Value and importance of information

Good information - why?

Controlling

Forcasting

Planning

Directing

Examples of costs - data entry

Hardware costs

Financial costs

Data collection costs

Human resource cost

Cost of processing and maintaining data

Training costs

Cost of staff performing data entry

Specialist staff for programming

Time Costs

Cost of questionaires being processed

Staff to analyse data

May have to pay a programmer to help reprogram software

Specialist staff maybe need to give instructions to database

Entering data using a keyboard

Reports take time to be created and analysed

Backing up data

Spending money in automated methods of data entry

Human resource cost can be lowered

Bar coding

Optical mark reading

Speech recognition

May have to pay an outside firm to back up data

Data may need to be transfered

Consumables (e.g printer ink)

Travelling costs

Costs of staff

Employ someone to design forms

Cost of paying third parties

Employing experts to collect data using forms

Keeping backups - for security

Keeping it up to date

Small changes to the structure of the program or database so relavent processing can occur.

Quality Chracteristics

Level of detail

Presentation

Relavance

Comepleteness

Accuracy

Age

Garbage in garbage out (GIGO)

Monitor progress

Competitive Advantage

Aids decision making

Data Collection

Indirect

Direct

Data which is obtained from a third party

e.g.A store collects information about the increase in sales as a result of an advertising campaign for a certain product.

Data collection directly by the organisation

e.g. A store uses a market research agency to obtain information about what product/brand is popular with consumers