Chapter 6

Managing Information

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

What Would You Do?

The PC industry is very competitive How can Dell and its suppliers work more closely together? How can Dell handle all the information it generates?

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Strategic Importance of Information

First-mover advantage Sustaining a competitive advantage

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Using Information to Sustain a Competitive Advantage

Does the information create value? Is the information different across firms? Can another firm create or buy the technology?

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Characteristics of Useful Information

Accurate Complete Relevant Timely

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

The Costs of Useful Information

Acquisition Processing Storage Retrieval Communication

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Capturing Information

Manual

Completing forms

Electronic

Bar code Electronic scanner Optical character recognition

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different Kinds of Storage Devices

Paper Microfilm CDs DVDs Data storage tapes Hard drives

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2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Processing Information

Processing information

Transforming raw data into meaningful information that can be used in decision making Process of discovering unknown patterns and relationships in large amounts of data

Data mining

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Protecting Information

Protecting information

Process of insuring that data are reliably and consistently retrievable for authorized users only

firewalls virus data encryption virtual private networks

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

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Security Threats to Data and Data Networks

Denial of service Web server attacks Corporate network attacks Unauthorized access to PCs Viruses, worms, Trojan horses

Malicious scripts and applets E-mail snooping Keystroke monitoring Referrers Spam Cookies
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2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Accessing and Sharing Information

Communication Internal access and sharing External access and sharing Sharing knowledge and expertise

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

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Communication

E-mail Voice messaging Conferencing systems Document conferencing Application sharing Desktop videoconferencing
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2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Internal Access and Sharing

Executive Information System (EIS)

Intranets

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

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Executive Information System

Uses internal and external sources of data Used to monitor and analyze organizational performance Must be easy to use and must provide information that managers want and need
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2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Characteristics of Best-selling Executive Information Systems

Ease of use

Few commands, important views saved, 3-D charts, geographic dimensions

Analysis of information

Sales tracking, easy-to-understand displays, time periods

Compare to standards, trigger exceptions, drill down, detect and alert newspaper, detect and alert robots
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Identification of problems and exceptions

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Intranets

Private company networks Allow employees to easily access, share, and publish information using Internet software Very popular
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2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

Why 80% of Companies Now Use Intranets

Intranets: are inexpensive increase efficiencies and reduce costs are intuitive and easy to use work across all computer systems and platforms can be built on top of existing networks work with programs to convert electronic documents to HTML
2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

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External Access and Sharing

Electronic Data Exchange

Extranet

Internet

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

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Sharing Knowledge and Expertise

Knowledge is the understanding one gains from information. Decision support systems (DSS)

Use models to acquire and analyze information Replicate experts decisions

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Expert systems

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

What Really Happened?

Dell shares information with suppliers Dell is on the cutting edge of technology Dell uses information to determine actual sales

2004 by Nelson, a division of Thomson Canada Limited

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