Chapter 1: Business Driven Technology

Learning Outcomes:

1.1. Compare Management Information Systems (MIS) and Information Technology (IT)

1.2. Describe the relationships among people, technology, and information.

1.3. identify four different departments in a typical business and explain how technology helps them to work together.

1.4. compare the four different types of organizational information cultures and decide which cultures applies to your school.

Information Technology Basics

• Information Technology (IT): A field concerned with the use of technology in managing and processing information.
• IT is an important enabler of business success and innovation.
• Management Information Systems (MIS) : A business function, like accounting and human resources, which moves information about people, products, and processes across the company to facilitate decision making and problem solving.
• System Thinking is a way of monitoring the entire system by viewing multiple inputs being processed or transformed to produce outputs while continuously gathering feedback on each part.
• MIS incorporates system thinking to help companies operates cross-functionally.
• For example, to fulfill products order, an MIS for sales moves a single customer order across all functional areas including sales, order fulfillment, shipping, billing, and finally customer service.
• MIS can be an important enables of business success and innovation.
• MIS is an important tools that is most valuable when it influence the talents of people who know how to use and manage it effectively.
• Most of the company nowadays perform MIS function effectively and they also have the MIS department often called Information Technology (IT), Information Systems (IS) or MIS itself.

When we are beginning to learn about the information technology it is important to understand :

• - Data, Information and Business Intelligence (BI)
• - IT Resources
• - IT Cultures

Data, Information and Business Intelligence (BI).

Data are raw facts that describe the characteristics of an event or object.

• Before information age, managers manually collected and analyzed data. This have caused a lot of time consuming and may drive them to make a wrong decision making due to the lacking of the information.
• When in the information age, managers compile, analyze, and comprehend large amount of data daily, which helps them make more successful business decisions.
• Information age is when infinite quantities of facts are widely available to anyone who can use computer.

Information- Data converted into a meaningful and useful context.

• having the right information at the right moment in time can be worth fortune, while having the right information at the wrong moment ; or the wrong information at the right moment can be disastrous.
• the truth about information is that its value is only as good as people who use it.
• Sometimes, people that using the same information can make different decisions depending on how they interpret or analyze the information.

Business Intelligence (BI) is a software or applications that collect information from multiple resources such as suppliers, customers, competitors and others that used to support decisions making effort.

• BI can manipulates multiple variables and some cases even hundreds of variables in order to analyze and forecast the future of an organization.
• Top managers use BI to define the future of the business, analyzing markets, industries and economies to determine the strategic direction the company must follow to remain profitable.

 Knowledge includes the skills, experience, and expertise, coupled with intelligence and information, that creates individual or person's intellectual resources.

• Knowledge worker are individuals valued for their ability to interpret and analyze information.
• Today's workers are referred to as knowledge workers because they know how to use the BI along with personal experience to make decision based on both information and intuition.

IT Cultures

 - Four types of IT cultures which are :-

• Information - Functional Culture
• Information - Sharing Culture
• Information - Inquiring Culture
• Information - Discovery Culture

Information - Functional Culture

• Employees use information as a means of exercising influence or power over others.
• For example, a manager in sales department refuses to share information with marketing departments because they want to have the authority on the particular information that they have.
• This causes the marketing manager's to need the sale manager's inputs each time if there is a new strategy of sales is developed.

Information - Sharing Culture

• In this culture, employees across departments and trust each other to use the information ( especially about problems and failures) to improve their performance.
• For example, marketing and sales departments share their information with each other and try to find a solution if there is a problem in order to fixed it ( especially in increasing the profit of the company).

Information - Inquiring Culture

• Employees across departments to search for information for better understanding in the future and align themselves with the current trends and new directions.
• For example, most of the company nowadays used the technology to operate their business successfully. Before they use the technology they have to search information as much as they could in order to do the technology.

Information - Discovery Culture

• Employees across departments are open to new insight about crisis and radical changes and seek ways to create competitive advantages.
• Not all the organization apply this culture in their workforce.
• For example, Google and Telecom use this kind of culture.
• Basically, information - discovery culture need the organization to be opened and accept any new ideas that can improve their organization status.