11) In their informational role, managers act as entrepreneurs by initiating new kinds of activities; they handle disturbances arising in the organization; they allocate resources to staff members who need them; and they negotiate conflicts and mediate between conflicting groups.
12) High-quality decisions require high-quality information.
13) Even with timely, accurate information, some managers make bad decisions.
14) Organizations are bureaucracies with limited capabilities and competencies for acting decisively.
15) Management information systems (MIS) provide routine reports and summaries of transaction-level data to middle- and operational-level managers to provide answers to structured and semistructured decision problems.
16) Executive support systems (ESS) provide analytical models or tools for analyzing large quantities of data for middle managers who face semistructured decision situations.
17) Management information systems (MIS) are systems that provide senior management, making primarily unstructured decisions, with external information and high-level summaries of firm performance.
18) The ESS software system contains the software tools that are used for data analysis.
19) A data table is a table that displays two or more dimensions of data in a convenient format. Microsoft Excel's PivotTable capability makes it easy to analyze lists and databases.
20) A sophisticated GDSS provides each attendee with a dedicated desktop computer under that person's individual control.