Social Media in Business Decisions of MSMEs: Practices and Challenges

2. Changing Paradigms Of Organizational Decision Making

There are many ways in which decisions can be made in the professional world. Earlier, organizations used to make business decisions on the basis of surveys, interviews, group discussions and finally the wisdom of managers. However, this was a time consuming process and the decisions were not very optimal. Organizations began to computerize many of the operational aspects of their business in the early 1960s. Information systems were developed to incorporate applications such as: order processing, accounting, inventory control, payroll and payable accounts. Management Information Systems (MIS) originally had the goal of making the information accessible for decision-making purposes in transaction processing systems. However, these systems were very large and inflexible and the reports produced were usually big, thus limiting the effectiveness of these systems (Ackoff, 1967). Eventually, this led to the development of Decision Support Systems in 1980s. Decision Support Systems (DSS) can help managers perform tasks such as resource allocation, budget comparison with actual results, data base testing to assess operating results, revenue forecasting and scenario assessment (Power and Heavin, 2017).