COSTS of obtaining:- GOOD QUALITY INFORMATION 1.Data Collection Costs 2.Data Entry Costs 3.Data Processing Costs

Data Collection Costs Data Collection can be Direct or Indirect 1. Cost of Staff to design and produce forms/questionnaires to collect data. 2. Cost of Staff to travel to interview / distribute forms/questionnaires. 3. Cost of Staff to collect and extract info from forms. 4. Cost of Staff to gather data from other systems – eg Internet /

Costs of Data Entry Human Resources – keying-in data, training costs, programmer costs etc Time Costs – keying in data, training, programming Hardware costs – buying in specialist hardware to cut time of data entry will reduce costs. Eg OCR, OMR, Speech Recognition etc.

Costs of processing and maintaining the data (1) Keeping data up-to-date Making backups Changing the program or database to do the relevant processing eg change the VatRate

Costs of processing and maintaining the data (2) Human Resources Staff needed to enter instructions for processing data – may need expert staff for some tasks.(Expensive!) Staff needed to analyse the information and produce more meaningful reports for managers

Costs of processing and maintaining the data (3) Financial costs Costs of transmitting data to other sites – expensive communication links (Secure) Cost of hardware and software for backups (May need to employ specialist staff) Printer consumables – toner, cartridges, paper etc

Costs of processing and maintaining the data (4) Time costs Processing and verifying (checking) large amounts of data is time-consuming. Reports need to be copied and distributed – again taking up valuable time. Backups take time. Large amounts of data may need many hours to backup. Printer consumables – toner, cartridges, paper etc