CH 3: INFORMATION SYSTEMS FOR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Q1: HOW DOES ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY DETERMINE INFORMATION SYSTEMS STRUCTURE?

       Information systems exist to aid organizations in accomplishing their goals and objectives. The goals and objectives are identified by its competitive strategy. Organizations first observe their industry structure then  establish a competitive strategy, which determines the value chains followed by the business processes. The structure of business processes finally concludes with the design of the information systems.

Q2: WHAT FIVE FORCES DETERMINE INDUSTRY STRUCTURE??

      Porter's Five Forces Model illustrates five competitive forces in the environment which is bargaining power of customers, threat of substitutions, bargaining power of suppliers, threat of new entrants and rivalry.

      Bargaining Power of Customers: Wanting to pay less for a gym membership

      Threat of Substitutions: Thinking of joining a sporting league to have a healthy lifestyle

      Bargaining Power of Suppliers: A landowner raising the rent

      Threat of New Entrants: A new gym opens up across the street from the other

      Rivalry: Going to the newly open gym

Q3: HOW DOES ANALYSIS OF INDUSTRY STRUCTURE DETERMINE COMPETITIVE STRATEGY??

      It is very essential for an organization to determine what their competitive strategy is going to be which is going to establish what direction the company is going to take and can be decided upon by using Porter's 4 Competitive strategies which is shown below.

 Q4: HOW DOES COMPETITIVE STRATEGY DETERMINE VALUE CHAIN STRUCTURE??

       There are different ways of choosing a competitive strategy, if a company chooses a differentiation strategy, they are choosing to develop more costly systems only if the benefits overshadow the risks.

A value chain is a network of value-creating activities which consists of 5 primary activities and 4 supporting activities. An example would be a bicycle maker. His primary activities are acquiring the bicycle parts to producing the bicycle and shipping to market and selling the bicycles and providing service to customers.

His supporting activities are managing supplier relationships, investigating new designs, hire and support employees, and managing company resources. All the stages the bicycle maker takes in his primary and supporting activities accrues costs and adds value to his/her products.Porter's model also include linkages which can be very beneficial to a company because they can reduce industry costs.

Q5: HOW DO BUSINESS PROCESSES GENERATE VALUE??

     A business process is a network of activities that produce value by converting inputs into outputs. The costs are the inputs plus the cost of the activities, the margin is the value of the outputs minus the cost. Business processes can have varied costs and effectiveness and the key to their competitive advantage is adding value while reducing costs.

Q6 & Q7:

    Organizations need to examine and evaluate their industry and decide upon a competitive strategy where they can then design business processes that span value-generating activities. By doing this, all the processes can establish the requirements of each organization's information system. There are 2 competitive techniques that can be used for a competitive strategy which are via products and services or via the development of business processes. In via products, organizations can create their existing products and making them better and having their products different from the rest of the competition. In via business processes, organizations can lock in customers by it making it to expensive for customers to leave or switch to another product. An example would be a gym where they can have high cancellation fees for members and make it an extremely difficult process to cancel their membership.

Ch.2 Collaboration Information Systems

Q1: WHAT IS COLLABORATION??

Collaboration is the "combined" efforts of two or more people that come to a common understanding. Collaboration is successful when performed correctly and more efficient than having individuals working alone. Ex:Some groups believe that by dividing up the work and coming together is useful; however, yes it might save time and the hassle of figuring out eachothers schedules, but you don't get a collaborative effort of ideas and meaningful feedback from the group. A collaborative effort involves communication, content management and workflow control. It is very important for a group to communicate and critique eachothers work in order to improve not only as individuals, but also for the group.Content management is key in making sure no information is duplicated from another team member and also to illustrate what changes have been made. Workflow control allows members to deal with specific tasks which helps run things more smoothly.

Q2: WHAT ARE THE COMPONENTS OF A COLLABORATION INFORMATION SYSTEM?

There are two kinds of hardware; client hardware is the means you have to communication, primarily phones. Server hardware is your computer and what is installed in it like google docs and spreadsheets. The software is google docs and spreadsheets that only require internet explorer or firefox. Data is what you store from documents, to team data, etc. in word, excel, powerpoint, etc.

PROCEDURES: Starting Phase--Setting the ground rules for a team. Who will be the leader, what roles each member has, and what goals will be for the team

Planning Phase--Designating who will do what and when should it be done by. Having alternatives as well.

Doing--This is when tasks are being completed. Review what has been done and provide changes now if necessary.

Wrapping up--Being able to determine if you are done or not and if so, then document your results for future reference.

Iteration and Feedback--Providing revised answers, answering questions

People is the most important aspect of a collaborative effort. It is what attitude, qualities and skills of different team members that can make or break a group.

Q3: HOW CAN YOU USE COLLABORATION SYSTEMS TO IMPROVE TEAM COMMUNICATION??

Encouraging others to criticize your work and vice versa, if you review someone else's work, provide them with quality criticism and helping them improve.

Synchronous Communication may be hard to do because all team members need to meet at the same time with either face to face communication or through conference calls.

Asynchronous communication is when team members meet at different times due to work conflicts or different time zones. Virtual meetings can be used if your team members can not meet up so webchat will be good as well as conference calls.

Q4: HOW CAN YOU USE COLLABORATION SYSTEMS TO MANAGE CONTENT?

Sharing content with your group such as documents, illustrations, spreadsheets and other data. There are two different controls of sharing content which are:

SHARED CONTENT WITH NO CONTROL. The way most groups share information is via email attachments but can be risky if not everyone receives it or notices the attachment. The best way is to have a group shared file server which is like a disk in a local computer. It is best because, everyone in the group can go to that shared folder to look for the work.

SHARED CONTENT WITH VERSION MANAGEMENT. This is the best way for groups to share eachothers work because it is in one folder and with a version management, it can track changes made. An example would be wiki where users provide their input and make changes as well.

SHARED CONTENT WITH VERSION CONTROL. This limits actions that is taken by a particular user and do not give control over the changes to documents to particular users. Each member is given an account with certain permissions, shared documents are put into shared directories or libraries.

Q5: HOW CAN YOU USE COLLABORATION SYSTEMS TO CONTROL WORKFLOW?

Sequential Workflow occurs in a sequence

Parallel Workflow is where reviews occur concurrently

Q6: HOW DO BUSINESSES USE COLLABORATION SYSTEMS??

Problem Solving, there are different views, everyone needs to agree on a common definition or answer.

Project Management is similar to ordinary team projects because they have a starting, planning, doing, and wrapping-up phase.

Decision Making. Operational Decisions deal with day to day activities. i.e: How much produce to order from a vendor, approving a loan, what payments to pay off.

Managerial Decisions deal with how much a budget should be, how many employees needed for hire, feedback and iteration can be taken into account.

Strategic Decisions involve considering a new product, opening up another branch or buying another company. Almost always collaborative.

Structured decisions are recognized and accepted

Unstructured decisions are not agreed upon. Predictions on the stock market is a good example.

Q7: 2020

This is stating that face to face meetings will not be so common due to the growing technological advancements. Most conversations are said to be asynchronous and even corporate training! Conventions will be virtual and it seems as if people will need to learn many online skills in order to keep up with the corporate business world.

MIS: CHAPTER 1

Management Information systems (MIS) is deemed to be the most important business class in this current time period. The growing technological advancements over the years are made plausible through Moore’s Law which implies that “the cost of data communications and data storage is essentially zero.” One of the major skills emphasized in Ch.1 that is a necessary and beneficial skill to attain for job security is “a marketable skill.” The components involved in this marketable skill are: abstract reasoning, systems thinking, collaboration, and experimentation. You need abstract reasoning in constructing a model to a potential client. In systems thinking, you will need to think outside the box, consider possible alternatives in different circumstances while taking an in-depth perspective of a certain product and looking into the ins and outs of a system. Collaboration is a very essential skill to use when dealing with other business professionals, able to collaborate with your CEO and provide even him/her with feedback can lead to a better working relationship. The ability to experiment on your ideas that do have promise help you learn from your mistakes and leaves your imagination open to new possibilities.

                MIS is defined as the development and use of information systems that help businesses achieve their goals and objectives. The 3 key elements to MIS are; development and use, information systems, and business goals and objectives. The 5 component framework illustrates an information system which is comprised of hardware, software, data, procedures and people.

Hardware    is    Computer, storage disk, keyboard and monitor

Software      is    Word, etc.                               

Data               is     Words, sentences, paragraphs

Procedures  is    Means you use to start the program, from entering your report, to printing and saving it.

                Even if your major is not MIS, you still have to play a vigorous role in creating an information system based on your specific needs. All the business aspects, from requirements to social networking, to customer response and design all depends on you.

                An important point not be mistaken is that the business goals and objectives are not achieved by the business itself, it is the people within a business who buy, sell, design, produce, etc. that carry out the business goals and fulfill them. Every business should create an information system for the right reasons and which is the most beneficial action for that particular business.  

There are 5 types of information which are: Accurate, timely, relevant, just barely sufficient, and worth its cost. All Information is not equal. Depending on the situation, you need to figure out what information is relevant and essential to what you’re task is.

Information technology defers from Information systems where technology is referring to the products, methods, inventions, and standards that are used for the purpose of producing information. It is the hardware, software and data components and an information system is an “assembly” of the hardware, software, data, etc. You can’t buy an information system, but you can buy information technology. A professor that is provided with the hardware to create a website that contains powerpoints, the syllabus and rules, he/she is responsible for the information system within and needs to explain and teach the information to his/her students.