Transcript Categorisation of Information

Characteristics of Information
Characteristics of Information
• Availability / Accessibility
 Information should be easy to obtain or access
• Accuracy
 Information needs to be accurate enough for the use to
which it is going to be put.
• Reliability or Objectivity
 Reliability deals with the truth of the information or the
objectivity with which it is presented.
• Relevance / Appropriateness
 Information should be relevant to the purpose for which it is
required. It must be suitable.
Characteristics of Information
• Completeness
 Information should contain all details required by the user.
• Level of Detail / Conciseness
 Information should be in a form that is short enough to allow
for its examination and use. There should be no extraneous
information.
• Presentation
 Information can be more easily assimilated if it is aesthetically
pleasing.
• Timing
 Information must be on time for the purpose for which it is
required. Information received too late will be irrelevant.
Characteristics – Value and Cost
• Value
 The relative importance of information for decision-making
can increase or decrease its value to an organisation.
• Cost
 Information should be available within set cost levels that
may vary dependent on situation.
• The difference between value and cost
 Valuable information need not cost much.
 Information costly to obtain may not have much value.
Categorisation of Information
Categorisation of Information
• Information can be categorised under several headings
that allow us to determine its overall usefulness.
 Main categories
• Source
• Nature
• Level
• Time
• Frequency
• Use
• Form
• Type.
Levels of Information
Long-term decisions - both
internal & external sources
Top level of management
STRATEGIC
TACTICAL
Medium-term decisions mostly internal but some
external sources
Middle management
Day-to-day decisions largely internal sources
OPERATIONAL
Lowest level of staff
Uses of Information within
Organisations
• Planning is the process of deciding, in advance, what
has to be done and how it
is to be done.
 Planning is decisions by management about:
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What is to be done in the future
How to do it
When to do it
Who is to do it
• An objective is something that needs to
be achieved.
• A plan describes the activities or actions required to
achieve the objective.
Uses of Information within
Organisations
• Control is the monitoring and evaluation of current
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progress against the steps of a pre-defined plan or
standard.
Operational level
 the manager’s time will be spent on control activities
• At higher levels
 planning and control are more closely linked, with management
being concerned with the monitoring of progress against the
plan, assessing the suitability of the plan itself, and
predicting future conditions.
Uses of Information within
Organisations
• Decision-making –
 means selecting an action or actions from those possible
based on the information available.
 involves determining and examining the available actions and
then selecting the most appropriate actions in order to
achieve the required results.
 is an essential part of management and is carried out at all
levels of management for all tasks.
 is made up of four phases:
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Finding occasions for decision making
Finding possible courses of action
Choosing among these courses of action
Evaluating past choices.
Planning, Decision Making or Control?
• Bart woke up and wondered if he should be
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bad or good today. A devil appeared on his left
and whispered “Be bad!” A Bart with a halo
appeared on his right and whispered “Be good!”
“It’s too hard to decide,” he thought, “I’ll
open the dictionary at random and see what
word catches my eye first.”
The first word he saw was “Angelic.”
“Best of three,” he said.
Planning, Decision Making or Control?
• Bart thought he would spend the day helping
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others. But who needed his help? He looked
out the window to see if he could see any old
ladies wanting to cross the road. (One looked
as if she might.)
He looked in the neighborhood newsletter to
see if anybody wanted chores done. (Mow my
lawn – 3 ads; Kind boy wanted to read
newspaper to a blind old lady – 4; Have you
seen my cat – answers to the name of Spider –
5).
Planning, Decision Making or Control?
• He asked his mom who needed help.
(“You could help me, Bart,” said Marge.)
• He asked Lisa. (“The person you can best
help Bart is yourself. Why don’t you do
your homework?”) He even asked Maggie.
• Then he made a list of everybody he was
going to help.
Planning, Decision Making or Control?
• At six o’clock Bart returned home, tired
but happy.
• “Have I achieved what I set out to do
today?” he asked.
• He pulled from his pocket his original
list, plus eleven dollars and 30 cents, 3
packs of candy, 1 of gum, and a slightly
squashed cat.
Source – Primary or Secondary
• A primary source provides the data to an information
system from an original source document.
• e.g. an invoice sent to a business or a cheque received.
• sales figures for a range of goods for a tinned food manufacturer
for one week or several weeks and one or several locations.
• A secondary source of information is one that provides
information from a source other than the original.
• e.g. an accounts book detailing invoices received, or a
bank statement that shows details of cheques paid in.
Where statistical information is gathered, such as in
surveys or polls, the survey data or polling data is the
primary source and the conclusions reached from the
survey or the results of the poll are secondary sources
Source – Internal
• All organisations generate a substantial amount of
internal information relating to their operation.
 Examples of internal sources:
• Marketing and sales information on performance,
revenues, market share, distribution channels, etc.
• Production and operational information on assets, quality,
standards, etc.
• Financial information on profits, costs, margins, cash
flows, investments, etc.
• Internal documentation such as order forms, invoices,
credit notes, procedural manuals.
Source – External
• An external source of information is concerned
with what is happening beyond the boundaries of
the organisation.
• census figures
• telephone directories
• judgments on court cases
• computer users’ yearbook
• legislation, e.g. the Data
Protection Act
• gallup & national opinion polls
• trade journals
• Ordnance Survey maps
• professional publications
• Financial services agencies
such as Dunn and Bradstreet
• industry standards
• the Internet
Internal or External?
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Staff lists
Internet
Census
Court judgements
Staff Phone nos
OS maps
Bulletins, newsletters
Manuals
Polls
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Phone book
Staff Holidays
Prof publics
Health & safety docs
Internal job apps
Trade journals
Industry standards
Internal email
Legislation
Source - Nature
• Formal Communication
 information presented in a structured and consistent manner
 main methods
• the formal letter, properly structured reports, writing of training
materials, etc. in cogent, coherent, well-structured language.
• Informal Communication
 less well-structured information
• transmitted within an organisation or between individuals who usually
know each other.
• Quantitative Information
 information that is represented numerically.
• Qualitative Information
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information that is represented using words.
Time
• Historic
 Information gathered and stored over a period of time.
 It allows decision makers to draw comparisons between previous and
present activities.
 Historic information can be used to identify trends over a period of time.
• Present
 Information created from activities during the current work-window (day,
week or month).
 In real-time systems this information would be created instantly from
the data gathered (e.g. the temperature in a nuclear power plant turbine)
giving accurate and up-to-date information.
• Future
 Information that is created using present and historic information to try
to predict the future activities and events relating to the operation of an
organisation.
Frequency of Information
• Continuous
 This is information created from data gathered several times a second.
It is the type of information created by a real-time system.
• Periodic
 Information created at regular time intervals (hourly, daily, monthly,
annually).
• Annually – On an annual basis a company must submit its report and
accounts to the shareholders.
• Monthly – Banks and credit card companies produce monthly
statements for the majority of their customers.
• Daily – A supermarket will make daily summaries of its sales and
use the product information to update its stock levels and reorder
stock automatically.
• Hourly – A busy call centre will often update totals for each
operator on an hourly basis and give the top employee for the hour
some reward.
Forms of Information
• Written
 Hand-written, word-processed, e-mails.
 Reports from different classes of software.
 Reports, memos and tables, receipts, invoices, statements, summary
accounting information.
• Aural
 Speech, formal meetings, informal meetings, talking on the phone
and voice-mail messages.
 Employee presentations to a group where there may be use made of
music and sound effects as well as speech.
• Visual
 pictures, charts and graphs.
 Presentations via data projects, DVDs, etc.
Types of Information
• Detailed
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An inventory list showing stock levels
Actual costs to the penny of goods
Detailed operating instructions
Most often used at operational level
• Sampled
 Selected records from a database
 Product and sales summaries in a supermarket
 Often used at a tactical level (maybe strategic)
• Aggregated
 Totals created when detailed information is summed together
 Details of purchases made by customers totalled each month