Sally is the executive director of an organization consisting of 33 offices that

Question

Sally is the executive director of an organization consisting of 33 offices that deal with providing services to persons and families with epilepsy in their local area. The large number of offices is causing Sally and the board of directors to consider an information system. As Sally's consultant, what factors would you recommend her to consider before making recommendations to the board?

Information Systems - Other issues to consider:

Why might donors be interested in the performance of the organization?

For accounting, what are the key criteria for an information system to possess for a nonprofit?

Beyond accounting, what data should an information system be able to accumulate and process?

Explanation / Answer

Information system would consist of data from all different offices in place for anyone interested in knowing the organization's performance. It would contain data like, number of epilepsy patients, number of patients recovered, revenue earned, expenses details, number of employees and other data required.

The donors would be interested in performance of the organization because donors have donated their money, time or other resources to the organzation because they believe in it. If the organization is not able to fulfill the promises the donors would lose trust in the organization and may take their money or resources elsewhere. Hence, performance data would be very helpful to let them know of the progress made.

A nonprofit organization's most limited resource is money, it needs to make a budget and stick to it. The organization needs to make sure the expenses are in check and they can meet the budget. SOme of the main criterias are: price and overall cost. the organization needs to make sure its pricing is and demand meets the overall costs for the organization. details of funding source, grants and other income. The budget is another key criteria tells us how would be required to spend in the coming months or year.

Beyond accounting the information system should be able to accumulate data from external sources which can provide the organization with competitive advantage and data about spread of epilepsy to compare with people helped and people needing help. There could be data about efficiency and effectiveness such as time taken to cure epilepsy or new research in their field etc.

Some of the other issues to consider in information system are:

There can be other potential issues.

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