Which level of decision making has the most unstructured processes and methods?

1. What are the different types of decisions, and how does the decision-making process work?
   The different levels in an organization (strategic, management, operational) have different decision-making requirements. Decisions can be structured, semistructured, or unstructured, with structured decisions clustering at the operational level of the organization and unstructured decisions at the strategic level. Decision making can be performed by individuals or groups and includes employees as well as operational, middle, and senior managers. There are four stages in decision making: intelligence, design, choice, and implementation. Systems to support decision making do not always produce better management and employee decisions that improve firm performance because of problems with information quality, management filters, and organizational culture.
2. How do information systems support the activities of managers and management decision making?
   Early classic models of managerial activities stress the functions of planning, organizing, coordinating, deciding, and controlling. Contemporary research looking at the actual behaviour of managers has found that managers’ real activities are highly fragmented, variegated, and brief in duration and that managers shy away from making grand, sweeping policy decisions. Information technology provides new tools for managers to carry out both traditional and newer management roles, enabling them to monitor, plan, and forecast with more precision and speed than ever before and to respond more rapidly to the changing business environment. Information systems have been most helpful to managers by providing support for their roles in disseminating information, providing liaisons between organizational levels, and allocating resources. However, information systems are less successful at supporting unstructured decisions. Where information systems are useful, information quality, management filters, and organizational culture can degrade decision making.
3. How do business intelligence and business analytics support decision making?
   Business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA) promise to deliver correct, nearly real-time information to decision makers, and the analytical tools help them quickly understand the information and take action. A BI environment consists of data from the business environment, the BI infrastructure, a BA toolset, managerial users and methods, a BI delivery platform (management information systems [MIS], decision support systems [DSS], or executive support systems [ESS]), and the user interface. There are six analytical functionalities that BI systems deliver to achieve these ends: predefined production reports, parameter-driven reports, dashboards and scorecards, ad hoc queries and searches, the ability to drill down, and the ability to model scenarios and create forecasts.
4. How do different decision-making constituencies in an organization use business intelligence?
   Operational and middle management are generally charged with monitoring the performance of their firm. Most of the decisions they make are fairly structured. MIS producing routine production reports are typically used to support this type of decision making. For making unstructured decisions, middle managers and analysts will use DSS with powerful analytics and modelling tools, including spreadsheets and pivot tables. Senior executives making unstructured decisions use dashboards and visual interfaces to display key performance information affecting the overall profitability, success, and strategy of the firm. Balanced scorecard and business performance management are two methodologies used in designing ESS.
5. What is the role of information systems in helping people working in a group make decisions more efficiently?
   Group decision support systems (GDSS) help people working together in a group arrive at decisions more efficiently. GDSS feature special conference room facilities where participants contribute their ideas using networked computers and software tools for organizing ideas, gathering information, making and setting priorities, and documenting meeting sessions.

An organization has a wide variety of decisions to make, ranging from highly structured decisions to unstructured decisions. A structured decision is one that is made quite often, and one in which the decision is based directly on the inputs. With structured decisions, once you know the necessary information you also know the decision that needs to be made. For example, inventory reorder levels can be structured decisions. Once your inventory of widgets gets below a specific threshold, there is a need to order more. Processes like this, based on structured decisions, are good candidates for automation. They can also be referred to as programmed decisions.

For programmed decisions, managers often develop heuristics, or mental shortcuts, to help reach a decision. For example, the retail store manager may not know how busy the store will be the week of a big sale, but might routinely increase staff by 30% every time there is a big sale (because this has been fairly effective in the past). Heuristics are efficient—they save time for the decision maker by generating an adequate solution quickly. Heuristics don’t necessarily yield the optimal solution, but a good solution. Heuristics are often used for programmed decisions, because experience in making the decision over and over helps the decision maker know what to expect and how to react. Programmed decision-making can also be taught fairly easily to another person.

In contrast, an unstructured decision or non programmed decision involves a lot of unknowns. They are generally based on criteria that are not well-defined, and information is more likely to be ambiguous or incomplete. The decision maker may need to exercise some thoughtful judgment and creative thinking to reach a good solution. An information system can support these types of decisions by providing the decision makers with information gathering tools and collaborative capabilities. An example of an unstructured decision might be dealing with a labor issue or setting policy for the implementation of a new technology.

A semi-structured decision is one in which most of the factors needed for making the decision are known but human experience and other outside factors may still impact the decision. A good example of a semi-structured decision is the hiring process. Part of the decision is structured (years of experience, education, etc.) and part of the decision is based on human experience (for example: social skills, problem solving skills etc.) Take a look at how companies are trying to program this decision and use algorithms. Semi-structured and unstructured decisions are more challenging and systems may not be able to assist in the process fully. However, advances in artificial intelligence (explored in Chapter 13) are helping to change this.

Decisions can also be classified into three categories based on the level at which they occur.

Strategic decisions set the course of an organization. Tactical/Managerial decisions are decisions about how things will get done. Finally, operational decisions refer to decisions that employees make each day to make the organization run. For example, think about the restaurant that routinely offers a free dessert when a customer complaint is received. The owner of the restaurant made a strategic decision to have great customer service. The manager of the restaurant implemented the free dessert policy as a way to handle customer complaints, which is a tactical decision. Finally, the servers at the restaurant are making individual decisions each day by evaluating whether each customer complaint received is legitimate and warrants a free dessert. Different information systems are used at each level of the company structure to support the different decision types. We explored transaction processing systems in Chapter 11.

Which level of management makes the unstructured decisions?

Which decisions are used for unstructured situation?

What is unstructured decision making?

What is unstructured problem in decision making?