36 Information Systems for Business FOCUSING STORY Information is often biased-s

Question

36 Information Systems for Business FOCUSING STORY Information is often biased-sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentional point was driven home to me personally many years ago. I was reading an article in trade magazine that I read frequently. Generally, I found the magazine informative useful. This particular article was about an output device called a plotter. A plotter Blased Information in a Trusted Outlet and to produce large-format drawings, such as architectural and engineering plans.I quite knowledgeable about plotters, having sold and used them extensively. This particu lar article was about a special kind of plotter that used pencils rather than pens, inkjet,or laser technologies. To say the article was positive about pencil plotters would be a gross understatement. The author went on and on about how much better the pencil technology was than any of the others. This was puzzling to me, as I knew that other technologies had many advantages that were not mentioned in the article. For example, inkjet and laser-like plotters were much faster than pencil plotters. They were also more versatile with respect to the kinds of images they could produce. To be blunt, I questioned the sanity and knowledge of the author. After coming to the end of the article, I saw in print a short "about the author" note. The author was the national marketing manager for the only company that manufactured pencil plotters (at that time). The reason for the arti- glowing opinion of pencil plotters became quite clear. The author had a heavy bias for pencil plotters; the information in the article reflected this bias. I often wondered how many companies purchased pencil plotters because of that article; hopefully not many This story illustrates the importance of taking a critical view of information, espe cially when making important decisions. Being able to evaluate and understand informa- tion quality are important skills for business professionals. You will face many situations that will require you to gather information in order to make im these decisions based on biased or otherwise low-quality info consequences, such as spending thousands of dollars on information can l an inferior plotter portant decisions. Making ead to serious FOCUSING QUESTIONS 1. Give two examples of in stances where you encountered biased information. What made you think the information was biased? ences have been if you relied on the biased information? LEARNING ACTIVITY

Explanation / Answer

1. The first example is related to a movie I read very recently. The film critic gave the movie 4 stars out of 5 and this shows that the movie is excellent.read the article was written and it had only the positives and the critic praised the actors and the director like they are the next superstars. I believed it must be true because the director has delivered some excellent movies in the past. After two days I saw the live reaction the people leaving the film theatre after watching the movie and also read the other reviews. Some of them even gave 2 stars for the movie. This showed me that the information was biased.

The second example is related to a beauty product I found online and the product was from South Korea. The person writing about the product had only great things to say about the product and he assured excellent results. The price was also very reasonable and he told the company believes in customer satisfaction, the company will also refund the money if we do not like the product. Then I read the reviews of the product online to see that the company was fake and the product never worked for anyone. This information from an external website was both biased and misleading.

2. If I had relied on the biased information, I would have spent 15 dollars on a bad movie and wasted 3 hours of my time during a weekend. With the second example, I would have bought a fake product from a fake company for 65 dollars. The product could have caused some skin infection and I would have ended up seeing a dermatologist spending hundreds of dollars to get the treatment.

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