Conduct an audit of the current report types, and eliminate the type of reports that are not crucial to departmental efficiency. Finally, create a filing system for every department head, whereby reports are immediately placed into important, less important, and non-prioritized categories, but even the non-prioritized file must be emptied by the end of the week, or some other pre-determined deadline. Some department heads had so many reports they did not act at all on the information, or they made incorrect decisions because of misuse of the information.

According to the information provided, many new department heads often made requests for additional reports according to their specifications, Because the systems department complied with all of these requests and reports were discontinued only on request by a department head (and then only if the request was not a standard report required by top management) few reports were ever discontinued. The system of approving requests for additional reports by department heads should be more stringent. More than one department head should have to sign on for a request for an additional report. Also, the request system for discontinuing reports should be more lenient -- so long as the persons putting forth the request feel the reports are no longer necessary, the reports should be discontinued. For all special reports, there could even be a stringent renewal process;...

Frequently, actions required by the nature of the report data were not taken until the department heads were reminded by others who needed the decisions. These department heads did not appear to have developed a priority system for acting on the information produced by the information processing subsystem.
There should be a prioritization system in general for the office, not simply for acting on report data. This ineffective managerial style suggests that a course in time management and prioritization would be helpful to managers, in addition to the actions taken specified above to fillet down the amount of reports the department heads receive.

4. Department heads often would develop the information they needed from alternative, independent sources, rather than use the reports generated by the information processing subsystem. This was often easier than trying to search among reports for the needed data.

Eliminating the volume of reports will automatically cut down on this behavior. Disseminating the reports in an online, searchable fashion would also make reports easier to search for information. If these controls fail to work, placing limits on the outside information that can be used might be necessary.