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Managers and information communication technology

Information Communication Technology (ICT) provides managers with the capability to reach easy access to internal and external information, which is relevant to strategic decision-making and other executive responsibilities. The advantages in access to internal and external information are critical for managers for understanding and assessing situations quickly.

The Executive support systems are one of an increasingly growing number of concepts which are gaining in importance for the decision maker. Executive support systems are predicted to be the fastest growing segment of the overall decision support system market. A recent study of the use for executive support systems in Fortune 500 companies found that approximately 30.8% currently utilize executive support systems for decision support, to aid in personal productivity, and/or communication (IDC 2007). By use of Executive support systems managers will be able to communicate and confront problems electronically by using some functionality for decision support such as analysis, queries; report information with a combination of graphics, tables, and text, scheduling, agenda setting to facilitate the production of the organisation and optional integrating different systems plus statistical capabilities.  

The ICT revises manager-employment relations by encouraging decentralization of the activities and a new form of managerial control (Bratton 2007, p428). Sometimes the employee has access to very important information for organisation decision-making; however, it is not often taking in consideration.
The organisation I work for is a typical example on the use of ICT. We have too many systems; they are not integrated with each other. The organisations employees are tired of learning many systems and sometimes they cannot see the point of using all of them. On the other hand management quickly decides on the nature of the demand of a new area by purchasing a new system, and as an end result we end up having i.e Intranet, financial management system, file system, time registrations system, website (CMS), Exchange, invoice system, video-conferencing - and none of them has any connection with each other!

A previous boos I had was very concerned with the amount of information should receive. The manger was comfortable with little amount of information to base decision, which is not necessarily cover all aspect of a situation. The manger did not really see the point of all these amounts of information available!
We do not have a culture in the organisation of daily activities to communicate and utilize data for decision support, however it exist with some extend in the area of finance. The financial system is not optimal to the requirements of software today but at least it can provide reports used to support decision of hiring new employee, fund-raising, budgeting, financial overview etc.

In conclusion a low-risk personality may certainly make use of the available ICT solutions to ensure a better and quicker collection and analysis of data. However, at the same time a proliferation of such system elements, e.g. in the scenario described above, may in fact mean that the decision maker ends up being more confused because he or she can not easily or confidently use the opportunities of ICT. In this case it may be necessary to make available a more limited and simplified system, or that person will not use the potential of ICT in their decision making. In other words, it is not so much the presence but rather the accessibility and immediate feeling of usefulness to the decision maker of ICT, which will make the difference.

Reference:
Bratton J. 2007: Work and Organizational behaviour [book] ISBN: 1-4039-1114-2

IDC 2007: International Data Corporation, The premier global market intelligence firm

 

Last Updated (Saturday, 27 February 2010 20:53)