Computerization Of Saccos For The Ministry Of Co-operatives

Abstract

Computers were first developed to process business transactions; the trend has been to have computers also support management in decision making. This led to the evolution of Management Information Systems (MIS). The concept of MIS can be traced from four major areas, namely, managerial accounting, management science or operations research, management theory and computer science. MIS is supported by a comprehensive set of data for business operations referred to as a database. There are several databases in any given organization. Organizations have realized that valuable information is hidden in separate databases which might sometimes contain overlapping and contradictory information, and are coming up with data warehouses. A data warehouse provides a platform for advanced, complex and efficient data analysis using On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) for data mining or Knowledge Data Discovery (KDD) to extract previously unknown strategic business information or business intelligence (BI). There are a lot of similarities between data warehousing and operations research (OR), they both require analytical processing to support executive decision making, yet OR, MIS and IT exist as separate communities, right from the education level to the organizations. There are many challenges facing data warehousing, with organizations viewing it as a purely IT project. The objective of the paper was to establish how some of the challenges of data warehousing could be addressed so as to reduce the failure rate of BI projects. It was concluded that data warehousing would be more successful if its development was a joint effort of both the OR & MIS community and the IT community. It is recommended that OR and MIS be taught as one discipline whose graduates will work very closely with IT specialists.