Global Journal of Management and Business Research, A: Administration and Management, Volume 23 Issue 1

the need to count on complete and exhaustive information tools. Every company increasingly perceives the need to be able to rely on elements and information that cover, in an integral manner, the cognitive needs that are indispensable for the decision-making process to be conducted rationally and in such a way as to ensure the maximisation of efficiency and effectiveness, both in terms of income and in financial terms. There is often dangerous practice of reducing the complexity of management analysis by eliminating, almost indiscriminately, values, data, quotients, aggregations, etc., to render the study itself essentially useless. The excessive simplification and the drastic reduction of the data to be analysed, carried out to "streamline" the information system, cause the implementation of a system that is not suitable for the decision-making process to improve and to be able to guarantee the maximisation of management efficiency and effectiveness. The need to avoid creating oversized structures and the consequent need to develop information systems suited to the specific size of the company should not lead to the belief that, especially in SMEs, due to their small size, companies can be "satisfied" with determining little data, simple in calculation and interpretation. The idea that medium-sized and small companies can nowadays afford to use crude, incomplete, imperfect and non-exhaustive management tools is not only wrong but particularly dangerous. Avoiding the creation of unnecessary over- structures does not mean, therefore, giving up having a complete and exhaustive management analysis system. The accuracy with which a system is implemented has a considerable impact on the rationality and correctness of the management's decision-making capacity, whether it operates in SMEs or in large companies. The selection, combined with the completeness of the data/indices/values to be used in the decision- making process, is the necessary but not sufficient condition for maximising the company's effectiveness and economic/financial efficiency. Management always wants to have a tool in which the starting point of the analysis is obvious. In a similarly intelligible manner, the individual steps necessary to follow are identified so that the information can improve the decision-making process. Understanding where to start, what to do in the process, and the endpoint of the information process is indispensable for the decision-maker to make full use of the data pool that the proposed system provides to the manager. In the following pages, we will deal with the three points mentioned above in a synthetic way to provide all readers with the interpretative key that allows implementation of an integrated information system created, taking into account the particular cognitive needs of SMEs and large companies. In highly synthetic terms, and valid only to make sense of the broad analysis that will develop in the following pages, these simple and, only apparently, can underline banal considerations: 1) If the management perceives a global economic/financial information need, it is necessary that the analysis foresees, as a first compulsory step, the in-depth, analytical and exhaustive study of the income and monetary/financial situation of the company at the moment in which one starts this business investigation. Pretending to implement control/analysis/research systems that relate to the future without understanding the company's strengths and weaknesses that can be identified when the examination begins is simply absurd and, what is more, dangerous. Fantastic because the thought of planning for the future without knowledge of the present appears, in all evidence, to be an unfeasible operation. Dangerous because attempting such an operation could lead to the unintentional creation of income and/or financial crashes that could potentially cause situations that are very difficult to recover from. Therefore, the starting point must necessarily be the development of a complete analysis of the company's income, financial and monetary situation, carried out on final data as close as possible to the moment in which management analysis and implementation of the integrated analysis system begins. 2) After having understood the initial company situation, it is necessary, first of all, to understand the "compulsory" nature of formalising a management control system. In general, one often hears it said that there is always some planning in the entrepreneur's mind even in the absence of a formal structured system. However, the complexity of today's economy also requires a formalisation of the objectives that the company wants to achieve. Therefore, in this programming phase, can generally identify two problems: The first "impasse" may be related to the tendency that every human being develops towards novelty. Introducing a control/programming/analysis system frequently comes up against the idea that "since it has gone well up to now, there is no reason to change...". The task of top management is certainly to make all employees understand that, at present, even in small and medium- sized enterprises, analysis, planning and in- depth analysis of the company's areas of strength and weakness are necessary but not sufficient condition for the company to continue to thrive. Necessary because, without it, The Implementation of an Integrated Information System in the Company: From Option to Obligation for Efficient and Effective Management 2 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Volume XXIII Issue I Version I Year 2023 ( ) A © 2023 Global Journals a)