---Managerial Roles by Henry Mintzberg---

Managers must wear many different hats in formulating and implementing task activities related to their positions. In an attempt to understand the diversity of hats managers must wear, Henry Mintzberg examined managerial activities on a daily basis. His study enabled him to identify ten different but, coordinated sets of behavior, or roles, that managers assume. These ten roles can be separated into three general groupings: interpersonal roles, informational roles, and decisional roles. These are the Managerial Roles stated:


INTERPERSONAL-Three of the manager's roles come into play when the manager must engage in interpersonal relationships. The three roles of figurehead, leader, and liaison are each necessary under differing circumstances. Adopting one or another of the three interpersonal roles is made easier by the formal authority the manager obtains from the organization.

Figurehead- Performs ceremonial and symbolic duties such as greeting visitors, signing legal documents
Leader- Direct and motivate subordinates, training, counseling, and communicating with subordinates
Liaison-Maintain information links both inside and outside organizaion; use mail, phone calls, meetings

INFORMATIONAL-These informational roles are created as a result of enacting the set of interpersonal roles already described. A network of interpersonal contacts with both subordinates and individuals outside the work unit serves to establish the manager as an informational nerve center of the unit, responsible for gathering, receiving, and transmitting information that concerns members of the work unit.

Monitor- Seek and receive information, scan periodicals and reports, maintain personal contacts
Disseminator- Forward information to other organization members; send memos and reports, make phone calls
Spokesperson-Transmit information to outsiders through speeches, reports, memos

DECISIONAL-Entrepreneur-Initiate improvement projects, identify new ideas, delegate idea responsibility to others
Disturbance Handler-Take corrective action during disputes or crises; resolve conflicts among subordinates; adapt to environmental crises
Resource Allocator-Decide who gets resources, scheduling, budgeting, setting priorities
Negotiator-Represent department during negotiation of union contracts, sales, purchases, budgets; represent departmental interests


Sources: http://oak.cats.ohiou.edu/~ml325898/esp/Roles.html

---Information System Leadership Roles---

The Roles of Leadership and Management clearly address both sides of this dichotomy and do so in meaningful and understandable ways. And they present meaningful dialogue on the important aspect of management. A number of models describing the manager's work have been proposed including functional descriptions such as planning, organizing, directing, controlling, coordinating, and innovating. Similarly, frameworks based on the methods used to accomplish these functions, for example, Mintzberg's role typology, have been proposed. According to Mintzberg (1990), the manager's job can be described in terms of various roles. These are the roles of the leader of Information System:

1. Chief architect. The chief architect designs future possibilities for the business. The primary work of the chief architect is to design and evolve the IT infrastructure so that it will expand the range of future possibilities for the business, not define specific business outcomes. The infrastructure should provide not just today's technical services, such as networking, databases and desktop operating systems, but an increasing range of business-level services, such as workflow, portfolio management, scheduling, and specific business components or objects.

2. Change leader. The change leader orchestrates resources to achieve optimal implementation of the future. The essential role of the change leader is to orchestrate all those resources that will be needed to execute the change program. This includes providing new IT tools, but it also involves putting in the place teams of people who can redesign roles, jobs and workflow, who can change beliefs about the company and the work people do, and who understand human nature and can develop incentive systems to coax people into new and different behaviors.

3. Product developer. The product developer helps define the company’s place in the emerging digital economy. For example, a product developer might recognize the potential for performing key business processes (perhaps order fulfillment, purchasing or delivering customer support) over electronic linkages such as the Internet. The product developer must "sell" the idea to a business partner, and together they can set up and evaluate business experiments, which are initially operated out of IS. Whether the new methods are adopted or not, the company will learn from the experiments and so move closer to commercial success in emerging digital markets.

4. Technology provocateur. The technology provocateur embeds IT into the business strategy. The technology provocateur works with senior business executives to bring IT and realities of the IT marketplace to bear on the formation of strategy for the business. The technology provocateur is a senior business executive who understands both the business and IT at a deep enough level to integrate the two perspectives in discussions about the future course of the business. Technology provocateurs have a wealth of experience in IS disciplines, so they understand at a fundamental level the capabilities of IT and how IT impacts the business.

5. Coach. The coach teaches people to acquire the skill sets they will need for the future. Coaches have to basic responsibilities: teaching people how to learn, so that they can become self-sufficient, and providing team leaders with staff able to do the IT-related work of the business. A mechanism that assists both is the center of excellence - a small group of people with a particular competence or skill, with a coach responsible for their growth and development. Coaches are solid practitioners of the competence that they will be coaching, but need not be the best at it in the company.

6. Chief operating strategist. The chief operating strategist invents the future with senior management. The chief operating strategist is the top IS executive who is focused on the future agenda of the IS organization. The strategist has parallel responsibilities related to helping the business design the future, and then delivering it. The most important, and least understood, parts of the role have to do with the interpretation of new technologies and the IT marketplace, and the bringing of this understanding into the development of the digital business strategy for the organization.



Source: http://csdl2.computer.org/comp/proceedings/hicss/2000/0493/07/04937055.pdf

"..mY reFlection.."

It was warm Thursday on the afternoon of the 18th of June, 2009 when we had our first meeting on MIS. It was introduced by our professor oh sorry I mean “Facilator”, hehe. According to him he is “gwapo”, and a national president officer of PSITE. He discussed about MIS and how it deals to work. Managing ones system is indeed a hard thing to do. It takes a lot of sweats, efforts, time and controls. This would give an organized pattern of certain documents or work and clean sequence of various things, however hat we think is not as easy to do for the reason that, there are some rules and decisions to establish in managing.

High technology is rampant in today’s generation, thus it helps a big impact in making such difficult work like manually done. These days, information resources have developed tremendously especially with the latest technology available. One way to manage them is by having a system that used to be called Management Information Systems (MIS). Nowadays, the terminology of Information Technology (IT) is widely used. IT has developed into a popular and a well paying job. That is why they made to create a system that would guarantee give a necessary focused on decision making. I believe that MIS or Management Information System is the appropriate system in managing data to a system.

It is said that MIS or Management Information System is a subset of the overall internal controls of a business covering the application of people, documents, technologies and procedures by management accountants in solving business problems such as costing a product, service or a business-wide strategy. Management Information Systems are distinct from regular information system in that they are used to analyze other information systems applied in operational activities in the organization. Academically the term is commonly used to refer to the group of information management methods tied to the automation or support of human decision making. Decision support system, Expert systems and Executive information systems. By this meaning, I can say that Information System should corporate to management in order for Information System to have persons to manage for. That since information technology or IT compose of Hardware and Software, it is advice to have personnel to control the system to be able to fix problems and errors to the system if ever it occurs which MIS can handle.

Management Information System is a planned system of the collecting processing, storing and disseminating data in the form of information needed to carry out the functions of management. In a way it is documented report of the activities those ere planned and executed. A market or office that has information system consist of people, equipment and steps procedures to analyze, think and timely, accurate information to marketing or managing decision makers. Although according to my research that the terms MIS and Information Systems are often confused. Information Systems include systems that are not intended for decision making. The area of study called MIS is sometimes referred to, in restrictive sense as information technology management. That area of study should not be confused with computer science.

Information Technology service management is a practitioner-focused discipline. MIS has also some differences with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) as ERP incorporate element that are not necessarily focused on decision support. Well Management Information System linked to work which serves and give a system which naturally supply the needs of a manager to a company. This MIS is a general name for the academic discipline covering the application of people, technologies, and procedures. It is collectively, the information system to business problems. On the other hand, MIS can also help in gathering and processing specific information for decision making, and analyzing customer behavior, if we talked about management information system, we say that in business information systems support not only business process and operations, but also decision making and competitive strategies which are the fields of Management Information System. Some say that as an area of study MIS is sometimes referred to, in a restrictive sense, as information technology management.

The study of information systems is usually a business administration discipline. It concentrates on the integration of computer systems with the aims of the organization or company. This subject would help us students in analyzing and solving matters regarding to problems which management covers. This means exactly what says, it’s an Information System used by Management. Now, the definition of an Information System is a set of interrelated components that collect, process, store, and distribute information to support decision making and control in an organization. It also helps managers and workers analyze problems, visualize complex subjects, and create new products. In Conclusion, Information Systems is a major part of a Management Information System and MIS are a major part of an organization. MIS are the decision-making element that helps plan and decide where the organization wants to go in the future.

Also you have learned that the success of an organization depends partly on how successful their Information System is. Information Systems can make a huge impact on Management Decision-Making. These Systems can provide information about different aspects of the decision situation and the decision process. For example, they could tell what problems or opportunities can be trigger the decision process and which solutions could be alternatives and they can tell you how the decision was reached.

These systems can also help managers stimulate innovation on existing decision procedures or explore different solution designs. There are different types of Information systems that managers could use in decision-making. MIS Management Information Systems can be defined as the combination of human and computer based resources that results in the collection, storage, retrieval, communication and use of data for the purpose of efficient management of operations and for business planning. Generally, MIS deals with information that is systematically and routinely collected in accordance with a well-defined set of rules. Thus, and MIS is a part of the formal information network in an organization. Information that has major managerial planning significance is Such information is not part of MIS, how ever; one- shot market research data collected to gauge the potential of a new product does not come with in the scope of an MIS by our definition because although such information may be very systematically collected it is not collected on a regular basis.