Author: Nzita-Mak, Gladys

A booklet on Information Gladys Nzita-Mak

Contents

Types of information
Primary data
Secondary data
Decision making
Operational support
Analysis
Gain advantage
HS Smith’s Functional areas

Types of information
Information should be both Qualitative and Quantitative.
Qualitative data is your own personal data based on your own opinions and beliefs. Quantitative information is related to numbers and statistics that is well processed.

Primary data
Primary data is data that you collect by yourself. It can even be data from your own knowledge. Collecting primary data can be from observations, questionnaires, and even interviews. Primary data is most useful because it is data that you can highly rely on.

Secondary data
Secondary data is data collected from other sources for example, the internet, textbooks and books, television, magazines etc. Secondary data is less reliable. You can never be truly certain how accurate the information you collect from these sources are, and even if it may be from a textbook, the information might have not been recently updated. Another downside to secondary data, is that some information you find may include bias point of views. Although primary data may be hard to get hold of, and maybe even expensive, secondary data is easier to collect and cheaper.

Decision making
In information systems, decision making is managed strategic, operational or tactically. As HS Smith is a business they would need to order their stock, so whilst placing orders on the items they need, when it comes to decision making it can be strategic: your order can be based long term (it can be ordered now but will only be important to you 6 months later), if not strategic, then Tactical, you can place the order and it can be relied on, on a short term basis. And when you order something and it can also be Operational, something you need right away. So when decision making, your decisions should be strategic operational or tactical.

Operational support
When a business monitors and controls its activities, they can make use of the information from its operational support system to make decisions. For example at a restaurant, food is made freshly prepared and some other foods may be done in different certain ways that may take some time. Customer orders are taken down on an EPOS system, so the operational support system can alert the restaurant management to let them know when to cook and prepare food for a customer. So linking back to HS Smith, if the company were to have an EPOS system, they’d have track of what sells the best in their stock and would know exactly what types of items customers like buying from their store, resulting the company to start selling those type of items to keep their profit up.

Analysis
This is where the company analyses the organisations trends. They may produce a report to monitor the business. By monitoring the business, HS Smith are able to take notice of how their profits are increasing or decreasing. Also this is where processing of data takes place. This is where company analysis is done. HS Smith can be able to predict future sales, and this will help the organisation to know how much stock to buy, what type of advertising should be done, and what staffing is needed.

Gain advantage
Gaining advantage is the opposite to finding a solution to a problem. Instead it is taking advantage internally and externally. Trends are monitored and decisions are made about the business whether the company should take advantages of events going on. For example if there is a football match on a certain day that the business is closed, HS Smith would have to make a decision to open up their business in order to make money off the football fans so they can sell their products to them. This would be gaining advantage.

Functional areas

Sales
HS Smith’s sales department is focused on how many products have been sold, in this case how much books, games, music and films have been sold.
Human resources The human resources department focuses on HS Smith’s employees and their personal details. The organisation will monitor the wages each employee gets, and the days off sick they have had. There are many other issues the human resources have to look into for example the HS Smith’s human resources department would have to deal with people when it comes to recruiting and training them6.
Marketing
When it comes to marketing, HS Smith deals with the analysis of its customers and competitors. The marketing team focus on what products seem to sell best to their customers, and when it comes to their competitors they analyse what the competitors do to attract the customers they get.

Warehouse
In the warehouse, this is where all the stock is managed and delivered to all the different HS Smith stores.
Purchasing
With purchasing, HS Smith are interested on how their products are sold by their suppliers. For example, a good supplier would have cheap prices, would be able to deliver quickly and also reliably and not have problems with the quality of the product.
Administration
In this department HS Smith will be doing reports that will apply to the organisation.

Marketing

Warehouse

Flow diagram

When it comes to marketing and the warehouse, HS Smith’s staff can check what stock items are available and if they're major selling products they can advertise them and if they need more of the product they can order them and get them sent off to their branches

Administration

With administration, as they're responsible for making reports based on the organisation, they can also use information based on their staff, for example to represent that their staff are always in on time, or they can get information from staff about how well or bad the organisation is being ran

Sales can be linked to purchasing and warehouse because as the warehouse manage the stocking area, once all the needed stock has been sent off to all the HS Smith branches they are ready to be sold to customers and so customers will be able to purchase these items.

Sales

Administration can also be based on the sales that come in from the customers as they’d have to check what type of items customers are frequently buying

As well as just the sales department, Human resources is involved with the whole organisation

Human resources

Purchasing

Good information

Valid— information should be fair and accurate, and able to be used by others in their work
Reliable—your information should be correct and from a source that you can trust.
Timely— Information should be accessible when needed not anytime after for example if a HS Smith worker were to attend a meeting and give information that was reliable 3 months ago, it wouldn’t be needed as the information is too late to give in, and so in a business like HS Smith they would need all their information to be given on a timely basis when it is needed
Fit for purpose— The information that you have provided should be up to date, it should be relevant to what it is needed for. HS Smith would need their stock lists updated from time to time to know what exactly to order, or to know which product is best selling

Accessible— Whatever calculations you do, it should be done with your information, and if this information contains a lot of data not all of it should be used in order to perform calculations
Cost-effective— the cost of gathering and actually producing data should be less than the decisions made for that piece of that data
Sufficiently accurate— The information that you collect may not be required to be 100 per cent exact but still accurate and reliable
Relevance— If your information is irrelevant then it is useless, whereas if you have information that is relevant then will be suitable for your work
Having the right level of detail— You should have enough detail required, but not too much of it, just a good amount

From a source in which the user has confidence— Whatever information you collect, you need to make sure that it is fully believable for you to actually use, for example HS Smith would need a reliable statement that customers like to buy a certain range of games from their store, if they use this statement and bring in more games customers like to buy then their profit will go up, if this is untrue and they have brought in more games and the customers are not buying them then this could result in money being lost
Understandable by the user— If your information is not clearly understood, then it should not be considered as information at all, your information has to be understandable and reliable enough for yourself and others to use, this could link to human resources, HS Smith would need accurate information about their employees, not false information about them.