Management Information Systems and Safety Aspects of MIS
Specialist Seminar
Management information systems and tools for supporting management and decision-making are at present one of the areas of information technology which are developing very dynamically. Their main aim is to support the operative decision-making of middle and higher elements in an organisation, but above all the top management and strategic management. The success of an organisation is dependent to a large extent of the accuracy of the direction and the speed of this decision-making.
Companies often gather a large quantity of information, but opportunities for using it are often limited. MIS, together with data stocks, surpasses these limits and offers used a quicker and more efficient approach to data from all the elements of the organisation and the subsequent purposeful use of this data in everyday working activities. They become an inseparable part of the process of constant improvement, not only of the decision-making processes inside the organisation.
Since water systems are a network industry, geographical information systems play an important role in terms of information systems. GIS has taken up a particularly significant place in displaying underground engineering networks in the infrastructure of town and village facilities, where water and sewage systems are the oldest in terms of operations and the most important. GIS offers the end user not only the opportunity to replace a traditional map containing all related data, i.e. the user’s work, but allows it to be used to gather the data necessary for all types of assessment of their serviceability, costs or profitability, to gather, store and provide trustworthy information for immediate management decision-making and strategic management. The integration of GIS and other information systems allows further profit to be made for users from the systems already introduced and used. Integration allows the distribution of information and results for all the activities which can be obtained from this data: operation, planning, projection, renovation and modernisation, management, customer service or management.
Further thematic cycles which the seminar organised by Centire, s.r.o. in Poprad on April 18th 2007 dealt with as part of the project “Specialist assistance for Slovak regional water companies” was information safety and the reporting of water companies. The subject of information safety is coming to the fore, not only because of the strategic and economic importance of water and water resources for society, but also in relation to developments in the field of information and communication technologies. Information safety is the inevitable penalty for the interconnection of business and its processes with the use of information technologies, when the information of individual companies is at the same time a certain form of their capital. The significance of this safety increases in the environment of wide notification obligations for the water sector, and in relation to the state administration (in particularly based on Act no. 442/2002 Coll. on public water systems and public sewer systems and its executive regulations, Act no. 364/2004 Coll. on water, Act no. 188/ 2003 Coll. on sediment from water treatment works), and in relation to the European Union, where the reporting obligation stems from individual transposed directives.
The topicality of the presented subjects was highlighted by a fruitful discussion and the positive responses of participants.
E. Rajczyková, P. Bajan