How is Information Used in Controlling?

Guests who stayed at a Sheraton, Westin, W. Hotels, St. Regis, Four Points, Aloft, Le Meridien, Tribute, or Element hotel between 2014 and September 2018 got a surprise in November 2018. The Marriott-owned Starwood hotel brands unveiled that its reservation system had been hacked and personal information on up to 500 million of its guests had been stolen. This information included names, addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, email addresses, and encoded credit card details. In some cases, travel histories and passport numbers were also taken. Needless to say, this was a huge humiliation to Marriott and a black mark in the company's reputation.

Marriott's experience is not unique. Similar attacks have occurred in the computer systems at Equifax, eBay, Target, and American Express. Protecting information is creating increasing demands for extensive information controls.

Managers deal with information controls in two ways:

• As a tool to help them control other organizational activities and
• As an organizational area they need to control.

Managers need the right information at the right time and the right amount to monitor and measure organizational activities and performance.

In measuring actual performance, managers need information about what is happening within their area of responsibility and about the standards in order to be able to compare actual performance with the standards. They also rely on information to help them determine if deviations are acceptable. Finally, they rely on information to help them develop appropriate courses of action. Most of the information tools managers use come from the organization's management information system.

A Management Information System (MIS) is a system used to provide managers with needed information on a regular basis. This system can be manual or computer based, although almost all organizations today have computer-supported applications. The term system in MIS intimates order, arrangement, and purpose. Further, an MIS focuses specifically on providing managers with information (processed and analyzed data), not merely data (raw, unanalyzed facts). A library provides a good resemblance. Although it can contain millions of volumes, a library doesn't do you any good if you can't find what you want quickly. That's why librarians spend a great deal of time cataloging a library's collections and ensuring that materials are returned to their proper locations. Organizations today are like well-stocked libraries. The issue is not a lack of data; instead, the issue is whether an organization has the ability to process that data so that the right information is available to the right person when he/she needs it. An MIS collects data and turns them into relevant information for managers to use.

A survey shows that 60 percent of companies had a network security violation in the past year. Because information is critically important to everything an organization does, managers must have thorough and secure controls in place to protect that information. Such controls can range from data encode to cyber security to data backups. Problems can hide in places that an organization might not have considered, like blogs, search engines, and Twitter accounts. Sensitive, defamatory, confidential, or embarrassing organizational information has found its way into search engine results. For instance, after Sony Pictures Entertainment's email servers were hacked, unattractive comments about numerous actors, directors, and producers showed up in Web searches. Equipment such as tablet and laptop computers, smartphones, and even RFID tags are unprotected to viruses and hacking. Needless to say, information controls should be monitored regularly to ensure that all possible precautions are in place to protect important information.