IS Strategy and Acquisition Flashcards
(40 cards)
What is a business model?
A business model is what an organisation does to sustain itself: how the company makes money. It’s the primary activity of the company that derives value.
What is a value chain?
The series of activities that a company undertakes in order to produce a product or service.
What is a value system?
The idea of a value chain can be extended to that of a value system, the activities of the companies that work together to create a product or service. For example, car manufacturers rely on parts manufacturers and the parts manufacturers rely on other companies, and so on, right back to the production of raw materials.
What are the primary and support activities of an organisation?
Primary activities: inbound logistics Operations Outbound logistics Marketing and Sales Service Support activities: Firm infrastructure HR management Technology Procurement
What are some competitive forces?
Threat of new entrants into the market Threat of substitute products or services Bargaining power of suppliers Bargaining power of buyers
What are some competitive strategies?
Lowering costs Differentiation Focus
What is strategic planning?
Strategic planning is something that organisations do in order to formulate their business strategies. In its proper form, it’s a deliberate process where a long-term view is taken, not a short-term view - perhaps a five-year horizon or something similar. During strategic planning, it is important to scan the environment. - The micro environment - the firm itself and what’s going on inside it, and also its immediate context such as suppliers and competitors. - The macro environment - the larger situation in which the organisation finds itself. That might include politics, geography, the ecology and external factors like that. Legal aspects, for example, would be part of the macro environment.
What are the 3 stages of strategic planning?
Analysis - Describe current and desired situations. Analyse and priorities needs for change Choice - Seek alternative actions. Select actions and make an action plan Implementation - Implement plan and describe results. Evaluate results
What is a strategic map?
A strategy map is a diagram that is used to document the primary strategic goals being pursued by an organization or management team
What is strategic agility?
Strategic agility is the ability to change strategy quickly. There has to be planning but the planning must also plan for change to allow for change if need be.
What is strategy alignment?
When companies formulate their information technology and information systems strategies, it’s important that they are linked back to the business strategy. Three distinct types of strategy are relevant. - The business strategy—what the company is going to do to win market share or make money. - The information system strategy—information systems what the organisation needs to support the implementation of its business strategy. - The information technology strategy—hardware, software and other technology services needed to provide the information systems.
What is a strategic information system?
A strategic information system is one that really makes a difference to the business and provides high strategic value. In 2003, a very influential paper was published called “IT Doesn’t Matter”. The contention was that IT had become so ubiquitous that it was no longer a source of strategic advantage for organisations. In other words, IT is simply a cost of doing business; you must have the technology to operate in today’s business world. Every organisation can use IT in the same way as every other organisation, so it doesn’t provide any particular advantage. But evidence suggests otherwise. Since 2003 we have seen many innovations which companies have been able to exploit to gain market advantage—mobile computing, the internet of things, machine learning, blockchain and so on. For example, the Uber app and associated back-end systems can be seen as a strategic information system, because without it Uber’s business strategy wouldn’t be feasible.
What can technology facilitate?
Innovative, competitive applications; new products Process improvements, efficiencies Data gathering Links with partners Locking in suppliers and customers
What is IS strategy?
Different ways of producing IT strategy have been suggested or tried. It’s probably true that most organisations use a mixture; more complicated methods like BSP probably don’t get used so much, but companies do make use of lightweight tools like SWOT analysis. When starting to formulate IS strategy, it is important to look at the current business strategy. IS strategy is all about identifying the applications we’re going to need to support the business in the future, including applications that we could class as strategic.
What are some methods of IS strategy?
Business Systems Planning (BSP) Scenario Planning “Stages of IT Growth” model Critical Success Factors (CSF) SWOT analysis PESTLE analysis
What is CTO/CIO?
Chief Technology Officer or Chief Information Officer
What is McFarlans strategic grid?
How do organisations acquire information systems?
The process of acquiring information systems has five steps.
- First, we have to identify the information systems that we’d like to have. This is often part of strategic planning.
- Next, we decide on a suitable IT architecture, or changes to our existing architecture. This tells us what technologies we need.
- We run projects to procure or create the necessary technology components.
- We install, integrate and test the technology components and incorporate them into appropriate business processes to form the required information systems.
- Then we can use the systems. Over time we can maintain and enhance them. In terms of value, if we’re talking about software, most of the cost is involved in step 5, the enhancement and maintenance stage.
What is COTS?
Commercial of the shelf
What is in-house development?
…
What is outsourced development?
When companies and government bodies outsource their IT, it means getting a third party to provide services connected with information systems and technology. Organisations identify vendors, typically IT companies, who can provide services of one type or another. Why are organisations doing this? There are many reasons, but cost is often a driver. Outsourcing might be done in an attempt to reduce headcount or to save other costs, or for various other reasons. There is often the idea that we can get better service by using experts, or that we should concentrate on what we’re good at instead of IT.
What is end user development?
End-user development (EUD) helps to solve this problem. EUD is “a set of methods, techniques and tools that allow users of software systems, who are acting as non-professional software developers, at some point to create, modify, or extend a software artifact” (Lieberman et al 2006).
What are the pros and cons of COTS?
On the plus side, there are many products to choose from. We don’t have to waste time writing code. We know what to buy, and we can be assured about products in advance by reading reviews. It can also be less expensive, if we need a product where there is a lot of competition in the market. On the other hand, buying existing software can be a less flexible solution than building our own. It may not match our requirements particularly well, and we don’t have much control over how the software works, if any. We will also be stuck with a piece of software that’s probably not integrated into our other applications—and this can become a real headache when we want to operate the systems as part of organisation-wide business processes.
What are some information system acquisition methods?
The idea of leasing software has increased in popularity, especially as cloud services have become a more attractive option. Increasingly, organisations subscribe to software online. On the other hand, we can still buy software to install in-house. We can build applications ourselves. That has been common, but requires expertise and is typically expensive and risky. Or we can pay somebody to do it—outsourced development is the most common type of IT outsourcing. A thing to note is that building a system in house can be quite difficult as requirements are hard to know from the get go and are often figured out throughout the project. Finally, we could create a solution using end-user tools such as spreadsheet software. This is the route that many end users take when confronted with the reality that IT department has a backlog of requests measured in years.
