The Marketing Information System (MIS) consists of people, equipment, procedures, and policies to gather, sort, evaluate, and distribute needed, timely, and accurate information to decision makers.

Wicked Problems

Assessing information needs

In the May 1996 issue of Strategy & Leadership, John C. Camillus describes complex, long-term group problems and calls them wicked problems "because the following characteristics make them unsolvable by classical, linear problem-solving processes":

	the problem is complex and intertwined
	the problem is hard to visualize or explain simply
	the problem has no perfect or obviously correct answers
	the problem has no known precedents
	the problem is not independent of the solution
	multiple stakeholders have conflicting priorities
	unexpected challenges and obstacles keep arising

As if all that weren't bad enough, look at the information you have to work with. You don't have enough of the information that you need. You have too much information that you don't need. In truth, you aren't even that sure what info you do need.

Camillus accurately describes the real world, or at least the one where I live and work. For the purposes of learning, we can simulate a world that sets off the wicked parts. That's what you'll be doing when you work on your course projects.

Gathering information

Internal information types

An effective MIS organizes and summarizes balance sheets, orders, schedules, shipments, and inventories into trends that can be linked to management decisions on marketing mix changes.

External information types

Marketing intelligence	provides everyday info about environmental variables that managers need as they implement and adjust marketing plans
Marketing research	links the consumer, customer, and public to the marketer through an exchange of information

Organizing information

Analyzing information

The MIS director must anticipate how information is to be used, e.g., if users from all business functions use the MIS on-line for short deadline decisions, then analytical tools must be available on demand. Then comes the hard part. Thinking.

Is the information credible? Is it valid, reliable, and relevant? Is it sufficient? Have you considered enough contradictory evidence? Have you interpreted well, that is, thought clearly and logically to your conclusions? In college, these are the questions asked in the beginning writing courses. For wicked, real-life problems in politically addled organizations, analyzing information can be quite an adventure.

Distributing information

The change from atoms to bits is making startling changes in how professionals distribute information. Three comparisons say it all, in my college prof's mind.

this course web		xeroxed handouts
email		office hours
electronic links		scribbled notes

For better or worse, I don't think most professionals are going to get a choice of whether or not we're going to do this. The traditional information process:

assesing needs
gathering
organizing
analyzing
distributing

is missing a step: designing information. At some point, you need to design the styles and the templates and the navigation between the nodes. Interface design, information design, and hypertext design are good search terms to start with. You'll find more ideas on this course web's new media development pages.

Let's separate three buzzwords for distributing information: intranet, extranet, and internet.

What we're talking about here is a matter of scale. The same protocol working for the Internet at large work is also working on a smaller scale for extranets and intranets. The right-hand column makes my point. Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol. Even Lotus Notes and Novell Groupwise have joined the TCP/IP bandwagon.

Note As organizations will change shape because of new media, groupware will open up under the pressure from its users to function more like an intranet. For now, groupware is not an intranet because it's still using proprietary data formats. When Lotus and Novell stop doing that, they won't have anything to sell and groups will take their own shape. It will be interesting to see them shift business models to try to stay in business.