It is important to stress that this area concentrates on the beneficial and negative impacts of ICT on the people within the Information Age, not on the services
Decision making : • Spreadsheets (‘what if’ scenarios, budgeting, forecasting, etc.).
• Simulation software (modelling – see Unit 3). • Data-mining tools (unearthing patterns in large databases such as – only as one example – the
correlation between a rise in the sales of Italian wine in a supermarket and the in-store promotion of pasta and sauce).
• Exception reporting tools, e.g. investigating all credit card transactions over a preset amount on an account,* looking in more depth at the sales performance of stores whose sales are more than 5 per cent below the average. (*Note that more sophisticated tools allow credit card companies to use artificial intelligence techniques to predict whether a particular card transaction is ‘abnormal’ and report it as an exception to be investigated.)
