Week 2 Notes

Lecture Objectives

• Understand the nature of the work of an executives and what effect that has on the design of business intelligence applications.
• Be familiar with the results of surveys on the use of business intelligence applications and understand what these results mean to the design of business intelligence applications. 

How do Executives Work?

According to Mintzberg, the nature of managers is described by three words which are:

• Fragmentation - on only 10% of the tasks SM can focus for more than an hour on significant level of  data. 90% of the time they do tasks with less than 1hr duration with significantly less data, because they get interrupted a lot.
• Brevity - SM have a constant time constraint, it is very difficult to pin a SM down, at any time, for any duration. They can be thought of as a moving target
• Variety - SM do many different things, which can be planned/unplanned during the course of their work day, and primarily are unplanned

Furthermore, Mintzberg divided the SM's role into 10 generic roles, which need to be integrated and cannot work in isolation:

• Interpersonal
• Figurehead - presidential type of role
• Leader - the head, who inspires people below them to inspire the people below them.
• Liaison - key connection point b/w organizations and external organizations. Sets the direction of negotiations, represents in lobbies, and has political power to get things done.
• Information processing
• Monitor - in snapshot it seems CEO doesn't know anything, but they ask questions from relevant people, instead of checking dashboards and reports. They file the small information snippets in their brain.
• Disseminator - disseminate information down, this happens through the hierarchy, top to bottom, between departments, even in different geographical locations
• Spokesman - communicates with the board and public about the performance of the company
• Decision making
• Entrepreneur - what the business is going to do? set the new direction, put their stamp on the business. new CEO, kill off all old projects, and get new projects on line, sets new direction, no prodigies from previous management.
• Disturbance Handler - settles the difference in opinion between functions
• Resource Allocator - budget is not infinite, set the priority for the resources
• Negotiator - external role, contract negotiations, like acquisitions are about to occur, set the limits e.g. buying a contract

Regarding BI systems Mintzberg said that its a waste of money on EIS systems, because these senior managers don't use them. He re-did his research in 90's to check if work of Managers had changed after economic crashes and changed organizations, and hardly anything had changed, everything mostly the same and hold today even.

Kotter on the other hand criticized Mintzberg, that what if he had just picked a bad sample, or maybe the sample was too small. Kotter said he'll study more managers and only check managers from successful companies with certain success experience, in their career and their role, and peers say that they're good.

In results, Kotter had mostly the same findings, including how SM get snippets of information through the networks that they form, and in addition he said that SM had "Agendas" - the agendas that they want to get done, and sometimes its not what the company publicly states what they want done - some of it is informal and not written down.

Regarding usage of BI systems Kotter didn't agree that BI system costs are a waste, because even if the SM doesn't use it the manager or analysts from whom the SM gets summarized information do use them - so management systems are actually useful to SM indirectly.

According to Isenberg, Managers design the organization processes, the reporting relationships, the structure, in other words, is the architect. SM do problem management, but they don't work on all problems at the same time. They tend to pick a pet project, whatever interests them, not all the problems in the organization, but in parallel they keep finger on the pulse of other problems also. Basically "what can i resolve easily and quickly", because sometimes big problems, tend to resolve themselves.

SM seem to know, what to do intuitively in "unconscious competence mode".

Survey Results of EIS Usage


Survey 1

• Ideas were initiated at the manager level, and mostly by the IT function - which is not a good sign because of their lack of business sense
• No specific development techniques were used
• CSFs were listed at the outset of the development
• Surprisingly there was no indication of information politics - might be because the EIS was already mature
• Little evidence of technophobia

Survey 2

• Survey was conducted mostly on large organisations
• Most of the platforms were custom built
• Training was in-house and light
• Mainly the system was used for accessing, assessing information and planning
• User were generally satisfied with the features and the system as a whole
• Ex-user showed the same good results, and gave the reply that their organizations had changed structure, but the EIS was not updated, rendering it irrelevant, and hence, was abandoned.
• Non-users are excited to start using EIS

Survey 3

• SM are and executives are very experienced with BI
• BI systems mainly used in large organizations, mostly for decision making, resource allocation and identifying problems
• business decision makers classify themselves as ‘analytical decision makers’, but the predictive analysis / what-if functions of BI systems is not often used;
• Systems have a very short life span, and need to be kept up-to-date
• Overall BI Systems are seen as important, and are being installed, and planned, meaning that the market is still growing