Degeneracy of MIS under the Conditions of Instability: A Mathematical Formulation

has been always observed that the effectiveness of MIS as a support tool for management decisions degenerate after time of implementation, despite the substantial investments being made. This is true for organizations at the initial stages of MIS implementations, manual or computerized. A survey of a sample of middle to top managers in business and government institutions was made. A large ratio indicates that the MIS has lost its impact on the day-today operations, and even the response lag time expands sometimes indefinitely. The data indicates an infant mortality phenomenon of the bathtub model. Reasons may be monotonous nature of MIS delivery, irrelevance, irreverence, timeliness, and lack of adequate detail. All those reasons collaborate to create a degree of degeneracy. We investigate and model as a bathtub model the phenomenon of MIS degeneracy that inflicts the MIS systems and renders it ineffective. A degeneracy index is developed to identify the status of the MIS system and possible remedies to prevent the onset of total collapse of the system to the point of being useless. I. INTRODUCTION HE normal life period of any system is characterized by a low, relatively constant failure rate. In case of products the failure rate is usually random when the exerted pressure exceeds what the system of components can withstand. However, in the case of information systems that are engineered and driven by software engines, the failure takes a number of different forms. The Soft Error Rate (SER) [1] is a close depiction of the type of failure that may inflict the functionality of any information system software. The reasons for such failure could be so convoluted that may be as obvious as a bug in the software code or as mystical as cosmic rays, that would inflict the memory chip at that moment. In addition, other factors would involve the complex interrelationships between the software, the hardware, and the users. In this paper we expand the environment of such failure to include aspect of human behavior in accepting or rejecting