Management Information System (MIS) and Business Success : A Technique for Goal Attainment in Hotel Management

In today's unpredictable hotel business environment, service organizations every day are increasingly faced with the challenges of attaining their specific goals and objectives. The prevailing global economic recession in Nigeria coupled with the growing dependence on information technology in hotels have heightened the need for hotel managers and entrepreneurs to re-think strategies on how best to achieve the goals of their organizations within record time. This paper, however identified Management Information System (MIS) as a computer based management technique, which involves the study and application of the information needs of an organization's management at all levels. It prescribes Management Information System (MIS) as a potent instrument which can be established, adopted and developed to facilitate operational, tactical and strategic decision making process by every organization wishing to meet the demands of the environment and achieve their expected goals. Therefore, computer based Management Information System (MIS) is recommended as an invaluable management strategy support technique which can be developed to assist management in understanding the effect of their strategies and help to enable effective decision making, useful for the attainment of organizational goals mostly in hotels. Keyword: MIS, goal attainment, Hotels. Introduction Issues about the effect of globalization in the third word countries, Khor (2000) declared that globalization has become the defining process of the present age. Khor stated that the breaking down of economic barriers between countries have affected not only national policy making but also the existence' and survival of many hotel business organization both public and private especially, in the developing countries. Khor (2003), argues that business organizations everywhere like hotels are now faced with unpredictable operational environment. The attainment of their organizational goals and objectives havealso been threatened by the effects of the recession in developing country like Nigeria, which was brought about by unbridled economic globalization. The above situations have heightened the concern for hotel managers and entrepreneurs to re-think strategies on how to manage their organization more efficiently and effectively. In recent years, the importance of information management has come to focus as a result of the increased complexities of organizations, which result in diversity of information needs to manage in all functional and at all levels. Increasing organization complexity has also brought about the problem of complexity of decision making process. The concept of management information system (MIS) contains three individual concepts namely: management, information and the functional system of the organization. This paper strongly advocates the establishment of Management Information System needed by managers to manage their Hotels efficiently and effectively. Management Information System: An overview Management Information System is basically a facilitating system for hotel managers in developing decisions, related to planning, directing, staffing; organizing and controlling functions. Information is Journal of Policy and Development Studies Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2017 56 the central concept in Management Information System (MIS) . Information consists of classified and interpreted data that are used for decision making. Generally, Management Information System is a group of people, a set of manuals, and data processing equipment (set of elements) which select, store, process and retrieve data (i.e. operate on data and matter) to reduce the uncertainty in decision making, and ask, seek a common goal by yielding information for the management to a time, they can mostly use it or refer to it. An information system must be structured to provide every management with the information that are relevant to their decision making needs. MIS is an organized approach to the study of the information needs of an organization's management at every level in making operational, tactical and strategic decisions. Its objective is to design and implement procedures, processes, and routines in a timely manner. In the past hotel organizations recognized the importance of managing resources such as labour, capital and raw material. Today, it is widely accepted that managing the information resources are very often and equally important. Management Information System supports the process of collection, manipulation of storage, distribution and utilization of an organization resources. This is now refereed to generally as the application of information technology to support the major functions and activities of either a private or public sector institution or organization. In a Management Information System; modern computerized systems arc used to continuously gather relevant data, both inside and outside of an organization. This data is processed, integrated and stored in a centralized database (or data warehouse) where it is constantly updated and made available to all who have the authority to, access it; in a form that suit their purpose. The term MIS is also used to refer to the people in hotels who manage these computerized systems. The Computer and Management Information System The use of computers has now become indispensable in the operations of modern MIS. Computers provide MIS with capabilities not possible in human information systems. The trend of using Computer Based Information System (CBIS) for contemporary MIS structure have expanded for the following reasons: (Onwuchekwa, 2003) a. Complexity of present organization in terms of size, organization structure, geographically dispersed location, technology employed, required increasingly diverse information. b. The vast capability of computer in hotels to store, retrieve, process data and present information in desired forms. c. The availability of user friendly software packages and software specialists in ever increasing numbers in hotels. d. Compatibility of the hardware with communications and teleprocessing infrastructure in hotels. e. Greater levels of precision and accuracy required in monitoring, protection processes in hightech areas in hotels. f. Possibility of programming, routine, structured and time consuming decisions in hotels. Some specific features of hotel Computer Based Management Information system are as follows:  Organizing and updating of huge mass of raw high accuracy and large computer memory facilities, the storage of large volume of data and information which can be retrieved easily as and when required [Elliot and Sheldon, 2008).  Input data can be a variety of purpose.  Expanded scope of using the information system widened scope of analysis  Integration of different information sub-system working, in organizing early business computer used for simple operations such as tracking sales or payroll data with little detail or structure. Over time these computer applications became more complex, hard ware storage capacities grew and technologies improved for connecting previously isolated applications. As more data was stored and linked, hotel managers sought greater details as well as greater abstraction with the aim of creating entire management reports from the raw stored data. The term MIS arose to describe such applications, providing, hotel managers with information about other data that would help in managing the organization. (Levinson, 2001). Journal of Policy and Development Studies Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2017 57 Types of Information System Information . system usually belong to two different types; structured and unstructured information system; information processing activity, is formalized and publicized. Whereas in an unstructured information system, the information processing is neither formalized nor publicized; information system can also be categorized into public and private information systems and formal and informal systems. Public information systems are designed to provide for the organizations. They are characterized by the presence of formal documents and records. Private information system is designed to limit the availability of the information to the selected individuals. Generally the private information systems are meant for supplement or duplicating the efforts of public information system and they have no other recording or predestined process of retrieval (Perrow, 2007). Formal Information system are those which follow the hierarchical starter of an organization. This is an information system in which all the persons who arc using information arc authorized to use, and are also responsible for dissemination of specific information. Fig. 1: The organization information system The importance of MIS in the management of contemporary organizations of modern day, have the following reasons. a. The system utilizes information which are the common Denominator underlying the management functions of planning, organizing, directing and control. b. Information systems are closely related to the basic organizational objectives, policies and strategies established by the management. c. MIS helps hotel managers to obtain valuable insight into the system operations and control operation while formulating their information requirements. d. Information system has a major impact on the utilization of physical, human and financial resources of a productive system. e. An understanding of the capabilities and limitations of information system technology, will enable hotel management to direct and measure its contribution to organizational objectives f. MIS will enable the hotel management to distinguish between information oriented problems and those which have other underlying causes (Simon, 2009). The Primary Data and Information in MIS Application Data and information are two indispensable variables upon which every successful MIS is built. Data are unstructured r