Management Information Systems at DVD Direct
Alice: Hi Elizabeth, I'm Alice.
Elizabeth: Hi Alice, nice to meet you. Dennis just called and said you had some questions about the bandwidth data in the Monthly Membership Report. I did it about three months ago. When I wrote it I had no idea it would cause such a stir. Even looking at the numbers now, nothing seems particularly out of the ordinary. I wonder why Carol is so concerned.
Alice: You wrote this report three months ago? But the information in the report includes data from this month and last month.
She hands Elizabeth the cover page of the report.
Elizabeth: Well I didn't actually write this report. I determined the format and the formulas that this report is based on. This particular report was created by a program that is part of our MIS or Management Information System. The program is run at the end of each month and applies my formulas to the new monthly data to produce the report. To locate the specific formulas you are interested in, all we have to do is look at the program that generated the report. Elizabeth turns to her computer and retrieves the MIS program. After quickly reviewing the program code, she points to her screen.
Elizabeth: There they are. The formulas use data from the production TPS database.