Introduction
Information is the lifeblood of business. Just like an adequate volume, composition, and flow of blood is necessary for life, a sufficient amount, type, and transfer of information is necessary for business success. To continue this analogy, it can be said that operations processes are the muscles of business because they perform the necessary work. Unlike in the human body, where both blood and muscle are necessarily managed together, many businesses now manage their information and operations processes separately. This was not always so, and this book contends that there are a number of good reasons for those businesses to return to more effective strategies that manage them together. This is particularly important when the product or service provided by a business is information itself.
At this point, it is important to take a moment to clarify what the terms process and information represent in the context of this book. A process is a sequence of actions required to accomplish some end result. For example, the steps or operations required to fabricate a product or provide a service. Information is considered to be a collection of descriptors derived from observation, measurement, calculation, inference, or imagination that can be communicated to others. Hence, one can observe from these definitions that information can also be considered to be the result of some process and its analysis, handling, and communication to others can also be considered to be the result of other processes.
While this book should be useful for individual contributors and managers working in larger organizations, the primary audiences are business students and professionals working in small-to-medium-size businesses (SMBs) where the level of pragmatism required in making management and process design decisions is necessarily higher because of more limited resources and available options. The tone is generally conversational and the content is more about things to consider when managing or improving information and other business processes rather than promoting specific solutions. A few examples are provided, where useful, to help in understanding the content and to provide some inspiration about where one might begin.
The discussion assumes that you are either a business student new to this topic or a working professional who has taken the initiative to increase your understanding of the process and associated information aspects of your business with the goal of either improving service, reducing operating cost, providing a better product, reducing cycle time, increasing productivity, managing risk better, or some combination of these goals.
If you are a business student, most of the content will be new with some parts partially familiar, depending on the prerequisite courses you have had. The discussion assumes some knowledge of basic statistics, probability concepts, and a working knowledge of more common Excel functions. Students should find the information in the appendices to be helpful.
If you are a professional in either an individual contributor or a management role, you have probably reviewed your old college texts, talked to some more experienced colleagues, subscribed to one or more business publications, reviewed the literature available in the local library, and used Internet search engines to find sites that might help.
One result for both students and professionals is that you probably noticed there is a wide range of material addressing individual aspects of information or process management, but the material on how to manage them together is more limited. Another outcome is that you often encounter a variety of unfamiliar terms, some that are widely used by the media and business IT functions and others that are internal shop jargon for specific situations.
One of the book’s goals is to help you navigate through these apparent discrepancies, provide some useful definitions, introduce you to some new concepts that are likely to be unfamiliar, and, foremost, enable you to integrate the use of information more effectively with other business processes.
Chapter 1 starts with a review of how business processes and information have been affected by technological innovations in the past and how much of that change has accelerated in recent years because of ongoing rapid advances in technology and explosive growth of a global economy. An increased understanding of how some current management approaches came about allows us to make more informed choices about what to retain, discard, modify, or add to current strategies. Two examples illustrating some of the effects of these technological changes on processes and the integration of information and product/service processes are provided.
Chapter 2 describes the nature of information. Information types, forms, formats, media, transferal methods, and storage approaches are discussed. Some emphasis is given to the issues that arise when dealing with unstructured and other highly variable or unpredictable information.
Chapter 3 reviews some basic modeling methods for integrating and analyzing information and product/service processes. It should be emphasized that this discussion does not just attach a classic IT information flow diagram to a traditional process flow diagram. Some new nomenclature is introduced to help avoid some confusion that can occur when adding information needs and flows to traditional process modeling and analysis. The methods are not meant to be all-inclusive, but only to illustrate some of the basic concepts required. A subsequent book by the author to be published later in 2013 regarding process analysis and improvement methods that include integrated information processes will provide a more in-depth discussion of this important topic.
Chapter 4 covers how information can be acquired and handled by a business beyond the more obvious uses for accounting and daily operation. Some suggestions regarding some lists of data that could be collected for various data mining and decision analysis situations are provided. How a business can acquire useful information at minimum cost while ensuring timeliness and accuracy is discussed. The chapter ends with a discussion of some useful methods for handling operating information more efficiently and less expensively.
Major software implementations that can help manage the increasing amount of data required by today’s businesses are discussed briefly in chapter 5. Software systems for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Materials Resource Planning (MRP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and many others such as Big Data analysis and Decision Support Systems (DSS) are now available in both large and small business versions. These applications can be of considerable benefit to a business, provided some important conditions are met. Otherwise, their implementation could cost a business a considerable amount of money and frustration without a corresponding benefit as evidenced by several horror stories reported in the business literature over the past few years. Some discussion of available on-line implementations and other services such as cloud computing and archival storage is included.
Chapter 6 focuses on managerial considerations regarding the integration of information and product/service processes in a business strategy. In addition to handling the daily issues involved with successfully using whatever application discussed in chapter 5 is used by your business, there are a number of factors related to maintaining information integrity and security. Some suggested policies regarding how to deal with data management and security issues and where to standardize on information formats and databases are reviewed.
When information is the product or service provided by the business, additional concerns must be addressed to provide a quality result for customers. Chapter 6 also discusses some of the better practices for reducing data variability, dealing with personal use of information at work, password management, e-mail retention, archival management, and preferred customer treatment.
A list of references and endnotes is provided at the end. Appendix A provides a glossary of terms; Appendix B lists the definitions for the wide range of acronyms developed for IT applications; and Appendix C presents some useful information, tables, and spreadsheet examples for Microsoft Excel© users.