Managing Computers in Large Organizations

Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/167.html
About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the
original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be
retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution.
MANAGING MICROCOMPUTERS AND END-USER COMPUTING SOME CRITICAL
ISSUES
not previously available. Internal security is ultimately still a matter of auditing
and personnel policies, not technology.
The final set of issues are those that, I believe, can be resolved in most
organizations by normal administrative procedures and proper computer-user
interfacing. These issues are the effects of bad data, data integrity, the problem
of transferring end-user-developed programs, and the question of who pays for
added computer capacity, the wasting of resources, and the proliferation of
languages.
Poor Data. Are decisions supported by computer-based analysis deficient
because of poor data? This may be an important question where data from
outside sources are used. The quality of outside data must be checked just as the
quality of received parts or materials is checked. (In a few places it may be
advisable to check the quality of the internal data as well.) Data quality really
involves two questions. Is the decisionmaker better off with no data or with data
that may have some errors? If flawed data are used will the power of the
computer-based analytic tools in some way amplify the errors?
There are several responses to this problem. Obviously, care should be
taken to prevent bad data whether micros, terminals, or adding machines are
being used. In each case the end user is more likely to know the data and
therefore be better able to catch errors than corporate staff or others. In fact, the
power of the computer may help the end user find errors by performing various
consistency and trend analyses. Thus, end user access to data may have an
additional benefit of making the data more accurate. Further, the kind of
decision-support analysis we are discussing may be insensitive to occasional
data errors. Of course, management should always be aware that
recommendations and analytic results may be based on poor data. End-user
computing should not aggravate this situation if administrative procedures are
followed to keep the data as clean as possible and to remind the staff to check
the data and the reasonableness of the results.
Data integrity. Can the end user affect the operational data in corporate
files? If so, can the integrity of the data be assured? Can the changes made by
an end user be audited?
The only way to insure the integrity of data is to maintain all the controls
that data processing has painfully learned: good editing, effective audit logs and
procedures, and good recovery processes.
89
Copyright © National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.