Optimal decision making by Thai management : focus on the enterprise information system

The main objective of this study is to examine information available from the current enterprise information systems of Thai manufacturing companies and to determine whether the systems meet the information requirements of users. The enterprise information systems are recommended as being able to provide the requirements of every business. As a result, many Thai organisations are spending a lot of money to adopt enterprise information systems, especially the enterprise resource planning systems, hoping to get high quality information to support their decision making and gain business competitive advantages. This study argues that the enterprise information systems deployed in Thai manufacturing companies ought to provide certain quality characteristics of information and specific items of information that are useful for supporting managers to make good decisions. The survey method was considered an appropriate method and two surveys were conducted. The first survey was done as structured interviews to gain an understanding about tasks, responsibilities, decision issues and required information from four Thai large organisations' CEOs and departmental managers. The major purpose of the first survey was to obtain the data to construct the main survey questionnaire; those data were reinforced by the best practice suggested by academics and trade associations. The three-ring model was developed to examine the information situation from three aspects: the best practice from academic and trade association literature; information required by users; and information currently available from the existing information systems. The main survey was conducted with large Thai manufacturing companies listed on the Stock Exchange of Thailand (SET) that had total fixed assets over 200 million Thai Baht (THB) in six industrial groups(246 companies). Seventy-nine questionnaires were returned, generating a 31.44% response rate. The quantitative data were processed using SPSS program version 17. The results show that there are gaps among the three aspects of information. The best practice aspect is quite similar to the level of information required from the information consumer's point of view but there are substantial differences which suggest that neither managers nor systems designers are fully aware of what items of information are required or of their quality. Another clear result is that the level of information from existing systems is significantly less that the level required and, as a corollary, significantly less than best practice. These present the gaps that need to be improved. The findings of this study identify both the gaps of information available from organisations' information systems and the misunderstandings of information system experts, as well as supporting the idea of using academic and trade associations' best practice to guide the information consumers to indicate their information needs. They also contribute to information theory by providing empirical data about how information systems fall short of the ideal. There is also an opportunity to conduct research to test the model with other industry sectors, where the unit of study would be selected from a different population of organisations. Last but not least, the research framework and method of study developed and used in this study have the potential to assess the availability and quality of information from information systems and show how system designers should pay more attention to the users' requirements. Future researchers can also extend the investigation to other types of business activity.