Management Information Systems

Citation

Urquhart, C. and Ravindranathan, M. (2006), "Management Information Systems", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 62 No. 4, pp. 534-535. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410610673882

The book claims to meet the needs of MBA and Management Diploma students for a comprehensive textbook on management information systems. The authors note the lack of case study examples from developing countries in current textbooks, and this book uses examples from large Indian companies. This is probably limiting the book's market to India alone. For a reader from any other country the case is too difficult to digest since the details are set in the Indian context and in Indian currencies. A bit more generalisation of the cases would have made an excellent reading.

The format of each chapter is similar and similar to many current textbooks. The learning objectives are presented before the introduction, the sections are chunked, and at the end of each main chapter there is a summary, glossary of key terms, review questions, some project work or critical thinking exercises, and a case study with example questions. The book is divided into 13 chapters. The first two overview chapters deal with the strategic issues, and the human, technological and business processes involved. Chapter three deals with the basic technical issues of networks and discusses network resource planning. Chapter 4 uses a similar framework for database management. The next chapters cover particular applications of management information systems (sales and marketing in chapter 5 and human resource, accounting and finance in chapter 6). Chapter 7 describes enterprise information systems and the principles of some e‐commerce applications. Chapter 8, intelligent information systems discusses the principles of business intelligence tools, data mining, decision trees, and decision support. The remaining five chapters deal with the planning of information systems (chapter 9), the role of a chief information officer (chapter 10), security and risk management (chapter 11) and benefits assessment (chapter 12). The final chapter covers some of the models used for assessing the success of information systems.

Compared to some of the management information systems textbooks on the market, the format and content of this textbook are very similar. Many textbooks have sections on information technology infrastructure, the management issues such as ethical and legal issues, and information security, and particular applications, notably enterprise applications. Most textbooks are aimed at the MBA market, and therefore make extensive use of case study material, and project type exercises. Most of the textbooks are American and therefore focus on American case studies.

The question that might be asked of this and all the other similar textbooks – do they work? Do they convince the ambitious manager of the need for management of the information resource, and do they affect how such managers manage? A major problem, possibly, is that such textbooks appear to compartmentalise the management information system or systems into those systems that process the data and produce reports. It would be very hard for MBA students, faced with these textbooks, to realise that business processes have something to do with information systems and that knowledge management and information systems have some relationships as well. An example in the Jaiswal and Mital textbook neatly illustrates the problem. The case study on page 483 describes how Kodak subject matter experts use Visio to capture business process information, to develop a process model for future analysis and improvement. The preceding chapter gives a brief outline of the usual processes involved in systems analysis and design, but it would be asking quite a lot of most MBA students to relate this to their experience of messy business problems. Perhaps the problem with many management information systems textbooks is that they try to focus too much on providing a technical background for the students, at the expense, perhaps, of persuading such students of the type of activities that will involve them as managers. This textbook does at least have a section on the role of the chief information officer, but it could be argued that any general manager should have some of the designated IT leadership skills if organisations are going to operate effective information and knowledge systems. Many of the management information systems textbooks may not emphasise to their MBA student audience that changing information systems is very much a change management process. Evidence from more than 1,000 global change initiatives reviewed by Sirkin et al. (2005) found that duration, performance integrity, commitment and effort were required. It is really hard to find much indication in many management information systems textbooks of the time required for successful planning and implementation, the selection of a good project team, the need for commitment on the part of senior management to information systems strategic development, and allowing for effort, the space for change to happen. In providing one or two diagrams of entity relationship diagrams, or DBMS schema, the impression might be conveyed that there is not much involved in providing useful information systems for the organisation. No wonder, perhaps, that managers and IT managers have communication problems.

This textbook is probably no worse, or no better than many of the management information systems textbooks. It does have the advantage of providing some case study material from a country other than the ubiquitous North American examples, and might be more useful if such case study material had been more extensive. There is an index, although a few spot checks of the index suggested that it might be better to scan the table of contents to find topics of interest. Although the book is written with MBA market in mind, it lacks couple of very essential topics. First among them is the IS/IT strategy and how they are linked to the overall business strategy. The second is the mention of topics, like enterprise architecture and its importance in the business context, and the third is the complete lack of treatment on business process outsourcing – especially important in the Indian context.