A management information system is a tool by which a CEO/ manager/team leader can review the performance data of one team (sales, marketing, operations, legal, any team you can imagine) or even the whole business for a specific period of time.

Let’s take an example.

Imagine that you work for the CEO of a SAAS company. 

What are the important numbers that they would want to know and be on top of all times? 

Here are some examples:

• How many leads did we get this month? How many were organic leads and how many were paid?

• How much did we spend on ad campaigns? What was the RoI?

• Which were the most effective social media channels – Google, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn? Which were the most effective ads?  

• On an average, how many phone/Zoom conversations are needed before someone buys our product?  

• What is the average cost of acquisition per customer?  

• How many agreed to renew contracts? How many customers did not renew/cancelled?

• How much revenue did we generate through referrals from existing customers? 

• What is the average revenue per customer that is being generated? 

• What is our customer satisfaction score for the month? How does it compare to the previous month’s score? 

• What is our net promoter score for the month? How does it compare to the previous month’s score?

• How long do we take to respond to a customer support ticket?

These are some examples. 

As you can imagine, such data and information needs continuous tracking.

This is how a high-level MIS will look: 

This is a very simplified chart.

Over time, as the business matures and you have data, it gets more finely categorised. 

That is when you need to visualise data and create charts and dashboards to answer key questions.

For example, how do you compare these results over time, or across different regions or products?

For this, if you know advanced features of excel, you can also prepare charts or a dashboard as follows: 

Like this, you can prepare important metrics for all the key teams of a company – sales, marketing, finance, tech, customer support, ops, HR, etc.

Let’s take another example. 

MIS for the customer support team 

Imagine that you are doing this for the customer support team. What data would the CEO want?

• What is our average “first response time”?
• What is our end-to-end query resolution time?
• How long does it take
• How many tickets did we receive on an average in a day?
• How many tickets per agent could we handle in a day?   

Whatever gets measured gets managed – said Peter Drucker, the father of modern management.

However, someone has to keep tracking the measurement. This is very valuable work for any smart organisation.

It is valuable, but it does not require any great skill. Just data entry work to be done with diligence really.

Collect data.

Fill into a spreadsheet.

Done.

You keep doing this without errors. Now you are in charge of a MIS!

Way too easy to do this.

As you keep doing this, you will sometimes get a chance to do more advanced stuff. How?

5 most frequently made mistakes which can let a startup CEO down 

Here are the most important ones. 

#1 – Not identifying the right questions or the right data to measure. Even CEOs may struggle with it sometimes. 

If you can help a CEO identify the important metrics by asking more questions about their business and what they’d like to measure, they will really appreciate it. 

Some of this can be done by using AI as well!

Plus, as the company grows, the MIS will evolve all the time. 

#2 – Not understanding how the business works, so when something in the business changes, your MIS does not adapt, but captures inaccurate data

#3 – Making careless mistakes while updating data, and blaming it on ‘human error’. If you do this, you will get fired soon. 

#4 – Not communicating your unavailability, not being reliable or not sticking to deadlines 

#5 – Not learning how to use software like Mailchimp, Google Sheets/Microsoft Excel, Zoho, Hubspot, etc. and depending on someone else to ‘train’ or ‘inform you’. 

Many people worry that software is eliminating these jobs, but that is not true. 

Some part of the MIS information can be provided by software. For example, your customer service tool may provide some data about customer response times. 

What if you decided to provide support on Whatsapp groups as well, and you wanted to measure that? How will you do it? 

You will need to detect this first, and then implement additional tools (e.g. a new software + Whatsapp business account) to measure this, and then record this data. 

Maybe the CEO wants to understand how long it takes for a lead to buy a product after they sign up on your website. You may need to pull in and organise data from multiple softwares to understand that. 

A lot of manual human effort is needed to prepare it and compile the data prepared, and it needs to be accurate.

What if you had a week to learn how to create this and implement this in a virtual setting? 

Imagine that a CEO is looking for a startup generalist and you show him how you have made many MISes before, and how you are going to help him with his MIS. 

Will that get you hired? Will you get more pay? What do you think?

What if you could learn 30 more such important skills? How will it improve your marketability for a remote startup generalist  role?

Btw, AI is making these tasks much easier to perform than it was ever possible before.