Chapter Summary

Working together and sharing data are crucial in today’s companies. MIS can help teams work better with tools designed to integrate data across an organization. Managers need to know how to use a variety of tools, from data sharing over networks, to dynamic linking, to groupware products.

Enterprise resource planning systems are commercial systems designed to collect and share data across the company. Most of them concentrate on transaction processing data with a special focus on accounting systems. However, the consistent data provides a solid foundation for additional analysis.

Workgroup software like Lotus Notes combines many features to facilitate work on group projects. It supports communication, document sharing, integration of data types, and tracking individual changes.

Group decisions can also be supported with GDSS software that is used to facilitate meetings. Its primary feature is that all managers can contribute at the same time. It also tracks comments for each idea and supports several types of votes and rankings.

Integration often requires combining data from many different locations. Networks enable you to dynamically link the work done by different people. However, if everyone in a company uses different software, it becomes difficult to combine the information because each software package stores data in a unique format. As a result, companies generally create standards for how the data will be stored and accessed. Although these standards are often necessary, several problems can arise when some users have special needs or the standards need to be changed.

At the personal computer level, software supports dynamic links that automatically update final documents as the underlying data changes. Microsoft pivot tables provide a flexible method of retrieving and examining data queries. Locking documents and tracking changes is useful to monitor the changes suggested by team members. Annotation facilities provide a mechanism to keep a log of changes and record the reason for the change.