Processing Information

Let’s take a look at capturing and processing information in management. There are two basic methods of capturing information: manual and electronic.

Manual capture of information is a slow, costly, labor-intensive, and often inaccurate process, which entails recording and entering data by hand into a data storage device. To avoid the problems inherent in such a system, companies are relying more on electronic capture. They use electronic storage devices such as bar codes, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, and document scanners to capture and record data electronically.

Bar codes represent numerical data by varying the thickness and pattern of vertical bars. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tags contain minuscule microchips that transmit information via radio waves and can be used to track the number and location of the objects into which the tags have been inserted.

Electronic scanners, which convert printed text and pictures into digital images, have become an increasingly popular method of capturing data electronically because they are inexpensive and easy to use. Text that has been digitized cannot be searched or edited like the regular text in your word processing software, however; so the second requirement for a good scanner is optical character recognition software to scan and convert original or digitized documents into ASCII (American Standard Code for Information In-terchange) text or Adobe PDF documents.

Traditionally, data mining has been very expensive and very complex. Today, however, data mining services and analyses are much more affordable and within reach of most companies’ budgets. And, if it follows the path of most technologies, data mining will become even easier and cheaper to use in the future.