HPMD Bullet: MIS Goals

HPMD Bullets

BULLET #18
MIS GOALS

The MIS department is a service department. It ought to have a service-oriented, pragmatic mission. The following are some MIS goals I've found useful:

1. Make it easy for customers to do business with us (eg. accurate, easy-to-read billing statements).

2. Make it easy for departments to serve customers (eg. Billing, Customer Service, Field Service, Sales Administration, etc.).

3. Make it easy to access data and track critical success factors for the business and each department.

4. Leverage existing hardware where we have a large capital investment.

5. Decentralize small-to-medium data collection and reporting to the departments (train secretaries; allow easy downloading to PC's for analysis and reporting).

6. Standardize on few, off-the-shelf mainframe and PC packages.

7. The mainframe is the LAN (ie. don't duplicate it with a PC LAN).

8. Connect everyone and every system or application (all PC's, terminals, mainframes).

9. Boil it down to one page summaries wherever possible (preferably graphs of results vs. goals; make trends clear).

10. The paper and pencil application is often best (ie. for simple reporting, one-time reports, and as the first MIS prototype).

HPMD