A clear identification of information needs is fundamental and necessary to go for design of a corporate MIS. Recently, a Central Government department spent lavish sums on hardware and software to perpetuate the existing 53 MIS reports and to build a sophisticated data-bank without first determining the real information needs of management. It is often forgotten that only that information should go into the corporate MIS which can increase the perception of managers on critical areas such as problems, alternatives, opportunities and plans.
At least there have been two States in India which built up comprehensive land-record data-banks without examining what the user needed from these data-banks. The enormous costs for building their data-banks were later found to be unjustified and both these States have since discontinued their efforts in this area. On the other hand, another State (Utter Pradesh) has begun on a limited basis to build up corporate MIS for 200 parameters for a couple of districts and, after ascertaining the user-needs, it is proposed to extend the MIS further to all the districts.
It is the user-manager who is to provide the specification for what he wants out of his corporate MIS. If the manager fails to do so, the computer professional by default would provide his own objectives and his own information needs. These would seldom meet the needs of the user-manager.
