The Outlook for MIS

The article focuses on the significance of management information systems (MIS) in the United States. Both the general and the marketing interpretation of MIS have fallen into disrepute as a result of oversell and underuse. One cause of this disillusionment has been the neglect of the decision environment that the MIS was intended to serve. To underscore the proper system focus and differentiate it from MIS, a decision-relevant information system will be called an information and decision system. One of the problems in the development of marketing information and decision systems has been computer availability for marketing applications and the kind of priority marketing problems get in corporate computer groups. Most marketing applications have lower priority than financial and accounting operations, and the reasons are historical. The first applications of computers were payroll and other accounting applications and for this reason, the computer group in most companies was made a staff function reporting to the controller or another financial officer.