Week 2 Information Systems Chapter

Intended, Emergent and Realized Strategies

Business Strategic Planning

An organizational strategy is a planned approach the organization takes to achieve its goals and its mission statement
 Long term plan
 Begins with an organization’s mission and objectives
 Designed with entire organization in mind

Tactical
Short term and abstract actions that can be applied in any of a large class of situations that conform to set criteria
Focuses on higher level tasks, concrete smaller steps, best practices, specific procedures and resources

Operational
Very detailed steps, down to listing of resources, timelines etc. to deploy the tactics

Difference between Tactical & Operational Planning

Example: marketing strategy to improve yourself influence and performance in social media
Your tactics might be to determine the best channels for your business and the most effective messages for your
audiences

Competitive Advantage and Strategic IS

Competitive advantage is an advantage over competitions in some measure such as cost, quality, or speed; leads to
control of a market and to larger-than-average profits

Technology is no longer an afterthought in business strategy, but the cause and driver.
IT can change the way the business competes
A strategic information system is any IS that uses IT to help the organization; gain a competitive advantage; reduce a
competitive disadvantage; meet other strategic enterprise objectives

Business – Information Technology Alignment

The tight integration of the IT function with the organization’s strategy, mission, and goals of the organization.
• That is, the IT function directly supports the business objectives of the organization.

Organizations with excellent business-IT alignment

• provide overarching goals that are completely clear to each IT and business employee.
• view IT as an engine of innovation that continually transforms the business, often creating new revenue streams.
Week 2 Information Systems Chapter
Competitive Advantage: Outperform one’s competitors in a critical measure
Measures of Excellence
• Customer satisfaction
• Cost reduction
• Cycle and fulfillment time reduction
• Quality
• Differentiation
• Productivity

Business Pressures
Week 2 Information Systems Chapter
Business Processes
A collection of related activities (inputs, resources, and outputs) that produce a product
or service of value to the organization, its business partners and/or its customers.
• Customers may be external (buying product/service) or internal (a department in the same organization)

Measures
• efficiency –doing things with minimal (waste of) resources
• effectiveness - doing the things that matter; degree to which something is successful in producing a desired result

Cross-Functional Business Processes

Multiple functional areas collaborate to perform the process.

Most processes are cross-functional in nature

Example: the materials procurement process comprises of 5 steps that are completed in 3 different functional areas of
the firm: warehouse, purchasing, and accounting

Example: order fulfillment process involves (3)

• Sales department - receives a purchase order; creates a sales order
• Shipping department - prepares and ships the order
• Accounting department - creates an invoice; bills the customer; records a payment

Information Systems: Enablers of Organization’s Business Processes

Execution of a process
• calculations, comparisons or creation of data, documents or other output

Capturing and storing process data

• format the data, store it in the correct data file on a physical storage device such as a hard drive

Monitoring process performance

• examine, analyze and assess the business process to ensure compliance and to evaluate the process
• Lookup: Process Mining

Means To Ensure Business Process Excellence

Business Process Reengineering (BPR)
• the “clean slate” approach (scrap everything and figure out what to do)
• costly and disruptive
• Assume: don’t have a process in place; then ask: What’s the best way to complete a task?

Business Process Improvement (BPI)

• a more incremental approach; one small change at a time
• Focuses on reducing variation in process outputs by identifying the underlying cause of the variation
• start with: analyzing existing processes then: assess room for improvement
• lower risk and cost than BPR
Week 2 Information Systems Chapter
Means To Ensure Business Process Excellence
Business Process Management (BPM): methods and tools to support the design (support BPR/ BPI), analysis,
implementation, management, and continuous optimization of business processes

Components:
• Process modelling –graphical model; helps employees understand
• Business Activity Monitoring –a real-time approach to measure and manage (identify failures or/and
exceptions) business processes; creates valuable records that organizations can mine