The role of a computerised Management Information System (MIS) in Management Decision Making was defined by investigating the functions and services which the MIS department of Nitel - Kaduna provides for managers of the organisation to enable them
make functional decisions.
The MIS department deals with the Billings aspects of the Accounts department of Nitel Plc, covering the North-West Zone of the organisation. The zone comprises seven territories with headquarters in Kaduna, handling over 90,000 subscribers bills and generating bill-related reports for management use. The department uses a VAX 4000 computer system (DEC-Model), consisting of 64megabyte memory and 7.0 Gigabytes
harddrive with open VMS AxPV6.1 operating system. The computer uses VAX COBOL and VAX BASIC programming languages to generate fifteen different types of reports.
The reports generated by the MIS department are:
- Summary Reports;
Territory Accounts Status Report, Performance Report.
- Generation of Related Reports;
International Call Report, Dial and Trunk Call Report, Dial Call charge report,
Digital raw meter report.
- Payment related Reports;
Payment report, Business office bill copy report, First time credit report, Credit
balance report, Bank listing report, Payment and Adjustment listing report.
- Customer information related reports;
terminal/final debtors reports, Adhoc reports - could fall under any of the four categories depending on the contents of the report.
The system operated to generate the reports is a feedback system which uses; pay-inslips, tapes and meter photographs, update forms and adjustment forms as source documents for capturing raw data.
Information contained in the reports generated for the Top level managers is condensed and unstructured, designed for making strategic, decisions. The middle management use reports containing summarised information obtained from day-today routine data collection, while information available to lower level managers is detailed and well structured for making operational decisions.
The reports generated by the MIS department are used by the managers to make decisions based on a variety of organised voluminous information, suited for peculiar needs of the users of each report.
The decisions made by managers concern; volume of credit of subscribers, level of debts of Exchange Area, performance measurement of territories, revenue generation analysis. It is necessary for Nitel Plc, Kaduna to use a Wide Area Network (WAN) system in order for data to be processed uninterrupted on-line" and for information to be made available to managers on "real-time" for immediate responses by managers to enable immediate decision making.
