C/C/22. Report on the Global Business Intelligence Offer: A Management Information Systems scenario and solution analysis

Global Business Intelligence, a company specialising in management information systems solutions, have approached our company with an offer of a management information service. The senior management of this company have commissioned this report to enable them to evaluate this offer. As requested, this report is divided into three main sections. The particular areas of interest have been identified as store operations, category management and merchandise management, and a list of customer applications in these areas of interest have been provided. The first section of this report selects and justifies the most important applications from this list, describes the importance and limitations of each application to the company, and to which management level the data should be directed in each case. It includes a brief description of the theoretical MIS structure of the company. Data that can be obtained from internal sources and data that come from external sources are also differentiated. This is followed by a brief look into how the development of IT might affect the use of MIS to improve the market share of the company in the future. GBI believe that they can be of particular value to our company in four selected areas. The second part of this report looks into the relevance of each of these issues in comparison with another organization, and suggests how this information could be incorporated into staff training programs. This is followed by an outline MIS solution. The third part of this report looks into the effectiveness of the company website, describing web analytics processes of importance, with some suggested software packages that serve the purpose, identifies two MIS subsystems and two network topologies. The conclusion sums up the report and provides suggestions for further action.