Internal Information Flows

1. Letters
   Are mainly used to communicate with external organisations.
   
   
2. Memoranda
   The purpose of memos has now been taken over in many companies by e-mail.
   In a paper based organisation they are only used for internal communications and the contents are usually brief and kept to a minimum.
   It requires a company to use an manual internal mail delivery service.
   
   
3. E-mail
   E-mails can be used both for internal and external communications.
   It is fast and inexpensive.
   It does however have weaknesses in the form of spamming (sending such a large number of e-mails that it overloads the individual and in the worst case floods an e-mail server) and also provides a security risk as viruses can be brought into a companies networks in documents attached to e-mails.
   
   
4. Local Area Networks (LANs)
   LANs are usually confined to about a 1000metres (college campus).
   Individual departments can have their own LAN which is connected to another work groups LAN.
   In large companies with departments located at other geographically locations the individual LANs can be interconnected via a Wide Area Network (WAN) to maintain national or international company communications.
   LANs allow shared hardware and software resources and improved communications in the form of e-mail and intranet.
   
   
5. Wide Area Networks (WANs)
   Wide Area Networks (WANs) are unrestricted in length.
   They rely upon external telecommunications carriers for inter-connection.
   WANs can be either private or public.
   
   
6. Telephone
   Telephony is useful for direct communication with an individual and allows for expression and interaction to take place.
   E-mails are expressionless and sometimes a message is wrongly interpreted by the receiver.
   Communication is not delayed unless an answerphone is provided to take messages.
   
   
7. Voice-mail
   Is a scheme that provides facilities for the caller to leave messages and is similar in operation to an answerphone or e-mail.
   
   
8. Meetings
   Are a useful means of communications for delivering a company message or where a group of individuals may be required to interact to a given topic/theme.
   This method of communication is time consuming and follows standard procedures.
   (A notice calling the meeting - a meeting place - an agenda - a secretary to take minutes of the meeting - a chairman to control the meeting)
   It needs all those involved to commit themselves to be available at a given time which is not always convenient.
   
   A modern equivalent is video-conferencing.
   In the case of a national company the employees are not required to travel to a common location to attend the meeting.
   A big saving in travel costs and lost time.
   
   
9. Reports
   A report is a strong way of providing information.
   A formal report follows a strict standard format and can be the findings from an investigation.
   Senior management may request these and they form a permanent document.
   Senior management produce an annual company report which is sent to shareholders informing them on the companies progress.
   
   
10. Management Information Systems (MIS)
    A MIS provides management and supervisory staff with information which allows them to control and make decisions.
    Some data may be analytical whilst other is informative.
    Data can be collected in the normal operation of the organisation or by special designed methods.
    (Bar code readers or questionnaires.)
    The power of information gathering is such that quite often a company can suffer from information overload.
    (Supermarkets run loyalty card schemes as they allow them to gather information on a customer even to their shopping habits.
    The implications to a such an organisation are great as they could stock individual branches according to shopping preferences of the customers in a branches catchment area, assess the catchment area by analysing customer addresses, make special offers to individual customers.
    In reality they perhaps collect more information than they can handle, or the cost of processing outways the benefits accrued by applying the processed data.)
    
    A successful MIS system may provide real-time data that allows corrections to be made to processes rather than historical data that indicates that problems had occured but are too late for any remedial action.