Management & decision making

Managers perform their tasks and responsibilities within cybernetic systems called organizations. They are the proposed users of business intelligence systems. In order to design interfaces for business intelligence systems fully dedicated to the needs and world of the manager, we should gain more insight into their work.

Who is managing the organization?

We have just finished discussing organizations. Now we want to know more about those who manage the organization, how they do it and under which circumstances. Managers are responsible for all participants of the organization taking care of their responsibilities, tasks and obligations. One important activity within the process of management is to ensure that people can proceed unhindered with the realization of the goal of the organization e.g. producing goods and services for customers.

The senior management process

In one the next blogs, I will take a closer look at the level of the senior management process and which features and variations are relevant for the interface. Thereafter, I shall give a comprehensive view of the general responsibilities of the executive. In one of the next blogs, I will outline the basic cycle that can be discerned in the process of management. We will see that planning and controlling activities have importance for how information can be edited and presented.

The decision making process

Finally, the decision making process is examined. This will enable us to understand how managers will behave in different modes of the decision-making process and how this might affect the interface of the management information system.

The levels of management

Management processes are executed at three levels in the organization:

• the strategic level makes long range decisions about products and services to produce; 
• the tactical level carries out the programs and plans of the strategic level; 
• the operational level is responsible for monitoring the firm’s daily activities. 

Managers at the strategic level encounter more different problems than at lower levels. Their time horizon is much longer (greater than two years), they face problems that are more difficult and the impact of their decisions is much bigger. They also need a broader range of information to make decisions.

They deal with problems as a network

I will discuss this in more detail in a next blog where we can see that “they deal with problems as a network of interrelated problems”. Causal cards or linkage diagrams can appropriately model interrelated problems. They display the positive or negative relation and their impact between two aspects or measures (de Smit, 1990). A diagram of causal cards can reveal causal circles, which will ultimately destroy the system. In the next part of this study more hypothesizes are postulated about the consequences that such relations might have for the design of the user interface of a business intelligence system.

Level and the agree of aggregation

An obvious difference with people working at a lower level in the organization is that senior managers need more aggregated information. Some managers do, however, make decisions based on very detailed and small pieces of data; other managers have sufficient information when merely the highest level of information is available.

BI systems are able to present information for all levels

Most business intelligence systems can present both summary information to assist the decision-making process as well as the background details supporting the summary data. The details are usually available to a user through a computer data search technique termed ‘drill-down’. However, we cannot presume that detailed data is not needed.

Tree structures and drill down operations

Moreover, business intelligence systems should extensively support tree structures and drill down operations in support of extensive and deliberate searching for ‘creamy and vivid’ details. There are many ways to employ drill down capabilities and tree structures. However, the tree structure visualizations and drill down capabilities should follow the characteristics of the data.

An example: car rental services

Let us take a view at a fictitious international car rental company. The organization is structured by continent, country, location, division, business unit and department. These are six levels to navigate through before a manager can look up an accurate value for a department. In PowerPlay (an OLAP tool from IBM Cognos) and many other OLAP tools, the user must perform at least six double mouse-clicks in order to reach the lowest level. This are at least twelve actions!

Drill down features may to too time consuming

Although the user is provided with different drill-down features, this standard navigation feature is, in my opinion, too laborious and time consuming. Moreover, once the lowest level of the hierarchy has been reached, in order to return to the third level of the hierarchy, a minimum of a further three double mouse clicks must be performed. Consequently, drill down operations should be combined with intelligent search operations and sophisticated visualizations of tree structures in order to comfort and support the navigation process through complex aggregated data.