Indian Institute of Management Nagpur

Executive MBA - Pune

Information Systems

Project Brief

Q.1 Consider your own industry and organization (or an industry and organisation of your choice).
Identify its Critical Success Factors. Classify the CSFs according to whether they are industry-
related, specific to your organisation or related to the external environment.

In this exercise you may first identify the generic competitive strategy or the desirable strategy
of your organisation and the industry structure, based on which identification of the CSFs
could be done.

For those of you working in the non-competitive sectors, Porter's framework may be at best
applicable only indirectly and at worst largely irrelevant. In such cases, you could base your
identification of CSFs on an analysis of the strategic objectives and mission of your
organisation or a definition of `success' for your organisation.

Q.2 Briefly discuss the various information systems needed to support the CSFs of your
organisation. To the extent possible, discuss how these information systems have been actually
implemented in your organisation.

You may find that some of the required IS are practically nonexistent, some have not been
formalised, some have been formalised but are inefficient and/or ineffective while some have
been implemented quite satisfactorily. Relevant observations from you on the different IS will
be highly appreciated.

You could also present your viewpoint regarding the reasons behind the particular state of the
IS support to the CSFs in your organisation.

Q.3 Suggest different ways of improving the IS support to the CSFs in your organisation through a
judicious application of different information technologies. Also discuss the possible pitfalls in
the application of the technologies.