QUESTION 1(A)

Mission
 To widen access to quality education and provide lifelong learning opportunities
by leveraging on technology, adopting flexible mode of learning, and providing a
conducive and engaging learning environment at competitive and affordable cost.

Purpose
 Provide the fist class lifelong learning services for all Malaysian who wiling to
improve themselves in academic.

Vision
 To be the Leading Provider of Flexible Learning

Knowledge Management System (KM System) refers to a system for managing

knowledge in organizations for supporting creation, capture, storage and dissemination
of information. It can comprise a part of a Knowledge Management initiative.

Among the important business or processes that contribute to the developing of

knowledge management system in this organization is the student registration process
whereby the respective process is important to store and manage the student data for
the whole University. At the mean time, the respective student registration process also
critical to register the students taken program as well as the courses which been taken
for each of the semester. The respective data is important and critical to ensure that the
knowledge management system in Open University Malaysia (OUM) is success in the
future.

The other important data in knowledge management system of Open University

Malaysia (OUM) is graduates student data. The graduates students data is been well
managed under the alumni system of the Open University Malaysia (OUM). The
graduates from Open University Malaysia Sarawak need to fill in the available form for
Alumni so that the University can track and follow up their status in the future.
Apart of above data, the staffs data also become one of the most important and critical
data to be managed in the Knowledge Management System. The staffs’ data is under
the human resource data management process. Under the respective business process,
the data of the staffs is kept in the human resource department under human resource
management process. The respective business process is important to ensure that
human resource data is well managed.

Besides that, the marketing process which been done for Open University Malaysia also
one of the important business process to determine the success of the Knowledge
Management System for the Open University Malaysia in the future. The data which
been used and produced in the marketing process such as the targeted customer and
marketing method is all critical and important to determine the success on the
Knowledge Management System of the University respectively.

Lastly, the confidential data of the University such as staff salary, policy and procedure
also is a part o data in the knowledge management system. As for the respective data,
the business process which been involved is the director and department person in
charge meeting. It is because the procedure and other management related policy only
can be fixed and creates during the director or board meeting.

As a conclusion, the respective data must be well managed under the named business
processes so that it will be easier for the University to manage the knowledge
management in the future.
QUESTION 1(B)

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is a global management consulting firm, founded
by Bruce Henderson in 1963. It has 66 offices in 38 countries, and its current CEO is
Hans-Paul Bürkner. BCG is generally ranked as one of the two most "prestigious"
management consulting firms in the world.

Obviously, the BCG Matrix method can help Open University Malaysia (OUM)
management to understand a frequently made strategy mistake: having a one size fits all
strategy approach, such as a generic growth target (9 percent per year) or a generic
return on capital of say 9.5% for an entire corporation.
At the mean time, Cash Cows Business Units will help the Open University to identity
their fastest way to reach their profit target easily. Therefore, it will make the Open
University Malaysia (OUM) to make them have an easy job. The executives are often
praised anyhow. Even worse, they are often allowed to reinvest substantial cash
amounts in their mature businesses.

Meanwhile, the Dogs Business Units are help the Open University Malaysia (OUM) to do
the fighting an impossible battle and, even worse, now and then investments are made.
These are hopeless attempts to "turn the business around".

As a result all Question Marks and Stars receive only mediocre investment funds. In this
way they can never become Cash Cows. These inadequate invested sums of money are
a waste of money. Either these SBUs should receive enough investment funds to enable
them to achieve a real market dominance and become Cash Cows (or Stars), or
otherwise companies are advised to disinvest. Open University Malaysia (OUM) can
then try to get any possible cash from the Question Marks that were not selected.

Porter's five forces analysis is a framework for the industry analysis and business
strategy development developed by Michael E. Porter of Harvard Business School in
1979. It uses concepts developed in Industrial Organization (IO) economics to derive five
forces which determine the competitive intensity and therefore attractiveness of a
market. Attractiveness in this context refers to the overall industry profitability. An
"unattractive" industry is one where the combination of forces acts to drive down overall
profitability. A very unattractive industry would be one approaching "pure competition.

The respective Porter Five forces will be an important business analysis tool whereby it
will help the Open University Malaysia (OUM) to analysis the industry competitors,
pressures from the substitute products, bargaining power of suppliers, as well as buyers
and potential entrants of the business.

Therefore, the business organization like Open University Malaysia can plan better
marketing strategy to market their business products in the future as well as to block
other new entrants from going to the market and compete with them. It will make their
business become more and more better in the future and solely win over the competitor
advantages.
QUESTION 1(C)

Using SWOT Analysis as a tool to formulate Strategy is one of the most effective tool in
Strategic Planning. It is a factual analysis due to its extensive data collection and
analysis of the data collected. It is effective because the analysis covers a wide
spectrum of business environment during data collection. Its takes into consideration
external business environment as well as internal capabilities.

Among the advantages of using the SWOT analysis is it is simple and easy to use
compare to other business analysis tools. It just a four boxes which explain the
strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the business in the easiest way.
Therefore, the management can identify the respective fours elements in their business.

At the mean time, this is the most easily most for the management to facilitate an
understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. Then, they can
work out some useful and systematic strategy to push the business to the highest level
in the future. The uses of SWOT analysis also will encourage the management to have
more efforts in development of strategic thinking. It is because the management team
can focus on the strengths as well as build up the opportunities of the organization.

As we know, the SWOT always gives the management clear pictures regarding the
threats of the organizations. Therefore, SWOT will enable an organization to anticipate
future business threats and take action to avoid or minimize their impact. Besides that,
the organization management also can spot on business opportunities and exploit them
fully and maximize the profit in the organization.

Lastly, the respective SWOT is a flexible business tool to be use to analysis the
business. It can be customized according to the needs of the business from time to time.
Therefore, it can be used widely and comfortable by the management respectively,

There are still cons or disadvantages of using the SWOT. First at all, there are some
users over simplify the amount of data which been used for the decisions. Therefore, it is
easy to use the scant data.
In order to ensure the respective SWOT is an effective tool for the business
organization, the process need to be undertaken on a regular basis. Therefore, it will
waste lots of time to do and repeat the same process.

The best reviews of the effectiveness of the business require different people being
involved whereby each having a different perspective. The gathers of different
perspective is important so that the best options and strategies can be used for the
company in the future.

The used of the SWOT requires accessing to quality internal data sources and it will be
a time consuming as well as political difficult. As for most of the company, their internal
data is confidential and they are not allowing too many people to access the respective
sources of data. Therefore, it will always take times for the analysis to get the data from
the company in order to analysis the business using the SWOT.

At the mean time, the pace of change makes it increasingly difficult to anticipate
developments that may affect an organization in the future. It is because the little
changes here and there will cause the big changes of the whole organization in senses
of their planning.

Lastly, the risk of capturing too much data is that it may make it difficult to see the wood
for the trees and lead to ‘paralysis by analyses’ in the process of analysis the business.
QUESTION 1(D)

Organizations typically develop rolling business plans, they are constructed by taking
into account the current business, the external influences on the business (e.g. the
economy, government policy and technological advances), and the aims and objectives
of the most senior levels of management. The strategic business plan describes how the
organization will strive to move from the current business to the target business.

Information Systems support is necessary to achieve the strategic business plan, so the
business plan feeds into a Strategic Information Systems Plan (SISP), which describes
how the current IT systems are intended to evolve into the target IT systems. A 'big
bang' approach is infeasible; therefore a project based approach is used. The output of
the SISP is a series of development projects which will either involve modifying existing
systems or developing new systems (which are likely to have to interface or integrate
with existing systems).

In the past information systems were developed simply to improve the efficiency of
specific business functions. More recently information systems have been viewed as tools
for obtaining competitive advantage. Avison and Fitzgerald (1995) have discussed the
following ways in which information systems can help to achieve competitive
advantage:-

"Redefine the boundaries of particular industries,

Develop new products or services,

Change the relationships between suppliers and customers,

Establish barriers to deter new entrants to marketplaces."

Porter (1980) identifies five competitive forces that any organisation needs to consider :-
1. Threat of new entrants.
2. Bargaining power of customers.
3. Threat of substitute products or services.
4. Bargaining power of suppliers.
5. Rivalry among existing firms.
Earl (1989) extends Porter’s work by illustrating the strategic role that Information
Technology (IT) can play in addressing these forces. The result of Earl’s work is a
‘multiple’ methodology. The methodology adopts a three pronged approach to strategic
information systems development. The first prong involves the top-down analysis of
business objectives using Critical Success Factors (CSF), SWOT (Strengths,
Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis and Porter’s five forces. The second
prong involves bottom-up analysis of existing systems and the third prong emphasises
the creative use of IT.

Bullen and Rockart (1984) have produced a strategic information systems methodology
based on CSF analysis. The methodology involves the analysis of business goals and
objectives and the factors critical to achieving those objectives. The next stage is the
identification of the information systems required to support these CSFs.

The idea of process innovation (Davenport and Short, 1990, Davenport, 1993) is closely
linked with the techniques of Business Process Re-engineering. The argument is that
computerising existing systems is only likely to yield marginal gains. In many cases the
only means of achieving radical improvements is to radically re-engineer the business
process itself and use IT to enable to re-engineered process. Process Innovation
illustrates the main argument of the paper, i.e. that an effective methodology for ISE
should adopt a rigorous, structured approach to data design and a dynamic approach to
process design.

At the mean time, the IT or IS can help the business to be expanded widely in the future
by help the business organization to analysis all kinds of threats and opportunities which
been occurred in the business so that the respective management can overcome it as
well soon as possible. This will result the management can work more effectively than
before.

As a conclusion, the IT/IS did help the business organization to achieve a better
business in the future.
QUESTION 2 (A)

The information systems plan project determines the sequence for implementing specific
information systems. The goal of the strategy is to deliver the most valuable business
information at the earliest time possible in the most cost-effective manner. The end
product of the information systems project is an information systems plan (ISP). Once
deployed, the information systems department can implement the plan with confidence
that they are doing the correct information systems project at the right time and in the
right sequence. The focus of the ISP is not one information system but the entire suite of
information systems for the enterprise. Once developed, each identified information
system is seen in context with all other information systems within the enterprise.
The following steps are involved in the development of the Open University Malaysia
ISP:
1. Create the mission model
2. Develop a high-level data model
3. Create the resource life cycles (RLC) and their nodes
4. Allocate precedence vectors among RLC nodes
5. Allocate existing information systems and databases to the RLC nodes
6. Allocate standard work break down structures (WBS) to each RLC node
7. Load resources into each WBS node
8. Schedule the RLC nodes through a project management package.
9. Produce and review of the ISP
10. Execute and adjust the ISP through time.

Collectively, the first nine steps take about 2500 staff hours, or about RM250, 000.
Compared to the IS budget RM15-35 million, that's only about 1.5% to 0.75%. If the
pundits are to be believed, that is, that the right information at the right time is the
competitive edge, then paying for an information systems plan that is accurate,
repeatable, and reliable is a small price indeed! The price however, for traditionally
accomplished ISPs is not small. A fair sized IBM’s Business Systems Plan (BSP), or a
James Martin’s System’s Data Planning (SDP), or Finkelstein’s Strategic Management
Planning (SMP) can take up to 40,000 staff hours (RM$4,000,000). Traditional ISPs are
also inaccurate, can't afford to be repeated, and are out of date well before they are
completed. Most ISPs, done the expensive and traditional way are never completed!
ISPs were "all the rage" five to ten years ago. Many died on the vine because the time
to” grow" an ISP exceeded the "growing season" many times over! ISPs thus fell "out of
favor," not because the need was invalid but because the approach/method for
developing it was grossly unacceptable. The need for ISPs has not diminished. It has in
fact increased due to the decentralization and distribution of planning and control for
data and processing. No longer are one or a few persons in control. Rather, many
hundreds of groups have access to data and the means to create sophisticated
information systems in cost effective manners. The result regrettably is that the
cumulative cost of thousands of small systems with discordant semantics far exceeds
the cost of their former centralized ones.

The avalanche of PCs and client/servers computing environments cannot be turned

back to an environment of a few well placed and centralized mainframes. Nonetheless, it
is imperative that there be centralized planning and control over the accomplishment of
all these information systems so that resources can be conserved, and data and process
semantics standardized. Once managed and optimized, the decentralization and
individual empowerment efforts can have their benefits accumulate beneficially rather
than be a source of endless conflicts and semantic clashes. The products that are
essential to the final ISP are, individually, very important. Because the ISP intermediate
products have real value, the ISP project receives positive recognition along the way.
Such recognitions almost always translate to continued management support and
continued funding. An ISP project of this type, that is, one that is open, empowering, and
providing immediate use benefits, can only be derailed by those who want to keep power
and total control "close to the vest." While such power trips are gratifying to "master-
slave" corporate cultures, these power trips are--in the long run--fatal to enterprises
trying to succeed in today's highly competitive environments.
QUESTION 2(B)
Critical success factors analysis can be considered to be both an impact as well as an
alignment methodology. Critical Success Factors (CSF) in the context of SISP are used
for interpreting more clearly the objectives, tactics, and operational activities in terms of
key information needs of an organization and its managers and strengths and weaknesses
of the organization’s existing systems. Rockart (1979) defines critical success factors as
being ‘for any business the limited number of areas in which results, if they are
satisfactory, will ensure successful competitive performance for the organization.’ As
shown in figure 3, CSFs can exist at a number of levels. They represent the few key areas
where things must go right for the business to flourish. Consequently, critical success
factors are areas of activity that should receive constant and careful attention from
management.

Rockart originally developed the CSF approach as a means to understanding the

informationneeds of CEOs. The approach has subsequently been applied to the enterprise
as a whole and has been extended into a broader planning methodology. It has been made
the basis of many consulting practices and has achieved major results where it has been
used well.

CSFs can exist at a number of levels, i.e., industry, organizational, business unit, or
manager’s. CSFs at a lower level are derived from those at the preceding higher level.
The CSF approach introduces information technology into the initial stages of the
planning process and helps provide a realistic assessment of the IT’s contribution to the
organization.
 Figure 1.0: The Hierarchy of CSFs

CSF analysis provides a very powerful method for concentrating on key information
requirements of an organization, a business unit, or of a manager. This allows the
management to concentrate resources on developing information systems around these
requirements. Also, CSF analysis is easy to perform and can be carried out with few
resources.
To be of value, the CSF analysis should be easily and directly related back to the
objectives of the business unit under review. It has been the experience of the people
using this technique that generally it loses its value when used below the third level in an
organizational hierarchy (Ward, 1990, p.164).

CSFs focus primarily on management control and thus tend to be internally focused and
analytical rather than creative (Ibid.). CSFs partly reflect a particular executive’s
management style. Use of CSFs as an aid in identifying systems, with the associated
long lead-times for developing these systems, may lead to giving an executive
information that s/he does not regard as important (Ibid.). (e) CSFs do not draw attention
to the value-added aspect of information systems. While CSF analysis facilitates
identification of information systems which meet the key information needs of an
organization/business unit, the value derived from these systems is not assessed.

Earl’s Multiple Methodology, developed by IBM, combines top down planning with bottom
up implementation. The methodology focuses on business processes which in turn are
derived from an organization’s business mission, objectives and goals. Business
processes are analyzed to determine data needs and, then, data classes. Similar data
classes are combined to develop databases. The final Earl’s Multiple Methodology plan
describes an overall information systems architecture as well as installation schedule of
individual systems.

Because the respective methodology combines a top down business analysis approach
with a bottom up implementation strategy, it represents an integrated methodology. In its
top down strategy, Earl’s Multiple Methodology is similar to CSF method in that it
develops an overall understanding of business plans and supporting IS needs through
joint discussions. IBM being the vendor of this methodology, it has the advantage of
being better known to the top management than other methodologies.
References

Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. New York: Free
Press, 1998.

Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. New York:
Free Press, 1998.

Mahon, J. F., and R.A. McGowan. "Modeling Industry Political Dynamics." Business
and Society 37, no. 4 (1998, December): 390–413.

Porter, M.E. Michael Porter on Competition. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School
Press, 1998.

"Professor Porter Ph.D.: Management Theorists." Economist, 333 (1994, October): 75.

Siaw, I. and A. Yu. "An Analysis of the Impact of the Internet on Competition in the
Banking Industry, Using Porter's Five Forces Model". International Journal of
Management 21, no. 4 (2004, December): 514–524.

Slater, S. F. and E.M.A. Olson. "Fresh Look at Industry and Market Analysis." Business
Horizons 45. no. 1, (2002, January/February): 15–23.

Surowiecki, J. "The Return of Michael Porter." Fortune 139, no. 2 (1999, February):
135–138.