BUSİNESS INFORMATİON SYSTEMS

Information literacy is called a set of skills that enables managers to seek, evaluate and use information in an effective way.

Recurrent information is information that is provided on a periodic basis from periodic reports. Market or customer shares, advertisement watch rates, product or service ratings, price fluctuations, exchange rates, customer complains on product basis are some examples of this kind of information that managers receive on a weekly, monthly, quarterly or annual basis.

Internal information may be obtained from company’s own employees - executives, managers, engineers, scientists, buyers and sales staff.

Information from internal sources can be accessed faster and cheaper than information from other sources, but internal information gathering has some shortcomings, too. Information gathered may be incomplete or unsuitable for marketing decision-making, it may require some extra work to dig into the sources to pull the suitable data out.

Inquiries or complaints received: Inquiries are useful in terms of establishing a pattern in purchase orders. On the other hands complaints both supply corrective information on what went wrong and supports the relationship quality with the customers.

Effective marketing research involves five steps; 1. Defining the problem, 2. Developing a research plan, 3. Collecting problem specific data, 4. Interpreting the data and solving the problem, 5. Decision making.

The other external data sources are standardized sources of marketing data such as consumer purchase panels, store audits (i.e. secret customers), multimedia services etc.

In some occasions, big data is defined as such: massive data files that can be obtained from both structured and unstructured databases. Big data entails: Technology: e.g., storage, computation power, Analysis: e.g., pattern identification for commercial, economic, social, technical claims, and Mythology: the widespread belief that ‘big data’ offers a higher level of generating valuable insights.

The raw data are not useful to marketing manager. For this reason, we need a process which includes converting data to information. The first step in transform data into a competitive advantage is understanding the difference between data (recorded facts, things, events and statistics), information (formatted, useful data extracted from data pool), knowledge (internalized information) and insight (a deep level of understanding about a particular situation).

Product information in marketing is defined by a set of attributes which define the product. For example, for an automobile, there will be at least thirty different attributions such as price, size, type, colour, number of doors, engine power, rated power, car weight, fuel consumption, CO2 emission etc. This means that the marketing manager of a firm will face lots of columns and rows when comprehending product attributes data.