information systems can be developed at widely varying levels of detail and for widely varying costs. This variety in alternative design and investment often results in one of two equally unsatisfactory decisions. Either a whose level of sophistication, cost, and complexity far outweighs its practical utility is chosen, or no real system at all is chosen-data collection and assembly goes on in an entirely ad hoc, unstructured basis. All of the assumptions about MIS that have been examined here have a grain of truth in them, but they also have more than a grain of falsehood. The executive who is installing or upgrading a management information system, then, should examine the claims that have been made about MIS very carefully before taking action.