CRITICAL APPRAISAL

Critical Appraisal

Critical Appraisal

Introduction

The article, “IS Strategic Planning for Operational Efficiency” written by George Philip, whose review I am going to present here proposed a framework for the Management Information System. The writers say that a proper framework is necessary to improve the working of an organization.

The objective of this article is to describe the advantages of developing a framework for Management Information System and to propose a framework model for Management Information System. The proposed model may be used to evaluate the process infrastructure and analyze the resources used in different decision making areas and how these resources can be used in the most appropriate way.

This article is a conceptual article, which provides the generalized framework based on research of other articles and theories.

Brief Summary

As discussed earlier the articles proposed a model framework for Management Information System to improve the decision making of an organization and to utilize all the resources most efficiently.

The article first discusses the importance of framework of Management Information System in an organization and then discusses its development. The authors used the reference of the taxonomy made by Anthony in his article. Anthony has discussed that there are three categories of Management Information System:

Strategic Planning

Management Control

Operational Control

The authors have also referenced the approach used by the Simon in his article. According to Simon the manner by which human beings solve their problems can be broken down into three categories:

Intelligence

Design

Choice

The authors termed these two approaches as structured and unstructured. The structured approach is completely automated while in the unstructured approach the decisions are made by the humans.

After discussing the above-mentioned structured and unstructured approaches the authors of the article discussed different decision-making approaches within the framework of Management Information System. They have said that in planning and resource allocation decisions the problems might be broken down into a set of sub problems. Some of such problems are solved automatically while the remaining ones are solved by the user. Similarly they have pointed out that a fundamental shift is required to make effective decisions.

While discussing the implication of the framework of Management Information System, the authors have pointed out the following differences in the frameworks:

System Design Difference

Organizational Structure Difference

Model Difference

In the end, they have concluded that in order to make effective and efficient resource allocation decisions the organizations must share some common framework among its members.

Results

The result of the article is that the design of a framework for Management Information System for improving the resource allocation decisions must be more effectively and efficiently developed and designed based on the generalized framework. This will result in the solution, which is most appropriate for the organization. This approach of using a framework for Management Information System is effectively used in the Information System. Nevertheless, some more and solid work needs to be done on this framework.

Class Readings

This article does not cite any class reading.

Contributions

The contribution of this article is that it presented a conceptual framework for Management Information System in order to improve the ...