assignment for information system service management by win and mike
TRANSCRIPT
ICT416: Written Assignment I
Tanat Jarusyingdumrong 508333
Win Hlaing 506415
ICT416: Management of IT services
Dr. Soranun
July 3rd, 2009
1. What are the goals of the new work environment? Why such the goals are
formulated?
There are four main different goals of the new work environment.
Firstly, it is to promote and make use of leverage knowledge efficiently. Usually, it is
not knowledge about the IT system, but it is the knowledge that people know but cannot
really explain to the others. Basically, it is implicit knowledge in peoples’ head (intellectual
capital). And that knowledge is to foster sharing and to support the sharing with technology;
for example, email and groupware are informal groups where collective knowledge is used to
accomplish a specific task. And through the organization “pull”, people need help from the
others to solve a problem rather than the organization push to them with the overload of
works.
And another one is to organize for complexity since the world becomes more
complicated day by day and simple solutions are no longer needed and business alliances
have complimentary expertise, more complexity, and specialization. Now, every decision can
lead to many organizational impacts.
The third one is to work electronically in the organization by taking advantage of the
internet and networks. It is required in different organizing principles and management tenets.
This changes how the organizations interact with others, including customers. Plus,
microchip and bandwidth power/capability are increasing and their costs are decreasing.
The last one is to handle continuous efficiency when the product or service is fine.
And discontinuous change is needed to replace the existing product or service entirely.
2. Give at least three characteristics of the technology trends in hardware, software,
data and communication.
When we look at the hardware trends in 50s-60s, batches processing (centralized
system) was used. Then, in the mid 70s, processing power began to move out of the central
site. After that, in 1980s, the period of boom of personal computers took place. Next, Client-
Server computing by interfacing between client and server on the network holding the data
and applications with the major current development hits the market. Handheld devices
become more popular due to wireless system.
For the software trends; in 1960s, there was an improvement of the in-house programs
after in-house programmers had successfully created transaction processing systems. For
programming history - the first era is modular and structured programming techniques. Then,
it’s the era of life-cycle development methodologies. Then, software engineering arises.
Purchasing software also becomes viable alternative to developing in-house software. Plus,
the off-the-shelf software focuses on applications rather than transaction processing. In
1990s, Enterprise Resource Planning and Web Front Ends empowered employees rather than
replacing legacy systems. Major changes in software trend is the web service software in
which information and data can be accessed anywhere through the internet.
Data trend is started with the file management with the techniques to serve individual
applications; then to serve corporate database by serving several applications. All of these led
to a data administration function. The focus of shifting from data resources to information
resources in 1990s, together with data management, organizes internal facts to data record
format; for example, data warehousing and data mining. There are two major data concerns,
security and privacy.
Communication trends have experienced enormous change and are now taking center
stage. In the early stage, it is for online and time-sharing systems. Later on, it became more
interesting in both public and private data network’s eyes. Finally, the Internet has changed
everything; and today internet’s protocol has become the worldwide standard for LANs and
WANs. Communication-based information systems link organizations to their suppliers and
customers. Nowadays, the explosion of wireless technology moves us from second
generation to WIFI third generation.
3. From Supply-Push to Demand-Pull
- Compare and contrast between supply-push and demand-pull
Supply-push business strategy: A push strategy in marketing is used when there has
been a development or improvement on a new product which is unknown to the consumer.
As there is no consumer demand in the product launch, the product and the information are
"pushed" to the consumer by distribution and promotion.
Demand pulls business strategy: In a "pull" system, the consumer sector requests the
product and "pulls" it through the delivery channel. An example of this is the car
manufacturing company Ford in Australia. It only produces cars when they have been
ordered by the customers.
- Explain its impact on the internal organization environment
A push and pull-system in business describes the move of a product or information
between two sectors. In the market, the consumers usually "pull" the goods or information
they demand for their needs while the suppliers "push" them toward the consumers.
In the internal organization environment, the push strategy in marketing can be found earlier
in times where the organization decided what to put into the market. The new approach of
pull system aggressively impacts the organization to listen more to the consumers then decide
what to produce according to the demand. Therefore, companies are moving more into the
customer-centric to all-the-best satisfy the customers better than their competitors do.
Customer Relationship Management system becomes more like a must for a company.
- What does an organization need to be prepared for this significant shift?
Over the few years, a few innovative companies have improved and achieved their
strategic by using advantages of IT and these firms served as models of what could be done.
However, most companies do not have the resources or skills to follow those examples; so
only a few utilized IT in their organizations. Later, the dramatic growth of internet and online
business makes IT become a strategic tool in every industry. Companies are now looking for
more and better cohesion where the uses of intranets and portals are the most popular ways to
use IT. Firms are now in need to adjust their organizational structures to be more adaptive to
the fast-moving and highly competitive market. To do that, firms need to demise their big
hierarchical structures to become more “flat” and project-based to quickly satisfy the basic
demands in the market where they are under top management scopes. Firms need to both
change strategically inside their own organizations and valuing customer-centric
methodology. The popular ways are to use IT in working across business (B2B), working
with customers (B2C), and working with the employees (B2E).
4. What is IT governance and why has it become important?
The term “governance” has become prominent in all areas of business including IT.
IT governance is the assignment of decision rights and the accountability framework to
encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT. Governance differs from management in the
way that governance is about deciding who will be put/authorize to make decision while
management is about that authorized person making decisions once decision rights have been
assigned.
Governance has become important in the business world because financial scandals
have shown that there was not much true and effective governance in some very large
enterprises. Governance has become more important in the IS world because IT expenditures
have become so large and diverse that management has had to find a way to bring order to all
the decision making. Basically, it is the concept of putting the right man on the right job.
5. What are the four areas that make up the overall responsibility of the IS function that
we discussed in class? Briefly discuss the trend of IS function in each area in the future
organization.
The new trends have contributed in moving the IS responsibilities and performance
out of the traditional IS department into other parts of the organization or to other enterprises:
1. Computer Operations : the IS was responsible to take care of everyday operations that
involve the use of IT. Nowadays, companies outsource more in this area. For example,
KBANK outsources IBM to take care of its IS.
2. System development and maintenance : the IS was responsible to develop the systems
or applications that the users or the organization demand. IS is also responsible for
maintaining them later. Nowadays, systems and applications are usually purchased then
customized to fit the unique organization’s needs rather than to have the IS department
developing them. After the systems or the applications are developed, the IS department then
can take care of the maintenance. This approach saves time, cost, and manpower as the
organization do not have to hire more people just to create a set of systems and applications;
so they can focus on their actual business and let the professionals handle all the extra work.
3. System and information architecture : the IS is responsible for creating the enterprise
framework. This work area can be outsourced; however, it is better to do it in-house since
some security concerns may be questioned. Top management probably does not want
someone outside to know everything about the architecture of the enterprise which is highly
sensitive and confidential.
4. Business requirements identification : the IS was responsible to understand what the
business needs. Nowadays, companies are moving more into project-based orientation where
IT and business staffs cooperate and work together to come up with a system that can
efficiently satisfy the business needs.
The future roles for IS are broker for commodity services, such as, helpdesk, basic PC
support, etc. And for systems and information architecture area, IS will become an IT
strategist who align the technology with business requirement. In the future, the IS Lite
concept suggests that IS department can be viewed as managing three overall process in
diving innovation, managing change and supporting infrastructure where the work will be
integrating the outsourcers and the organization’s business people.
6. Describe the need of champions of IT project in an organization. How can we identify
them?
To answer this question, a proper definition of “champions” must be clearly defined; a
champion is someone with a vision and that person can gets it implemented by obtaining the
funding, pushing the project over hurdles, putting his or her reputation on the line, and taking
the risk of the project. And the special thing about these champions are that they can only be
found, not appointed. They have distinctive characteristics to ordinary workers. They can be
identified by the followings:
- they are opinion leaders: they are the frontline when it comes to commenting
- they have a good reputation for creative ideas or being involved with innovations
- they have developed strong ties to others in the organization: they are respected
- they have the organizational power and influence to get strategic innovations implemented
So why do we need these people in the organization? The answer is simple; to
compete better in this enormously populating business world. Nowadays, competent workers
are no longer an issue to any organization since the population is large and education is
abundant. Almost all of the workers have achieved at least high school diploma and many
more with undergraduate degree. What firms want today is a group of people who can come
up with original and creative ideas, ready to take the risk, execute remarkable both public and
internal performance, carry out duties and properly react to any surprising circumstances with
reasonable acts.
7. How has the Internet changed consumer expectations?
The Internet has changed a lot of things in these past few years; especially how
business works and how we live our lives. As before, consumers expected or hoped for the
suppliers (producers) to listen to them and come up with the things they demand. However,
these days, businesses are growing dramatically; firms are too competing against each other
and the ones benefiting are the customers. The customers now don’t “beg” for the goods, but
the firms are the ones begging the customers to buy their goods by improving quality, putting
in new creativity, reducing prices, advertising, etc. Basically, the customers are the ones
controlling what to produce now; for example, customized/personalized products.
Furthermore, consumers tend to demand more IT functions for their convenience like price
comparison, online transaction, data mining for suggestions and recommendations, saving
records (like billing and shipping addresses) so that they don’t have to key in again, etc.
8. What are the three strategic uses of IT in an organization? What are the purposes or
the essences of each strategic use?
I. B2E or Business to Employee (working inward):
This is to create a cohesion among workers; this process is to ‘glue’ isolated employees
together. A very famous tool in this area is intranet. By building up an intranet system, firms
can establish better relationship between themselves and their employees. Furthermore, the
system can improve working efficiency and save time and cost with an improved internal
processes and structure (examples: using the existing Internet to expand its intranet to other
locations, reducing training time to users since it is web-based application, and the firm needs
to store records at only one place while allowing its workers to access anywhere in the
world). Lastly, it creates a sense of belonging to its workers. Its workers will feel like they are
being taken care of and not left out alone.
II. B2C or Business to Customer (working outward):
This is to dramatically improve the relation between the company itself to its customers. This
process focuses on the firm’s products and its relationship with workers. The very famous
tool to use is the CRM or the Customer Relationship Management. By implementing B2C
system, a firm can achieve either these two things or both; gaining competitive advantage or
finding itself at a disadvantage. This system also gives the customers the feeling of being
taken care of; everybody is a valued customer (examples: data mining technology lets the
firm knows what this particular customer or customers as a whole like then they can serve
them fully to its potential; on the other hand, the customers will recognize the help from the
firm that try to take care of them. Another example is the tracking system that can give the
customers the feel of safety that they can track their cars, packages, etc. They can also do
business online at the tips of their fingers; their lives have changed forever to be more and
more convenient. Therefore, we must focus on this issue and deliver what the customers
want.
III. B2B or Business to Business (working across):
This is to improve a company’s processes and relationships with its business partners. A clear
picture is the company and the suppliers or among companies that are in the same industry
that need to be sophisticated like banking and transporting mostly through IOS or Inter-
Organizational Systems that take care of inter-banking transactions and reservations for air-
line and travel agent ecosystem. The integration can be of tight, close, and loose relationship.
Firms with tight relationships mean that they gradually share the system and information
together; which means, if the system fails, both firms will not be able to continue both of
their businesses until the system is recovered. The further apart the relationship, firms are less
dependent on each other. Firms with close relationships share only some information and
system together while they still have their own systems running. In case of any downtime of
the co-system, their systems can still work fine by being a stand-alone system; however, their
business values can be decreased since their normal inter-organizational services are limited
(example, banking system can become quite useless if inter-bank transfers cannot be made).
For loose relationship firms, they only share some of their information while their systems
remain independent or mostly independent. Anything that affects one firm will be a tiny
effect to another firm.
9. What are the major differences between operational planning, tactical planning, and
strategic planning? Give examples of each planning approach to support your answer.
Strategic planning is like setting a vision for the whole organization. This planning normally
takes around 3 to 5 years to achieve the vision. It is set by senior management (CXO).
Tactical planning is focusing on the smaller scale like selecting projects and allocating
resources. This usually takes like 1 to 2 years timeframe set by middle managers.
Operational planning is the actual carry out of work on day-to-day basis like managing the
“existing” project (this is the big difference to tactical planning since the tactical one analyzes
and selects what project should be conducted while this operational one is the planning on the
actual work of that particular project) to meet the time and budget scope. This is normally set
by project/line managers. It should take less than a year to complete.
Example:
An ABC Technology Corporation, a specialized IT sector company manufacturing computer
chips, has its headquarter residing in America with 2 factories locating in Thailand and
China. Its strategic planning or its vision is to have its inventories be used by all levels of
users; doesn’t matter a big businessman or an ordinary student.
Then its tactical planning should be considering opening up more factories in more countries
to have a variety of quantities of products to gain more market shares like in Philippines,
Japan, and Taiwan.
Made-in-China products tend to be purchased by little spenders like students and ordinary
workers for cheaper prices.
Made-in-Taiwan/Thailand/Philippines products are more for the middle-class people while
high-end Japanese made chips are for the high purchasing power group like middle to top
management and rich people.
It also needs to consider quality controls, implementing B2B/E/C models, coming up with
new managing techniques, etc.
Then its operational planning should be considering about their construction projects whether
they are on time and cost scope or not. How are our B2X models doing? Is the new policy
setting the new working time effective in motivating our workers?
10. What is a sense-and-respond approach to planning? What are the success cases for
this approach you can find in the internet?
Sense-and-respond approach is the new method of carrying out the operations to achieve the
business vision (strategy). In the old times, in order to get close to the set strategy, the top
management makes one big decision for the whole corporate to follow. The advantage is that
everyone really knows what they are doing while the disadvantage is that if something goes
wrong or if the choice is later viewed unprofitable and they want to terminate it, it will result
in a waste of time, manpower, and budget. On the contrary, sense-and-respond approach
comes up with many small choices conducted by teams. The advantages are faster decisions
can be made, members have the sense of belonging, and small commitments are present; if
once choice fails, the rest are unaffected and the company wastes only a small portion of
budget, time, and manpower. However, the disadvantage is that people don’t know where
they are going. The goals are too diverse as there are many teams doing many tasks. To fix
this problem, a strategic envelope is used to set the overall frame for all of the teams to
follow to be guided to the same direction.
11. If you were in charge of systems planning for a small firm, what questions would
you ask company officers to determine which planning frame work(s) would be most
appropriate? Carefully elaborate your answer.
Suppose there is a newly open company called Mikey Trading Corporation. Its nature of
business is to be a sub-broker investor for anyone who wants to invest but has financial
limitation. This company will throw all of the funds into a central pot to buy and sell stocks
with share ratio for every investor while the investors do not need to watch any news, observe
the market, and analyze anything for a service charge of only 0.2675% for every incoming
and outgoing transaction.
Since it is a company dealing with financial-limited customers, they probably have limited
connection speed and computer specifications, and the company provides service not product,
therefore, it should focus on service-oriented architecture. There will be no application
involve; however, the database (spreadsheet) can be viewed at anytime by the customers via
Google Docs (so there’s no need for the customers to download any application, and it is
faster to view via Google Docs than to send the Excel file). Plus, these customers only want
to invest a small amount of money and they do not need to access real-time data. They only
need to see how their money is is used and how much do they gain/lose whenever there’s any
movement (transaction).
Bonus:
1. What is cloud computing? How does it differ from the grid computing or cluster
computing that you learned in the computer architecture class?
Cloud computing involves delivering hosted services over the Internet. Cloud computing
services can be divided into three main services: Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-
as-a-Service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). The name cloud computing represents
the Internet in flow charts and diagrams.
The service of the cloud computing system is different from the traditional hosting and the
users can have the service as much or little as they want by minute or hour. All of the services
are 24/7 managed by the provider and the customers don’t need to have expert knowledge in
computing but a personal computer and internet access.
A cloud can be private or public. A public cloud sells services to anyone on the Internet. (For
example- Amazon Web Services) and A private cloud is a proprietary network or a data
center that supplies hosted services to a limited number of people.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service like Amazon Web Services provides virtual server with unique IP
addresses and blocks of storage and customers use the provider's application program
interface to start, stop, access and configure their virtual servers and storage.
Platform-as-a-service can be the software and product development tools hosted on the
provider's infrastructure. Developers create applications on the provider's platform over the
Internet.
In the software-as-a-service, the seller supplies the hardware infrastructure, the software
product, and interacts with the user through a front-end portal. SaaS is a very broad market.
Services can be anything from Web-based email to inventory control or even database
processing.
Grid computing is the application/software of hundred or thousand of computers to
solve a single problem at the same time. It is usually to use a scientific or technical problem
that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of
data. One of the main grid computing strategies is to use software to divide and apportion
pieces of a program among several computers.
The difference of grid computing from cluster computing systems is that grid
computing tends to be more loosely-coupled. Furthermore, when a computing grid is
dedicated to a specialized application, it is often constructed with the aid of general-purpose
grid software libraries and middleware.
2. Who is Gartner (whom we talked about in class)?
Gartner, Inc. is the world’s leading information technology research and advisory company.
It delivers the technology-related insight necessary for its clients to make the right decisions.
Its clients varied from CIOs and senior IT leaders in corporations and government agencies to
business leaders in high-tech and telecom enterprises; and from professional services firms to
technology investors. It is the indispensable partner to 60,000 clients in 10,000 distinct
organizations. Through the resources of Gartner Research, Gartner Executive Programs,
Gartner Consulting and Gartner Events, they work with every client to research, analyze, and
interpret the business of IT within the context of its customer’s individual role. It was
founded in 1979. Gartner is headquartered in Stamford, Connecticut, U.S.A. wtih 4,000
associates; including 1,200 research analysts and consultants in 80 countries.
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