Streamlining Management Information Systems Processes towards Improving Sustainability Reporting for a Tourism Company

Abstract

Information systems are used to allow organisations to achieve business objectives and are critical in supporting organisations in operational excellence, to develop new products or services, to improve decision-making or to gain a competitive advantage. Reporting on information is inevitably part of organisation's objectives regardless of the industry in which the organisation resides. Management information systems (MIS) are used to support decision-making in organisations. The most important characteristics of MIS are relevance, accuracy, usefulness, timeliness and completeness. When MISs adheres to these characteristics, decision makers in the organisation have confidence in their decisions resulting in desired actions. This paper reports on sustainability information reporting challenges of a luxury experiential travel company operating in geographically dispersed locations. The challenges are due to apparent disparate data captured on different systems used for financial, operational and sustainability reporting. Besides the disparate data generated, the different systems duplicate the same information on various versions of data sets on different platforms. Bandwidth capacity and varying business priorities complicates compliance of operational units' reporting. The research objective was to determine how current reporting into the MIS can be streamlined to ensure improved flow of relevant, accurate, useful, timely and complete sustainability data to facilitate optimal decision-making capabilities for various operational units. The case organisation's MIS practices were compared against a publicly trading peer organisation to benchmark the trends in sustainability reporting. Through a number of key interviews, the research results showed the information flows, flaws and gaps in the current reporting practices. The inherent differences in the case organisation and the peer organisation highlighted potential areas for improvement and change. The technology, organisation, environment (TOE) framework proved an ideal fit as a foundation for understanding the requirements to streamline the reporting process of MIS processes for the case organization.