The age of the computer has changed business in many ways, allowing the manager unprecedented span of knowledge and control over all processes relating to his business. This has allowed for the use of data and information on an unprecedented scale. The drawback is that the available data for any business can be unwieldy and it is very possible to drown the manager in information. This is the time to leverage the power of processing to control the computer via systems management software.

 

Information is the lifeblood of industry, from determining what product or service is needed to handling the myriad requirements that must all be pulled together to create them. Knowing the customer is a complicated business that is not intuitively obvious, and those who crack the code first are the most successful. Information is the key to the code, and information technology allows for its collection and analysis. As this new era of automation matures, the quest for ever greater detail in the information collected and studied grows until there comes a point where there is simply too much to effectively make sense of.

 

Given the right motivation, we can identify and collect an endless stream of facts concerning our business. There is information about the historical needs and uses of the product, what time of year it is most needed, what additions or complementary products most affect its use and so on. We can even spit details of which employee candidate pool is the most likely to successfully work in our industry and where they can be most easily found, attracted, hired and motivated. Unfortunately, we have not found a way to make the day longer or management more multitask capable than we already have. We can hire others to do parts of the business, but that in itself complicates the process and while we gain flexibility, we lose control.

 

This is not to imply that any manager would wish to have less information, far from it. It is that the effort to gain usable, decision-making understanding from the data has been overcome by the methodology for garnering the raw data from which it is distilled. Information carries with it nuances that help determine its meaning in the form of the entering arguments for the collection process. This is the age old recognition that how one asks a question influences the answer to a degree. With the manager expending so much time in collecting reference points and measurements, there is little left to consider the purpose and possible alternative collection means.

 

Like all tools, the computer has the potential for enhancing decisions with data that engenders confidence and produces results. It becomes problematic when the tool becomes the driving force in the business. If management is spending more time using the tool than created and delivering the goods and services at the heart of the company, there is a problem. While the information and uses for it grow exponentially, management possesses an ability to use it which remains fairly stagnant, which means there is inefficiency in the process as a whole.

 

There is a means of restoring sanity to the balance of business using computers; the use of the computer to control the information gathering and analyzing automatically. This is, in essence, using a computer to run the computer, and it pays immediate and far reaching dividends. This gives management the ability to make the decision on what data it needs and in what format it wants the information presented. That accomplished, managers can spend their time doing what they were hired to do; run the company and make a profit.

 

If a business is in the manufacturing industry, management does not want or need to spend its time gathering and inputting data about the supply chain, constructing statistical process control charts, or gathering data on trends in the demand for their product or the prices of their supply chain. What they need is that data collected for them by an automated system that collects and collates the information and packages it in a readily identifiable format and delivered to their desktop before the day begins.

 

This is the ultimate purpose of and advantage to using systems management software. It keeps the onus of detailed data input and collection distributed across a workforce with the appropriate specialists. Individual employees input the data relevant to their portion of the company process.The software then executes the appropriate queries to collate the correct data to provide managers with the usable information they need in a format they can readily put to operational use.