Can MIS be entirely trusted?

Lack of proper MIS or ignoring the avaiable MIS is the reason for most of the ills we see in Government departments and Public services.

A typical example is the failure being experienced in collection, storage, its condition and distribution of food grains under PDS.

Rains and flood are natural occurances happen in every monsoon. Why there are no routine pre-monsoon precautions initiated by  concerned government departments? Why information regarding condition of stored food grains, inadequacy of storage spaces, delay in distribution and uptake at end points etc., are not known to the departmental heads and concerned Minister's offices?

Why day to day information about the food grains getting damaged due to shortage of storage, positon and delay in distribution are not known to the Ministers, until media rakes up these issues. 

Are not there any Management Information Systems in place in these government departments?  It is high time the IT ministries in the Centre and States look into these and take necessary steps to implement and make use of the right sort of MIS in every Government establishments. 

MIS should be trusted as it is the crux of key data on the basis of which important decisons are taken by Management.The utility of MIS is increased in case of ''Realtime MIS'' however in case of post mortem MIS reports.The data has to be understood in the light of circumstances prevailing at the time info was gathered.Further needlesss to mention MIS would yield proper results only when correct and proper links/interfaces have been established.Missing any linkcs would render MIS useless.

Yes. MIS can be trusted but we need to be sure proper checks are in place and maximum automation is done to avoid any flow. There is also one more thing that is data on which MIS depends and data is something that can be presented in many ways all depend on approach. For some glass is half empty and for some glass is half full. MIS is a management tool, if you have trust in your management, you must have trust in your MIS.

Software applications play a significant role in providing critical services that are essential to the

smooth functioning of our daily lives, responsible for providing the basic call management, it has provided capabilities over traditional PSTN network infrastructure with near perfect Reliability, for several decades, and the society now takes for granted these basic capabilities. For the IMS system to be widely adopted and in fact preferred over the traditional PSTN. IMS offers these basic capabilities with similar levels of reliability. Most important step in ensuring reliable operation of the IMS is a systematic analysis of its reliability. Such analysis should consider customer usage patterns, reliabilities of its components and its architecture. While the analysis should undoubtedly provide an estimate of the IMS reliability, the primary objective of such analysis should be to facilitate an assessment of the sensitivity of the IMS.

Yes, unless it is manipulated.

MIS should not be treated as just another routine operational function.

Its quick analysis and timely corrective action should happen whenever there is deviation from desired results.

However, there is a tendency in some organisations to spend more time for MIS generation, periodic compilation and its analysis at the cost of productive worktime, especially where these had to done manually. 

With computerisation, situation has changed and we have now very effective MIS tools for every organisation so that most of it can work tranasparently and generate reports needed at various levels of the management without little human intervention.

The degree to which Management Information Systems can be trusted is directly proportional to the care and accuracy WITH WHICH IT IS DESIGNED. It must be capable of providing accurate and timely and adequate information based on which strategic and tactical decision making can enabled.