Approaches to Design of MIS:

The approaches given here provide directions to the design team in developing MIS. It broadly specifies how information should flow to different layers of management and to different managers in each layer. John Buckley identified four approaches to MIS design which are listed in the order of least desired to most desired approaches. They include the shotgun approach, traditional approach, rational approach, and empirical approach. 

Shotgun approach 

The information requirements of different executives and employees vary with respect to the level of management and the position they hold. Under this approach, when an executive asks for some information, the system would provide all the related information relating to the query without sorting or filtering the unnecessary information. The system ignores the process of filtering the information or diagnosing the query so as to provide only relevant information. The executive then has to manually filter and sort the information according to his/her requirement. This approach can increase the cost to the organization, which includes the cost of gathering all the information as well as the cost of storing it (as it may consume a huge amount of space in memory). 

Traditional or integrative approach

The essence of the traditional approach is to give the same kind of information to the decision maker that has proved successful time and again. The traditional or integrative approach uses integration of information systems across the functional departments of the organization. The integration of information into a centralized database helps in reducing costs by eliminating duplicate data. It helps in providing traditional reports to the managers which they are familiar with. This approach also suffers from certain disadvantages. The biggest disadvantage is that query specific information is seldom provided in this approach. The traditional approach is known to provide time-tested information which may not be as useful in the current scenario as it used to be in earlier cases. Hence, there exists a certain ambiguity for the managers while making decisions. Due to integration, the powers of the individual departments get shifted to the central offices or headquarters. This creates friction in the organizational layers and functioning, leading to a fall in revenues. If the MIS is implemented in big government organizations using this approach, it will result in an increase in costs.

Rational approach

The rational approach is an improvement on the shotgun and traditional approaches. It incorporates the decision-making process in the MIS design, though in an abstract form. The rational approach emphasizes rationality and model building in the MIS design. The models are developed by experts who understand managerial decision-making and incorporate their recommendations in their models. Information dissemination depends on the managerial hierarchy, which indicates that different levels of management are treated discriminately by allowing varying levels of information to flow to them. This is done to provide the respective managers with the information required to help them in arriving at their decisions. Model building is based on certain assumptions and such assumptions may prompt the experts to include some variables and exclude others. But there is always a problem in distinguishing critical variables from non-critical ones.

Empirical approach

In this approach, the scientific observations of decision makers at work are taken into consideration while designing an MIS. This approach emphasizes the behavior of the decision makers rather than rationality. The environment in which the decisions are made is also given due importance and the decision-making process is given the same importance as the outcome of the decisions. This approach focuses on how a manager behaves while making a decision. It includes the channels of information the manager uses, the type of environment he/she is working in, the organizational set-up, etc. These factors are considered to influence the decision-making process and, ultimately, the decision outcome. As it is difficult to study all the managers at work in an organization, this approach is used selectively. In other words, the empirical approach is based on the marginal utility theory. Based on this theory, the approach tries to improve the marginal effectiveness of the best decision-makers in the organization instead of enhancing the efficiency of all the decision-makers. Hence, the empirical approach considers a fixed MIS and a variable MIS. 

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