3. Answer the questions.

1. What organisation changes are mentioned in the text?

2. Can you name any other changes?

3. How does evolution of information systems reflect changes in organisations?

4. What are the effects of technologies advancing for information communication?

5. What does proactive information flows management mean? Give examples.

6. What factors have caused the need for it?

4. Speak on the role of data, information and knowledge in management studies or business management using one of the following sets of words.

A.

unprocessed

convey

multitude

fluid

wiki

sample

B.

misinterpret

insight

raw

application

to convert

findings

TEXT 4

1.

A. Think of appropriate titles for the extracts.

B. Find the topic sentences of the paragraphs.

Information is fundamental to the operation of all management systems. As the work of Chandler and other business historians has shown, the development of the telegraph, telephone, and computer had a huge impact on the practice of management and the size and structure of the firm. Accounting systems are key components of firms’ information systems. They collect, organize, and communicate financial information to top management and other parts of the organization.

Administrative hierarchies are founded on vertical information flows: the upward flow of information to the manager and the downward flow of instructions. The trend towards decentralization and informality in organizations rest upon two key aspects of increased information availability: information feedback to the individual on job performance, which has made self-monitoring possible, and information networking, which has allowed individuals to coordinate their activities voluntarily without hierarchical supervision. A central element of total quality management has been recognition that regular, real-time, performance feedback to employees permits them to take responsibility for quality control, reducing or eliminating the need for supervisors and quality controllers. During the past decade, corporate intranets, web-based information systems, and groupware have transformed organizations’ capacity for decentralized coordination.

Robert M. Grant.

Contemporary Strategy Analysis.

Fifth edition, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005, pp 211-212

For top management tasks, information technology so far has been a producer of data rather than a producer of information – let alone a producer of new and different questions and new and different strategies.

The people in Management Information Systems (MIS) and in Information Technology (IT) tend to blame this failure on what they call the “reactionary” executives of the “old school”. It is the wrong explanation. Top executives have not used the new technology because it has not provided the information they need for their own tasks. The data available in business enterprise are, for instance, still largely based on the early-19^th-century theorem that lower costs differentiate businesses and make them compete successfully. MIS has taken the data based on this theorem and computerized them. They are the data of the traditional accounting system. Accounting was originally created, at least five hundred years ago, to provide the data a company needed for the preservation of its assets and for their distribution if the venture were liquidated. And the one major addition to accounting since the 15^th century – cost accounting, a child of the 1920s – aimed only at bringing the accounting system up to the 19^th-century economics, namely, to provide information about, and control of, costs. (So does, by the way, the now-so-popular revision of cost accounting: total quality management.)

But, as we began to realize around the time of World War II, neither preservation of assets nor cost control is a top management task.

Peter F. Drucker

Management Challenges for the 21^st Century

HarperBusiness, 1999, p. 99

But for none of these top management tasks* does the traditional accounting system provide information. Indeed, none of these tasks is even compatible with the assumptions of the traditional accounting model. The new information technology, based on the computer, had no choice but to depend on the accounting system’s data. No others were available. It collected these data, systematized them, manipulated them, analyzed them and presented them. On this rested, in large measure, the tremendous impact the new technology had on what cost accounting data were designed for: operations. But it also explains information technology’s near-zero impact on the management of business itself.

Top management’s frustration with the data that information technology has so far provided has triggered the new, the next, Information Revolution. Information technologists, especially chief information officers in business, soon realized that the accounting data are not what their associates need […]. But they did not, as a rule, realize that what was needed was not more data, more technology, more speed. What was needed was to define information; what was needed was new concepts. And in one enterprise after another, top management people during the last few years have begun to ask, “What information concepts do we need for our tasks?” And they have now begun to demand them of their traditional information providers, the accounting people.

* that is, risk-taking, strategic decisions

Peter F. Drucker

Management Challenges for the 21^st Century

HarperBusiness, 1999, pp 100 – 101