Chapter 12, Problem 4RQ

Explanation of Solution

Major decision making constituencies in an organization

• The main decision making constituency in an organization is operational management.
• It makes structured decisions based on day-to-day operations in an organization.
• It receives most information from transaction reporting systems and some information from Management Information Systems.
• The next decision making constituency is middle management.
• It makes structured decisions and semi structured decisions based on routine product reports from Management Information System (MIS).
• It uses exception reports in order to determine exceptional conditions...

Explanation of Solution

Management Information System providing decision support

• Management information systems (MIS) provide routine reports and summaries of transaction-level data to middle and operational level managers for providing answers to structured and semi structured decision problems.
• MIS provide information on the firm’s performance to help managers to monitor and control the business.
• They typically produce fixed, regularly scheduled reports based on the extracted data and the data summarized from the firm’s underlying transaction processing systems.

Decision Support System providing decision support

• Decision-support systems (DSS) provide analytical models or tools for analyzing large quantities of data and supportive interactive queries for middle managers who face semi structured situations...

Explanation of Solution

Balanced score card method

• A balanced scorecard focuses on measurable outcomes on four dimensions of a business’s performance which include financial, business process, customer, and learning and growth.
• Each dimension uses key performance indicators (KPIs) to understand how well an organization is performing on any of the dimensions at any time.
• The framework of a balanced scorecard requires managers to focus on more than just financial performance...

Explanation of Solution

Group Decision Support System (GDSS)

• A GDSS is an interactive computer-based system that facilitates the solution of unstructured problems by a set of decision makers working together as a group.
• GDSS have been developed in response to the growing concern over the quality and effectiveness of meetings.
• Hence it is an interactive computer based system that helps a number of decision makers in finding solutions to problems that are unstructured in nature...