Information Needs in Organisations

The Needs of An Organisation

Most organisations have similar information needs, such as retaining a stock quantity, a short description of the product etc. Therefore many organisations can utilise off the shelf systems, examples of these systems could include;

Supermarket Checkout Software,
Timekeeping and check in software for managing staff hours,
Task Management.
Communication Software.

A lot of businesses; for example in the telecommunications industry, will most likely use Asterisk for managing and delegating calls to staff around the organisation.

Similarly, any company that has a website will most likely have Apache or Nginx to host their website, these are very limited examples but should give you an example of the variety of software available to organisations.

Business efficiency Considerations

The reasons that companies use these particular systems may vary however, they are relatively low maintenance compared to systems that they would have to develop themselves. Additionally, the cost of these systems can be significantly less as some software can be rented or managed through Saas (Software as a service) systems.

The Variety of Systems Available

Organisations also have different informational needs from sector to sector, for example…

A Car Manufacturer’s part list.
A Bank’s Customer Database.
A Wholesalers Stock Quantity.

These businesses rely on completely different information about their systems. Their goals and objectives as businesses vary.

The Scale of Organisations

Additionally, because systems are so different… when a company undergoes a merger, it may be very disruptive to merge systems, especially ones that are updated very quickly, an example of this could be the askMID database, this system monitors the Insurance status of vehicles on the road in the UK, they claim to have over 10,000 edits an hour, therefore if they needed to merge their database, it would be important that the data was continually updated. It is also likely that the variety of the data available makes spotting mistakes harder to identify, so having a way of logging changes would be vital.