Information management
Chapter 1: Information systems and the role of general and functional managers
IT has become a critical resource that draws significant investments. The success of every enterprise,
department, function and employee depends increasingly on IT. Software could become the key
driver of new value creation.
To manage information within the company, firms must adopt information systems and information
technology resources. Selecting, designing and managing these resources are now the shared
responsibility of all functional managers. They should work closely together (partnership) with
technology professionals to be able to carry out decisions. There are some important lessons for
managers:
- The general and functional managers should be able to make educated decisions about the
deployment of information systems in the organizations.
- The objective of IT deployment should be business driven. It should serve needs.
- The general and functional managers should be able to make these kinds of decisions, by
working closely with IT professionals.
- The end users should experience the new introduced hard/software programs first hand. This
because they have another role in the organization than the management does.
End-users are those individuals who have direct contact with software applications as they use them
to carry out specific tasks. Most general and functional managers (in modern organizations) are also
end-users.
The diverse training and lack of reciprocal understanding leads to great deal of communication
difficulties between professionals within firms. It is important to understand each other because
communication and a good relationship is critical to the firm’s success. The following people are
involved in overseeing the design, development, acquisition, implementation and maintenance of
the IS:
- CIO: CIOs are required to exhibit many of the skills of their executive counterparts while
maintaining priorities that are focused on keeping the lights on and IT operations running.
They need to be well versed in business while not losing sight of the delivery of information
services that enable the organization to operate effectively.
- Technical staff: includes the following roles
o Developer: develops the framework for the development of a system.
o Architect: builds high-quality, innovative, and performing software that complies
with coding standards, technical designs and the framework provided by the
architects (computer programmer).
o Administrator: day-to-day maintenance of a system or collection of systems.
- Analyst and managerial staff: includes the following roles
o Analyst: Analysis is the process of gaining a better understanding of the topic or
subject matter by gathering and examining information about it. In the IT function,
the two most prominent types of analysts are business and systems analysts.
o Project manager: Their responsibilities include delivering every project on time,
within budget and scope.
o Information systems manager: is in charge of a team within the IT function of an
organization.
,IT consulting is a huge industry. They assume roles like the ones described above. However, unlike
the in-house IT function, consultants move from client to client as they take on different projects.
Moreover, they expend substantial efforts in selling projects to potential clients.
Data science and Data Scientists: Future lies with super crunchers (both creative and quantitatively
oriented). They will be able to exploit the availability of data to their advantage and to the advantage
of their organizations by quickly and effortlessly testing their hunches and intuitions with data. Data
scientists have strong business acumen, coupled with the ability to communicate findings to both
business and IT leaders in a way that can influence how an organization approaches a business
challenge. The following roles are critical to the success of data science initiatives:
- Data Scientists: These individuals are in charge of analytics efforts and have an overview of
the end-to-end process.
- Data Engineers: These individuals can be invaluable in reducing the time needed to access
and prepare data for analysis.
- Business Experts: These general and functional managers have a deep understanding of the
business and functional domain of analysis.
- Source System Experts: These individuals have a deep understanding of the technology
underpinning the business domain of analysis. They understand what business processes
created the data and how the data are stored.
- Software Engineers: These individuals have traditional software engineering knowledge that
may be needed on special projects or when substantial custom coding is required to extract,
analyze, or visualize the data.
In addition, the team also needs strong project management and communication skills.
Understanding the drivers and trends that shape the evolution of IT is important to know as a general
manager because new technologies constantly enable new strategies, new initiatives, and the
effective management and use of greater amount of data and information. The responsibility for
taking advantage of the technical progress lies with the general and functional managers. All these
new trends require organization of strategies and investment. The amount of opportunities increase
everyday and it is the managers role to guide the firm through all the different options and paths of
implementation. Evidence for this growth is Moore’s law and its effects:
- Increasing number of transistors. More transistors equates to greater computational power
in any device that uses a microchip.
- The storage capacity also increased exponentially.
- The costs of computing power have declined through innovating designs and continuous
improvements
- Computers have become easier to use even though they became more powerful and
internally complex. They now can do more operations on behalf of the user. Also the
simplicity of user interfaces increased. They way they interact with humans has changed.
Some more IT trends:
- Declining storage costs
- Ubiquitous network access: dot-come era.
- Ubiquitous computing and digital data genesis: birth of the Internet of Things.
,Chapter 2: Information systems defined
There is a critical difference between information systems and information technology. Information
systems do exist for decades already (winery: inventory, track payments etc.). However information
technology is a component of a modern information system.
Information systems are formal, sociotechnical, organizational systems designed to collect, process,
store, and distribute information. The key aspect is sociotechnical. IS contains of four components:
- Information technology: Information
Technology (IT) is defined here as
hardware, software, and
telecommunication equipment. It is the
basis of any modern IS, enabling and
constraining action through rules of
operation that stem from its design.
! The software is often limited by the
developer who created it (choices).
- People: The people component refers
to those individuals or groups directly
involved in the information system.
- Processes: The process component of
an information system is defined here
as the series of steps necessary to complete a business activity. Business processes can
become very complex, spanning multiple individuals or organizational entities reason why
people make use of graphical aids.
An activity could be performed using a variety of different business processes who enact with
each other. The way it is enacted is often the root cause of IS failure (wrong way to handle)
- Structure: The organizational structure refers to the organizational design (hierarchy,
centralized); reporting and relationships within the information system. Structure can be
difficult to identify. Think of it as the explicit rules that govern relationships between the
people involved. Understanding the structure component is crucial because user resistance,
incentive systems, and relationships are often silent enemies of IS success that go
undetected before, and sometimes even after, IS failure becomes apparent.
Can be grouped into:
- Technical subsystem: Does not include human elements
- Social subsystem: People in relation to one another
All four components are crucial to ensure that the information system is successful and delivers the
functionality it was intended to provide. The system as a whole would stop working. This notion of
the interdependence of the components goes by the name systemic effects, indicating that changes
in one component affect all other components of the system and, if not properly managed, its
outputs. However, the more precise you can be a priori in estimating what the effects will be, the
better able your will be to proactively manage the changes. During system failure there are 4 visions
to look at for solving the problem.
IS Failure: Gaps can exist between the official business process and the information system. This
potential discrepancy between the business processes as designed by the organization and the
manner in which it is actually enacted is often the root cause of IS failure. When designing a new IS or
, when confronted with IS failure, it helps to think about what possible obstacles exist that may make
it difficult for employees to accurately follow the business process. The system fails whenever it is
abandoned or not used, so it does not yield any of the benefits.
Successful information systems: IS system should be built according to an explicit goal designed to
fulfill the specific information processing needs of the implementing organization.
Important information system have side effect next to efficiency and effectiveness. Examples are
deskilling, widening the scope of responsibilities and creation of a monotonous working
environment. Another important outcome is the effect on future opportunities available to the firm.
Language/Action Perspective (LAP): This focuses on what people do when communicating. It does
not start with technology, but with people communicating. Communication is not seen as only the
primarily transfer of data but also the development of relationships.
Every organization is unique. At the highest level of abstraction, a firm is characterized by its strategy,
its culture, and its current infrastructure, stemming from the organization’s history, size, product line,
location, values, and so on. The information system does not exist in a vacuum but are embedded in
a specific organizational context, defined by the firm’s strategy, culture, and IT infrastructure.
Moreover, the organization itself does not exist in isolation but is embedded in the external
environment, including social and competitive forces.
- Firm strategy: A firm’s strategy
represents the manner in which
the organization intends to
achieve its objectives. In other
words, understanding a firm’s
strategy tells us what the firm is
trying to do and what course of
action it has charted to get there.
- Firm culture: The collection of
beliefs, expectations, and values
shared by the organization’s
members. The firm’s culture, a
broad representation of how the firm does business, is an important characteristic of the
organization because it captures the often unspoken and informal way in which the
organization operates.
- Infrastructure: . The existing IT infrastructure, defined as the set of shared IT resources and
services of the firm, constrains and enables opportunities for future information systems
implementations.
- External environment: Organizations themselves don’t exist in a vacuum but instead are
embedded in the external environment that encompasses regulation, the competitive
landscape, and general business and social trends
Information systems and organizational change: three levels of change brought by new IT.
1. First-Order Change = automate: This level of change involves technology and processes but
does not affect the sphere of the social subsystem. First-order change occurs when an IT
innovation is introduced that modifies how an existing process is performed.
Requires little executive sponsorship and involvement for management.
Between technological aspect and the process.
