IT Work - Managing information overload.

Task -

Many ICT tools have been created to help in dealing with the information explosion. In what ways can the following help in decision-making:

• Spreadsheets
• Simulations software
• Data mining tools
• Exception reporting tools?

Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets can be used to keep track of your money, they are good tools to add in all your accountancy work instead of having lots of different pieces of paper with your income and outgoings thrown across them.

The spreadsheets can also do calculations for you so, if you put in the right equations then you can add up blocks of information, for example, 2 numbers into another number. Subtract things and it can be used to give you a total profit/loss calculation if you are using it for accountancy.

Simulations software: These can be used for large companys that needs to find out if something will actually widthstand something, for example, putting satalites into space costs a lot of money and so the owners of the satelites will want them to go up and work successfully without any breakages for a long period of time. They will need to run simulations of the strains on the different parts of the satelite. In a simulator you can program them to show where the largest strain on the satelite will be and so where you will need to use the right materials and re-enforce parts of it so it does not just snap in half due to the pressures of space.

Data mining tools: Data mining is the process of sorting through large amounts of data and picking out relevant information. it is usually used by business intelligence organisations and finacial analysts but is increasingly being used in the sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets generated by modern experimental and observational methods. It has been describes as "the nontrivial extraction of implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from data" adn "the science of extracting useful information from large data sets or databases." Data mining in relation to enterprice resource planning is the statistical and logical analysis of large sets of transactional data, looking for patterns that can aid decision making.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining)

Exception Reporting tools: Exception Reporting tools are a computing term referring to the computerized handling of errors. Runtime engines such as those for the Java language or Microsoft .Net lend themselves to an automated mode of exception or error handling. In these environments software errors do not 'crash' the operating system or the runtime engine but rather generate exceptions. Recent advances in these runtime engines enables specialized runtime-engine add-on products to provide automated exception handling that is independent of the source code and provides root-cause information for every exception of interest.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Exception_Handling)