Using Information Systems to Optimise Employee Workflows and Decision-Making

Introduction

Why is it important to utilise Information Systems to optimise employee workflows and decision-making?  Why do we even care?  The short answer: improved employee workflows lead to better employee morale which leads to improved overall company performance.

Information Systems

Information Systems are used in a variety of ways in every organisation - it’s beyond the scope of this blog to go into the detail of every permutation.  Their primary purpose, however, is to optimise employee work, or workflows, and to enhance decision-making,

Workflow

"Workflow is the production and distribution of output." (Rao, 2009).

For an employee, decisions need to be made to accomplish work – for example, a janitor deciding to clean one specific office instead of another so that a meeting can go ahead uninterrupted, or a clerk deciding to work on this client’s file instead of that one so that a disgruntled customer receives better service, or a manager deciding to give an employee a warning instead of following through on a disciplinary hearing, potentially saving a family from financial ruin.

"Decision making in businesses used to be limited to management. Today, lower-level employees are responsible for some of these decisions, as information systems make information available to lower levels of the business." (Laudon, 2022).

Using the CCoB definition, by gathering data through digital collaboration with other systems, processing it meaningfully (e.g. analysing stock trades over time) and providing meaningful information to the decision-

Monitoring

“Microsoft Corporation collects and analyzes data ... between its staff and clients ... to measure employee productivity ...” (Laudon, 2022).

While, in this example, Microsoft clearly has a positive purpose for this data collection, it can also have a negative effect on employee well-being through the stress of knowing they are being monitored, though.  It is important for companies to beware of excessive monitoring or run the risk of demoralising their employees and negatively affect their performance (Siegel, et al., 2022, p. 2).

In a well-being report, the co-authors state they "estimate a positive correlation between employee well-being and productivity", and a "large, positive correlation between employee well-being and aggregate firm-level ... performance across ... industries" (Krekel, et al., 2019).  If, therefore, employee well-being is important, then when employee processes are optimised employee productivity and well-being improves which is when company performance is improved.

The best decisions are usually data driven, but not always (consider, in the previous example by Laudon, the potential for employee dissatisfaction and undue stress with Microsoft collecting monitoring data on their employees).  These data-driven decisions are, given that information systems disseminate information based on the gathering and collation of various data points, information systems driven.

Collaboration

While it's true that Information Systems can foster a collaborative environment for people in different departments, it's equally true that entrenched siloed departments can utilize Information Systems to instead confound and break down collaboration, such as in banks (where I've seen this happen)  - executive and senior management need to be directly engaged in projects that transcend departmental silos, and they need to

Data Driven