Problem: Enormous amounts of information will be useless if the information is not organized. Consider Grandma preparing to cook a big holiday dinner for the family. She is managing the enterprise of preparing a feast. If she opens her cookbook to find that the ingredients and instructions for every recipe are scattered haphazardly throughout all the pages, that cookbook is only good for stoking the fire. It is worthless in helping her manage her enterprise successfully. In order for knowledge to be useful, the user must be able to find, understand, and use a specific segment of information at any given time.

This is what management information systems are all about: The body of all relevant knowledge, organized to be accessible and useful to the management of any organization. The purpose is to provide the tools for planning, implementation, analysis, and continual improvement of all phases of an organization's operations.