Research Process In Business Decision Making

INTRODUCTION

A research can be defined as a systematic way of gathering data, recording it and analyzing it further to guide business decision making. A research is mainly done to handle uncertain decisions and uncontrollable situations. A research always helps the managers in providing useful and timely information. The main purpose of any research is to provide accurate, timely, appropriate and relevant information to the top management for further decision making. A research is mainly done to discover new knowledge or interpretation and establish facts in a particular field.

The research process involves various steps that helps the organization to investigate a problem or look for an opportunity facing the organization. The steps

Identifying and Defining Problem - The first step of any research process is to identify and define the problem faced by the organization. Business have to identify various problem areas and opportunities they have to work in to sustain themselves in the global market. The problem should be well defined. This well defined problem will give a proper direction to do investigation to the researcher. Once, the research problem is clearly identified, further exploration is done through exploratory research. Through this one can get an idea of what are the questions to be answered in order to solve the problem. This process takes evaluation of current studies, previous studies by experts and analyzing the situation. After this process, the objectives of research are determined. These act as a guideline for various research process and should be very precise. After this process, hypothesis is also developed.

2. Planning the Research Design - Once the base work process is done, a research design is planned. It is a actual framework of research that provides specific details regarding the process to be followed in conducting the research. This design includes where the information will be researched from, in what time limit, sampling process and appropriate measurement

Data Collection - The researcher collects data from the units in the selected sample. There are number of data collection methods. Either responses can be taken with the help of questionnaire, or by observation method by observing the respondents. Data should be collected without any errors.

6. Evaluating the Data - This is an important step to evaluate the collected data which will help in decision making process. Several research and mathematics tools are used to evaluate the data. It starts with editing and coding the data. The interpretation of the data that has been collected is used by different analytical techniques according to the requirement of the management is called analysis. This may range from simple frequency tables to complex multivariate analysis.

7. Preparing and Presenting the Research Report - The research report is then presented in oral or written form . The amount of information provided should be based on the requirement of the manager. This report is then used by the company to make their final decisions.

Some important characteristics of a Good research are maintaining high ethical standards, defining a proper problem, accurate, bias free, no errors