Design of a strategic information system to assist executive and management staff at Lakeshore Technical College make customer-focused program and service decisions

Communication and decision-making were identified as two of six areas needing improvement in a survey conducted by Baker and Hoover (1996) at Lakeshore Technical College (p. 3). The problem identified was that executive and management staff did not have access to customer and market information they needed to make effective program and service decisions. The purpose of the project was to design a strategic information system to assist executive and management staff make effective customer-focused program and service decisions.;The project was conducted in three phases. Phase one consisted of organizing and planning the project. Phase two consisted of analyzing the current system, designing the new model, and developing evaluation criteria. Phase three consisted of developing a plan to implement the strategic information system.;The project resulted in the identification of twenty-six key decision categories and the identification of essential decisions. The results revealed that three items were identified as both useful information items currently received and as information needed. Seventy-seven and one half (77.5%) of the information needed for decision-making originated from the college's internal records and 8.75% and 13.75% respectively originated from market intelligence and market research systems. A conceptual model was designed to provide the structure. Hierarchies for 10 information dimensions were developed.;Six conclusions were reached including (a) Decisions made by the core process teams are the unstructured type, (b) Information needs for each of the core process teams are unique, (c) Most information needed to develop the system is currently in the database, (d) The marketing information system model can provide a framework for developing the information needed for the core process teams to make effective decisions, (e) System implementation should focus on developing the decision support subsystem and the system for assessing user needs and use groupware applications to simplify the accessibility of the information, and (f) Successful implementation of the system should be based on criteria that evaluate both the implementation and operation of the system.