The basic cycle of the management process

The management process is performed within a generic cycle of five steps (Mintzberg, 1975):

1. Planning, budgeting and setting norms;
2. Organizing;
3. Coordinating;
4. Deciding;
5. Controlling.

What managers actually do

These steps tell us little about what managers are actually doing and how they are doing it. Without such concrete information, we are not able to design and build planning or information systems that are dedicated to managers (Mintzberg, 1975); neither are we able to define a knowledge-based system that assists in building the interface of such systems. Although this cycle is very unspecific it deserves clarification and discussion related to the user interface of business intelligence systems.

The future

Planning is concerned with the future. Managers do not only live day to day; they have to think about the future of the organization as well as contextual developments and trends. Planning means working out the necessary activities that should be carried out and will contribute to the stability of the operations of tomorrow. To carry out plans, managers accommodate a structure and working environment in which those plans can be realized, the process of organizing. After that, managers establish a coordinating structure and make decisions in order to fulfill plans. Finally, they control the work to be done. The actual work done and the results are then compared with the plan and might give rise to new plans causing the cycle to start again.

Translate plans into hard figures

Senior managers plan, make policies and think about the future. Sometimes these plans can be translated into hard figures. Two of above activities, planning and controlling, are significant since they are can be performed using an information system. In one of the next blogs, it becomes clear that managers reveal little structure in their work and decisions. They have very few repetitive, structured tasks. Nevertheless, these two activities, planning and controlling, are two tasks that can be performed in a more structured and organized way. Firstly, planning activities are executed and after a given time (which depends on the term of the plans), the plans are checked to see if they have been attained.

Variations important for the user interface

Plans are similar to organizational goals and share almost the same properties. However, this activity exhibits a few variations that are important for the business intelligence user interface:

• Planning is often performed with historical facts at hand; 
• Plans, which are based on hard figures of the current period, can be set in three different ways which require different interface techniques: 
• Set the plan figures manually; 
• Copy the plan figures of the same period before; 
• Set the plan figures automatically by using a percentage that is applied to the figures of the current period; 
• Adjust figures after applying one of above methods. 
• Planning is done in a more imprecise way and therefore the input and presentation of planning figures should be less precise than historical data; 
• Planning figures have a scope which decreases when these figures lay further in the future (for example, the coming years can be planned in months, the next few years in years and after that in periods of five years); 
• The form of the presentation of the planning figures should follow the form of the presentation of the historical data, which the manager is looking at. 

Business Intelligence tools

An advantage of the existence of planning figures in a business intelligence tool (see: https://www.passionned.com/business-intelligence/business-intelligence-tools/) is that the system can determine, (based on these planning and historical figures) when a particular measure increases or decreases, whether it is profitable or not to accomplish organizational goals.

Not for all measures and dimensions

Planning figures are not available for all measures and dimensions. If the figures are not available, which strategy should be adopted to allow managers to discover useful deviations in the data? To detect deviations of such figures, the knowledge-based system can compare and evaluate the most current information in four other ways:

1. Look for historical information and compare with current information;
2. If no historical information is available, compare information in a group, for instance, compare performance of five product lines;
3. Look at external competitive information and compare with corporate information;
4. Combine above strategies (if information is available) in order to determine the most distinctive deviation.