There is an ironic truth in the management complaint that computers have made the business so complex that if the power goes off or the information technology freezes up, everybody may as well go home. It has come to pass that we are so deeply invested in computers to operate on a daily business that we can not continue to operate without them. While this is literally true in many manufacturing and financial sectors, it is also beginning to be the state of affairs for nearly every company, and highlights the need for systems management software.

 

Information is the lifeblood of industry, from determining what product or service is needed to handling the myriad requirements that must all be pulled together to create them. Knowing the customer is a complicated business that is not intuitively obvious, and those who crack the code first are the most successful. Information is the key to the code, and information technology allows for its collection and analysis. As this new era of automation matures, the quest for ever greater detail in the information collected and studied grows until there comes a point where there is simply too much to effectively make sense of.

 

The manager is now faced with so much information about every topic that discerning the valuable information from background noise data is seriously problematic. Hiring decisions used to be made following an interview, with questions and answers and the unquantifiable interpersonal ques an interview provides. Today a successful candidate of yore may be electronically eliminated by an insignificant criterion before an interview is even conducted.

 

While the data is important and even critical to a competitive organization, the methodology for gleaning information does impact the final data. Once all this data has been collected, the manager must make sense of it and put it to use in a practical way, a difficult endeavor made more complex by not having a good handle on the parameters under which it was collected. This is further complicated by the issue of time, just how much should be spent on the analysis of data?

 

The reason for the explosion of information technology is that, when used well, it is a tremendous boost to corporate efficiency. Communication can be immensely more effective when all the decision makers of a large organization all have the same information at hand when discussing significant strategy and tactics. But it dos not always tell us what is important. A small airline company can produce thousands of data entry points to track and report the systemic progress of getting an airplane in the air on time. But this will never help a manager figure out that what the customer cares about is not the takeoff time, but the landing time at destination.

 

Not surprisingly, this phenomenon is known to information system specialists, who are working feverishly to reign in the complexities of using management tools. It should also be no surprise that the solution will likely entail software designed to run or enhance the existing management tools, computers in charge of computers. This secondary iteration of control is much like the levels of management in a company, with each successive level designated to run the level below, allowing the higher levels to focus on a more strategic role.

 

All leaders intrinsically want to have a feel for what their company is doing. There is no scarier feeling than being responsible for something and not having the first hand knowledge of what is being done to make it happen. This does not mean that the CEO of a company needs to know the name, start time destination and cargo of every truck carrying product within his company, that is what the management hierarchy is about. Unfortunately, the nature of man is to be curious, and if the data is available it is difficult not to get captured in the mountains of minutia.

 

Allowing the manager to spend their time using the data is the goal of information technology, and that means that while they need to understand what and how information is selected for their use, they need to be able to rely on data that is collected and provided to them as they need it. If new data geographic information is useful in determining which stores need more or less product, then they need a means to tell the computer to collect it for them. Systems management software provides the means for management to go from slave to the machine to leader of an industry.