Planning for the future.

For the future, most businesses want to keep costs down and expand their business. They also need to consider new areas of business and new ways of doing business.

An Operational Task is a process that is done every day to keep things running. For example; a receptionist at the dentists needs to book appointments, ensure they don't over run or are booked at the same time as someone else. If the receptionist didn't do this, the dentists couldn't run properly. However, things cannot continue the same way forever - organisations need to expand and improve.

The people who plan for the future are called directors, who are helped by senior managers. Planning is important, and if they get it wrong, the company can suffer - it could go bankrupt or people could lose their jobs. The planning is called strategic activity.

Management need a lower level of data than the middle managers, who will often summarise the data for the management. The management do not need to know everything that is going on, just the 'bigger picture'. They need processed data which shows trends. The origins of the data that the management recieve would be at lower levels, who have processed and summarised it for the management.