unit 3

Scenario

You are currently employed for a large company who helps organisations communicate both internally and externally. Your role is to meet the owners of the organisations that employ your firm, ‘Business Information Systems’, and explain the need for good communication and information systems in an organisation. You are holding an exhibition try to generate business from educational establishments as your boss feels that there is a gap in the market that you can fill. You have been asked to prepare an exhibition stand based on ‘Bolton College’, a local college to try and generate business from this college now and in the future.




Task 1

(P1) Produce a report which explains how Bolton College uses data/ information within their daily operations across different functional areas with special reference to SiD and Moodle services used within College.


Examples of this is as follows:

Purposes: operational support e.g. monitoring and controlling activity; analysis e.g. to identify patterns or trends; decision making (operational, tactical, strategic); gaining commercial advantage.

Functional areas: e.g. sales, purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, finance, personnel, administration




Task 2

(P2) Produce a report for Bolton College that describes the characteristics and sources of information that the organisation needs.

Examples of this is as follows:

Characteristics: distinction between data and information; type of information (qualitative, quantitative); primary; secondary; characteristics of good information e.g. valid, reliable, timely, fit-for-purpose, accessible, cost-effective, sufficiently accurate, relevant, having the right level of detail, from a source in which the user has confidence, understandable by the user; transformation of data into information (collection, storage, processing and manipulation, retrieval, presentation)

Sources of information: internal e.g. financial, personnel, marketing, purchasing, sales, manufacturing, administration; external e.g. government, trade groupings, commercially provided, databases, research; reliability of data sources

Task 3

(P3) Produce a report identifying the constraints (legal, ethical and operational issues) that relate to the use of customer information in an organisation and describe how these may impact on the organisation.

Examples of this is as follows:

Legal issues: relevant data protection legislation e.g. Data Protection Act 1998, Freedom of Information Act 2000; other relevant legislation e.g. Computer Misuse Act 1990.

Ethical issues: codes of practice e.g. on use of email, internet; ‘whistle blowing’; organisational policies;
information ownership.

Operational issues: security of information; backups; health and safety; organisational policies; business
continuance plans; costs e.g. additional resources required, cost of development; impact of increasing
sophistication of systems e.g. more trained personnel, more complex software.
Task 4.

(M1) Produce a report which describes how information flows between different functional areas within the College or an external organisation of your choice.

Examples of this is as follows:

Information flows: internal information flows; information flows to external bodies; information flow diagrams.

Task 5.

(M2) Evaluate how issues related to the use of information can affect an organisation in its operational effectiveness.
 Examples of this is as follows:

Purposes: operational support e.g. monitoring and controlling activity; analysis e.g. to identify patterns or trends; decision making (operational, tactical, strategic); gaining commercial advantage

Task 6.

(D1) Explain how an organisation could improve the quality of its business information justifying each of your recommendations to achieve competitive advantage to Explain how an organisation could improve the quality of its business information to achieve competitive advantage. Justify each of your recommendations.