Theoretical aspects

Chapter 1: Managing the Digital Firm

Information system is a set of interrelated components that collect, storage, retrieval, process and use of information to support management of the organization for business planning and control.

 Data are facts, transactions and events which have been recorded. They are the input raw materials from which information is produced.
 Information is data that have been processed in such a way as to be useful to the recipient such as making decision.

Activities in an information system:

INPUT PROCESS OUTPUT

The digital firm contains those aspects:-
 Electronic commerce – internet links buyers and seller in worldwide in order to run business, by so the transaction costs will be lower and in term of B2B transaction is increasing.
 Electronic business – business builds private and secure network to work on their business. For example, by using e-mail, the business can be more effectively under controlling.
 Electronic market – information links buyer and seller to exchange information, products and services, and payment purposes.


Chapter 2: Information System in the Enterprise

There are 6 types of information systems in the 4 level of information system:

Types of information systems Level of information system
• Executive Support Systems (ESS) Strategic-level system
• Decision Support Systems (DSS)
• Management Information Systems (MIS) Management-level system
• Knowledge Work Systems (KWS)
• Office Automation Systems (OAS) Knowledge-level system
• Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) Operational-level system

The ESS provides executive level management (top level management) with strategic information. In addition to select and summarized information, it also provides an easy to use interface, and information analysis facility and the incorporation of soft, people-orientated information.
The DSS provides ‘middle management’ with tactical information containing data summaries, graphical presentation and all necessary cross referencing. Being tactical, the information is selected for specific situation and facilities are provided to allow the manager to manipulate the information through specially designed interface.
The MIS provide considerable general assistance for planning and decision making. It produces summary reports from the high volume data and it normally used by middle managers.
The KWS are mostly used at knowledge level. It usually used by technical staff to get the outputs such as designs or graphics
The TPS are basic business systems that serve the operational level. A computerized system that performs and records the daily routine transactions necessary to the conduct of the business.
The OAS is the computerization of the routine tasks of producing documents, tracking schedules, filing and communication. In addition, office automation allows certain facilities to be shared.

Information systems help organizations achieve great efficiencies by automating parts of processes rethink and streamline processes.

Other important points of this chapter are:
 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Provide end-to-end customer care such as FAQ, Feedback and so on. The purpose having these is to retain customers and be competitive advantage.
 Supply Chain Management (SCM) – Close linkage and coordination of activities involves in buying, making and moving a product. It integrated supplier, manufacturer, distributer, and customer logistics time. As in result in reduces time, reduntant effort and inventory costs.
 Collaborative Commerce -Uses digital technologies to enable multiple organizations to collaboratively design, develop, build, move, and manage products. It will increases efficiencies in reducing product design life cycles, minimizing excess inventory, forecasting demand, and keeping partners and customers informed


Chapter 3: Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy

Information system can be defined as a system that provides information for the management of the company. For organization, technical microeconomic definitions of the organization are stable, formal structure and take resources from environment and process them to produce outputs; while behavioral definition if organization are collection of rights, privileges, obligations, responsibilities, and delicately balanced and conflict resolution.


How Information Systems Affect Organizations?
Economic theories:
• Information technology is a factor of production, like capital and labor
Transaction cost theory:
• Firms can conduct marketplace transactions internally more cheaply to grow larger
Behavioral theories:
• Information technology could change hierarchy of decision making
• Lower cost of information acquisition
• Broadens the distribution of information


Information systems assist manager and improve management decision-making by using a process of decision making:
• Strategic Decision Making: Determines long-term objectives, resources, and policies
• Management Control: Monitors effective or efficient usage of resources and performance of operational units
• Operational control: Determines how to perform specific tasks set by strategic and middle-management decision makers
• Knowledge-level decision making: Evaluates new ideas for products, services, ways to communicate new knowledge, ways to distribute information

After doing a process of decision making, then come out with stages of decision making.

Intelligence Design Choice Implementation


Strategic Information System is a computer system at any level of an organization. It changes goals, operations, products, services, or environmental relationships. Besides, it also helps organization gain a competitive advantage.


Chapter 4: Electronic Commerce and Electronic Business

Categories of electronic commerce include:
 Business to customer (B2C) – Retailing of products and services directly to individual customer. These are more customer centered retailing and less use of intermediaries in the business process. By using web sites, consumer can search for information on products, services, prices and so on.
 Business to Business (B2B) – Activity of a business selling to other businesses, using the internet to cut transaction costs and increase efficiencies.
 Consumer-to-consumer (C2C), individual use web for private sales or exchange.

For electronic business, that is functional applications of intranet within the organization.
Mobile commerce (m-commerce)nis that wireless devices used to conduct both B2C and B2B e-commerce transactions over the Internet. It extends personalization by delivering new value-added services directly to customers at any time and place.


Chapter 5: Ethical and Social Issues in the Digital Firm

Ethical issues are problems or situation in which a individual require to choose between alternatives that been evaluated as right or wrong or good or bad to guide their behavior.
Social issues are concern with the development of expectations of privacy or privacy norms, as well as in public attitudes. For political issues, it concerns the development of statutes and governs the relations between record keepers and individuals.

Moral dimensions of the information age:
• Information rights and obligations – privacy and freedom
• Property rights – intellectual property
Eg. trade secret, copyright and patent
• Accountability and control
• System quality – data quality and system errors
• Quality of life – equity, access, and boundaries

Cookies, web bugs, opt-out model and opt-in model are terms using by advertiser to track visitors to the website. There are several terms of internet challenges to privacy.

Cookies: Tiny file deposited on a hard drive. It used to identify the visitor and track visits to the website.
Web Bugs: Tiny graphic files embedded in e-mail messages and web pages. It designed to monitor online Internet user behavior.
Opt-out model: Informed consent permitting the collection of personal information. Consumer specifically requests for the data not to be collected.
Opt-in model: Informed consent prohibiting an organization from collecting any personal information. Individual has to approve information collection and use.


Candidate Ethical Principal
• Golden rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
• Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative: If an action is not right for everyone to take, then it is not right for anyone
• Descartes’ rule of change: If an action cannot be taken repeatedly, then it is not right to be taken at any time
• Utilitarian principle: Put values in rank order and understand consequences of various courses of action
• Risk aversion principle: Take the action that produces the least harm or incurs the least cost
• Ethical “no free lunch” rule: All tangible and intangible objects are owned by creator who wants compensation for the work
Practical theory

Week Description
1st Create a website using wetpaint which is a ‘wikipage’. The website introduce a dirt bikes company.
URL: www.reduxbike.wetpaint.com
Write the background of the ReduxBikes company history and background and draw the organization chart using www.bubbl.us.

2nd Use Microsoft Excel to come out a financial report. It contain graph of revenue, expenses, profit and turnover.
3rd Create a database using Microsoft Access. Contain of database include customer, product and purchasing table. This database will place in Sales and Marketing section.
4th Do “Sales by Model” report with graph by using Microsoft Excel.
5th Learn about Customer Relationship Management (CRM).


New discovery of software

Software (also called programs) is a step by step instruction that tell the computer hardware how to perform a task. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Access and Microsoft Power Point are application software as it is designed for a specific application of the computer.

 Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – Provide end-to-end customer care such as FAQ, Feedback and so on. The purpose having these is to retain customers and be competitive advantage.
 Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – An information concern with product-related information. By using this sotware the buyer and the seller know the product ‘characteristics’ more clearly.
 Supply Chain Management (SCM) – Close linkage and coordination of activities involves in buying, making and moving a product. It integrated supplier, manufacturer, distributer, and customer logistics time. As in result in reduces time, reduntant effort and inventory costs.
 Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) - Enables companies to procure from suppliers.


Favorites website concerning MIR

My favorite MIR website is www.mhhe.com.it. It provides a range of useful information about this subject. It provides Student Online Learning Center, Page out or Course Website Development Center and so on. From the website, I gain the knowledge in the IT world.
Information Resources Management (IRM) is an emerging discipline that helps managers assess and exploit their information assets for business development. It draws on the techniques of information science and information systems (IT related). It is an important foundation for knowledge management, in that deals systematically with explicit knowledge. Knowledge centers often play an important part in introducing IRM into an organization.

Skills to manage information as a strategic asset:

1. Understand the role of information
2. Assign responsibility for leading your IRM initiative
3. Develop clear policies on information resources
4. Conduct an information audit (Knowledge Inventory)
5. Link to management processes
6. Systematic scanning
7. Mix hard/soft, internal/external
8. Optimize your information purchases
9. Introduce mining and refining processes
10. Develop appropriate technological systems
11. Exploit technology convergence
12. Encourage a sharing culture



Findings about MIR

MIS is a system to convert data from internal and external sources into information and to communicate that information, in an appropriate form, to managers at all levels in all functions to enable them to make timely and effective decisions for planning, directing and controlling the activities for which they are responsible.

The information technology is not just something to make our lives easier-it also redefining entire industries. It is changing the nature of work, and changing it fast. It is altering conventional meanings of time and space.

All the information in now days are all storage in computer. When want to search a customer purchase history for example, we have to just key in the customer IC or name, the program will search for user without findings in lot of document – traditional way.

A database is a file of data structured in such a way that it may serve a number of applications without its structured being dictated by any one of those applications, the concept being that programs are written round the database rather than files being structured to meet the needs of particular programs.

The database can grow and change and its build up stage by stage within the organization. It will actually comprise several databases, each providing the anticipated information for several logically related management information systems where the data can be access, retrieve and modified with reasonable flexibility.



Favorite journal about MIS

(1) Journal of Management Information Systems
Vol. 23 No. 4, Spring 2007 pp. 7 - 9
Briggs, Robert O. , Nunamaker, Jay and Sprague, Ralph
Global Perspectives on Information, Communication, and E-Commerce
THIS SPECIAL SECTION FOCUSES ON THE INTERPLAY of many issues arising when people work together to achieve high-value goals on a global scale. In order to build efficient, effective, and useful global systems, we must accommodate the needs of distributed cross-cultural teams. Among other things, we must establish verifiable, yet defensible, online identities that travel securely across geographic and electronic space. We must accommodate myriad genres for data streams and documents. We must find new ways to direct and focus attention, to forge new representations of familiar entities, to reason together, to negotiate and to build consensus, to hold one another accountable.
Within this general context, the seven papers in this Special Section address challenges of importance and interest to global information systems (IS) endeavors. Consider, for example, the challenge of managing and controlling global information technology (IT) resources. Madhu T. Rao, Carol V. Brown, and William C. Perkins examine the utility of resource dependence theory in the context of global control and coordination of a distributed IS management function among 54 headquarters—subsidiary pairs spread across 19 countries in their paper, "Host Country Resource Availability and Information System Control Mechanisms in Multinational Corporations: An Empirical Test of Resource Dependence Theory." They report intriguingly mixed findings—some aspects of the theory were borne out in the field, while others were not.
The next paper, "Interoperability of E-Government Information Systems: Issues of Identification and Data Sharing," by Benoît Otjacques, Patrik Hitzelberger, and Fernand Feltz, deals with the sensitive legal and administrative challenges to exchanging information about the identities of individuals within a particular national entity and across international borders. This exploratory paper describes the status quo for such practices among 18 of the member states of the European Union. The insights derived here may be useful on a broader scale, as the European Union is a leader in identity protection.
Dongsong Zhang, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Lina Zhou, and Xiaolan Fu examine the degree to which global differences affect the efforts of cross-cultural teams in their paper, "The Impact of Individualism--Collectivism, Social Presence, and Group Diversity on Group Decision Making Under Majority Influence." The authors investigate how national culture, social presence, and group diversity may correlate with majority influence in a group decision-making context. The paper reports a study of 183 groups which revealed that the ability of a majority to impose its will on a minority varied significantly by culture. The paper offers useful insights for improving the outcome and the effectiveness of group decision making in cross-cultural environments.
Carsten Østerlund, in his paper, "Genre Combinations: A Window into Dynamic Communication Practices," investigates a global phenomenon as he explores the interplay of policy and action in a case study of how organizational members strike a balance between the need for continuity in communicative practices and a need for flexibility in managing a jumble of paper-based and digital IS. Using an emergency room as a rich exemplar, he presents case study data to illustrate that end users often adapt a genre’s media and form in new ways to achieve their ends.
John Hulland, Michael R. Wade, and Kersi D. Antia consider an aspect of the global electronic marketplace in their paper, "The Impact of Capabilities and Prior Investments on Online Channel Commitment and Performance," which examines a proposed correlation between prior network infrastructure investments and commitment to online marketing channels. As the paper draws on a resource-based view of the firm, it makes a cross-disciplinary argument to explain the commitment and performance benefits that firms derive from their prior investments. The authors demonstrate the utility of their approach with a survey of 550 online retailers. They report some interesting variation in the degree to which rewards vary unequally across firms.
One of the biggest barriers to participation in the global economy is a lack of knowledge about how to conduct collaborative business processes on line. Every aspect of business collaboration incorporates some element of ideation, and many studies have been published about ways to improve idea generation. Bruce A. Reinig, Robert O. Briggs, and Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., in their paper, "On the Measurement of Ideation Quality," report having discovered fundamental flaws in the metrics used to evaluate ideation approaches. The study shows that the same data set would yield three mutually exclusive conclusions depending on which of the metrics was applied. The paper therefore calls into question earlier ideation research based on the biased metrics (including that of the authors). It argues further that the one logically sound metric nonetheless has certain limitations, and proposes an approach to developing new metrics to overcome those constraints.
Finally, the line between the global and the local all but vanishes in the paper "Attention Issues in Spatial Information Systems: Directing Mobile Users’ Visual Attention Using Augmented Reality," by Frank Biocca, Charles Owen, Arthur Tang, and Corey Bohil. The paper tackles a special challenge faced by people who must collaborate with respect to three-dimensional objects in three-dimensional space that one or more of the participants do not actually occupy. Collocated team members use gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze, and proximity to direct the attention of their teammates to objects situated in three-dimensional spaces. These same mechanisms are not available to those who do not occupy the same space. This paper presents an elegant and deceptively simple solution to that challenge.


(2) Journal of Management Information Systems
Vol. 25 No. 1, Summer 2008 pp. 105 - 130
Ren, Yuqing , Kiesler, Sara and Fussell, Susan R.
Multiple Group Coordination in Complex and Dynamic Task Environments: Interruptions, Coping Mechanisms, and Technology Recommendations
ABSTRACT: Collaboration in complex and dynamic environments such as hospitals, air-lines, and disaster response teams is challenging. High performance requires smooth co-ordination across multiple groups whose incentives, cultures, and routines can conflict. In this paper, we present an in-depth case study of a hospital’s operating room practices to understand challenges associated with multiple group coordination and how information technology may help. We use the concept of trajectory to focus our observations and in-terviews on workflow across groups and critical events when coordination breaks down. A careful examination of the sources, coping mechanisms, and consequences of coordi-nation breakdowns suggests three factors whose absence may impede effective responses to unexpected interruptions: (1) trajectory awareness of what is going on beyond a per-son’s immediate workspace, (2) information systems integration, and (3) information pooling and learning at the organizational level. We conclude with technological recommendations to promote trajectory awareness and to automate information gathering and monitoring, so as to facilitate multiple group coordination in complex and dynamic task environments.


Remarks about MIR

There is abundant evidence from numerous surveys both in the UK and USA that existing MIS often using advanced computer equipment, have had relarively little success in providing management with the information it needs. The typical reasons discovered for this include the following:

 Lack of management involvement with the design of the MIS
 Narrow or inappropriate emphasis of the computer system
 Ubdue concentrate on low level data processing appplications particularly in the accoounting area
 Lack of management knowledge og computer
 Poor appreciation by information specialists of management’s true information requirements and of organisational problems
 Lack of top management support

To be successful an MIS must be designed and operated with due regard to organisation and behavioural principals as well as technical factors. Management must be informed enough to make an effective contribution to system design and information specialists must become more aware of managerial function and needs so that, jointly more effective MIS are developed.