L71 Information Systems Challenges in Management

Information Systems Challenges in Management

Task 1

i. Firm strategy

The strategy of a business organization should drive and guide all its functions and purposes. (Ven Verelst & Mannaert 2008). When it comes to outsourcing of information systems, a firm’s strategies should guide the whole process of identifying the best firm that can deliver the designated service that is being outsourced. Traditional maxims argue that a successful information technology outsourcing process involves outsourcing of services that are not the key activity of an organization and that which will not cause strategic differentiation. Liberalists argue that the first steps in carrying out outsourcing must be coming up with a strategy to define the objective and nature of the outsourcing transaction. Based on a particular firm’s strategic position, there could be practically varying guidelines as on when to start the outsourcing process, and how to carry out the transaction.

ii. Factors of the Supplier

Supplier factors greatly determine the client’s decision to take on a particular outsourcing transaction (Richardson & Director 2008). When the outsourcing firm or company realistically has few choices of services to offer, companies are more unlikely to enlist themselves in the outsourcing process. On the same note, when the outsourcing firm has new services in the market, companies tend to be reluctant in outsourcing them due to fear of the unprecedented future and the risk of trying the untried. Probable models for predicting success of outsourcing transactions include measures such as considering the supplier’s expertise, especially their ability to deliver meets the demands of the client, extent to which the supplier has invested in the outsourcing process, and whether the supplier is able to meet the specificity factors laid out by the human resource manager of the client (Pollard & Cater-Steel 2009).  However, the number of the available outsourcing firms to a great extent determines the success of an outsourcing process. When the number of outsourcing firms is small, an outsourcing process tends to success as opposed to when the number of outsourcing firms are many. The feasibility of organizations outsourcing increases with increasing number of outsourcing firms. The decision making process of an organization concerning outsourcing is greatly impacted by the number vendors of the service or product to be outsourced.  Studies that have been done on the  factors  that are always validated to determine the success of an outsourcing process include the supplier’s demonstration of understandability of the needs of the client, the trustworthiness of the employees of the supplier and the supplier’s experience with the information system that is being outsourced (Lacity, Willcocks & Rottman 2008).

iii. Firm size and outsourcing decisions

Research has shown that there is a direct link between the size of the farm and its outsourcing decisions on Information Systems (Morali & Wieringa 2010).  A study done on 226 banks showed that size of a firm affected the presence of the supplier, technology implications, the complexity of the task and asset specificity on outsourcing of information systems (IS) (Marston, Bandyopadhyay Zhang & Ghalsasi 2011).  However, the study found out that the findings above did not affect small banks as compared to large banks. It was found out that for large banks, factors such as advantages of cost production were strengthened while factors such as task complexity and the specificity of assets seemed to weaken.

iv. Competitive strategy

Research has demonstrated that organization that employ low cost strategies are forced to rely heavily on meeting high standards of efficiency when it comes to their transacting processes (Oshri, Kotlarsky & Willcocks 2015).  Firms that follow differentiation strategies on the other hand heavily rely on information from the market and they often view their Decision support systems as being more important in determining the long term success of their outsourcing transaction process.

v. Technological Environment

A challenge for most organizations taking up outsourcing transactions is the uncertainty of technology and the risk of misunderstanding the cost of implementing an IS projects (Pollard & Cater-Steel 2009). Often organizations tend to reduce or mitigate their technological risks by technically transferring those risks to the outsourcing firms. Hence, the outsourcing firms must be ready for this scenarios, because the client organizations accept that the vendor has the skills and strategies to meet those risks and resources to manage them. Emerging technologies has greatly impacted on how outsourcing process is done due to the emergence of cloud computing and novel sourcing models for example application Service provision (ASP). Information Technology organizations can define cloud computing as enhancers of Information Systems outsourcing in which software and hardware resources are made available over the network ‘a service’ models, whereby clients can use on pay as you use basis (Tate & Ellram 2009).

vi. Legal and Political Environment

There are some regulations and restrictions that tend to affect uptake of IS outsourcing. These decisions include the following: putting restrictions on operations of foreign firms operating within some limitations, banning importation or exportation of certain services or products, limitation of internet exchange activities and content scrutiny. For example, the ‘Government Information Technology Contracting.’ This is a policy framework that has provisions for using or acquiring ICT products that has within it a number of inclusions to manage the acquisition of the products and or services (Jones & Jones 2013).

Political instabilities and legal provisions also affect outsourcing processes. Varying public perceptions in different countries may affect outsourcing decisions of clients. Additionally, some governs may require overseas companies to comply with some novel requirements which they may not be ready for, and so hence up quitting. This greatly affects outsourcing of Information Systems.

Lastly, rights on intellectual property that embark on protecting intellectual property for example trademarks and copyrights are considered a necessity for an outsourcing transaction to be complete. Hence, this impacts on the choice of country to outsource from when it comes to international outsourcing (Ven Verelst & Mannaert 2008).

References

Jones, G. R., & Jones, G. R. (2013). Organizational theory, design, and change. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Lacity, M. C., Willcocks, L. P., & Rottman, J. W. (2008). Global outsourcing of back office services: lessons, trends, and enduring challenges. Strategic Outsourcing: An International Journal, 1(1), 13-34.

Marston, S., Li, Z., Bandyopadhyay, S., Zhang, J., & Ghalsasi, A. (2011). Cloud computing—The business perspective. Decision support systems, 51(1), 176-189.

Morali, A., & Wieringa, R. (2010, September). Risk-based confidentiality requirements specification for outsourced it systems. In Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 2010 18th IEEE International (pp. 199-208). IEEE.

Oshri, I., Kotlarsky, J., & Willcocks, L. P. (2015). The Handbook of Global Outsourcing and Offshoring 3rd Edition. Springer.

Pollard, C., & Cater-Steel, A. (2009). Justifications, strategies, and critical success factors in successful ITIL implementations in US and Australian companies: an exploratory study. Information systems management, 26(2), 164-175.

Richardson, R., & Director, C. S. I. (2008). CSI computer crime and security survey. Computer security institute, 1, 1-30.

Tate, W. L., & Ellram, L. M. (2009). Offshore outsourcing: a managerial framework. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 24(3/4), 256-268.

Ven, K., Verelst, J., & Mannaert, H. (2008). Should you adopt open source software? IEEE software, 25(3), 54-59.

Task 2

i. Data Privacy in electronic Information systems

Challenges to Privacy by companies

Because data is increasingly becoming valuable to companies, data warehousing is becoming a common practice in the electronic information systems. Furthermore, the emergence of the technology of knowledge discovery and data analytics has enlisted novel concerns on privacy issues, (Jain & Shanbhag 2012).  The existing data privacy policies to govern the use and of personal data that is being held by various corporations and organizations across the world seems unable to curb the rising illegal use or sharing of personal data without consent of the owners, (Aleem & Ryan Sprott 2012). It seems as if the agencies concerned with the enactment and review of the policies that safeguard right to information privacy are either behind the current developments in data mining industry or they have decided to deliberately keep off (Subashini & Kavitha 2011).

Challenges to Privacy by individuals

Recent technological developments in information systems has caused amassment of large amounts of personal data in the accounting companies, shopping malls, network service providers and medical institutions (Wang, Ren, Lou & Li 2010). This has brought an increasingly growing concern on whether the privacy of personal information is not being encroached. However, it is important to observe that this new technology of knowledge discovery and data mining (KDDM) causes the privacy threat in itself (Batyuk et al 2011). It is an interesting area to research on since KDDM must involve amassment of data, for this is part its business procedures. KDDM poses a data privacy issue in the electronic information systems because knowledge discovery often involves using personal information to carry out predictions without the consent of the owners (Gao, Hu, Huang, Wang & Chen 2011).

ii. Standards of Conduct on the Networks

Cultural beliefs and norms define values of what the society defines as acceptable conduct (Mason, 2017).  However, behavior standards in the online platform are not always founded on the norms of the society whereby the network is situated. Human interactions in the electronic information systems may at some point be stretched across several societies who may be having varying values and norms that guide their conduct in the network platform (Bélanger & Crossler 2011). Due to these limitations, human interaction in the online network needs to be redefined altogether. Another challenge is that different online networks are managed from different areas, which have differing standards of conduct. Hence, ensuring for acceptable behavior in the online network is made doubly difficult.

The fact that computers technically avail limitless opportunities for people to do what they please in the network with anonymity makes it challenging to enforce sane standards of conduct (Smith, Dinev & Xu 2011).  Additionally, due to multicultural diversities, values of behavioral conduct on the information system networks tends to have varying guidelines. Furthermore, these guidelines are liable to change as the traffic on networks increases. While morally upright custodians of the norms and values of acceptable behavior may have tried to preserve standards of acceptable behavior in the information systems network ethics in acceptable behavior in the information systems networks still remains to be a big challenge. This is majorly because most of the traffic in the network is made consists of the young generation that is less morally sensitive.

Copyright Laws

The proliferation of information which is generated by information systems in the online platform has led to a problem on how copyright laws of intellectual property can be implemented (Siponen, & Vance 2010). Many conflicts in information systems is about how information is used. There needs to be a standard to govern the use of intellectual property. Furthermore, more clarification should be outlined on how electronic files can be used, distributed or viewed. The flexibility of how electronic files and can be edited or shared greatly limits the enforcement of the already established copyright laws (Erlich & Narayanan 2014). It is either the already existing laws are too limited to meet the needs of the problem at hand or they are easily subjugated by the easiness of editing or sharing electronic files. Enforcing acceptable behavior or conduct in information systems becomes even more difficult considering the fact that different countries have different laws on copyrights, which means that information that is available globally will have different protection laws (Laudon & Laudon 2015).

While implementation procedure of copyright laws is straight forward, the main question that really comes up is, who is responsible for implementing these laws? While they are many acts and policies that have been enacted to protect copyright laws, often the laws are not implemented because the requirements are practically unenforceable. Hence most of the intellectual property in the electronic information systems ends up being illegally used or distributed. Alternative ways of protecting electronic files should be sought, for example using digital markers to identify the owners of a particular electronic files and imposing of fees before subscribing to informational services.

iii. Access to Electronic Networks

A key issue in the electronic information systems is access to electronic networks. Who accesses the network and what the kind of information they would want to access is important to consider because information system networks have confidential information could easily for accomplishing nefarious purposes by ill minded persons (Fire Goldschmidt & Elovici 2014).

Protection of personal Data

Additionally, the question of privacy is also important as electronic information systems in the online network are laden with tremendous information that is personal and confidential in most cases. Given the huge number of machines and devices connected to the cloud network, protection of personal data becomes an important issue (Fire Goldschmidt & Elovici 2014). Security issues that come with this set up include data loss and privacy because of the sharing of cloud services. It is easy to lose control of the physical infrastructure of the devices in the online cloud, and this becomes one of the greatest security vulnerabilities (Cutillo, Molva & Strufe 2009). While Cloud Service Providers (CSP) endeavor to protect consumer data through cloud encryption techniques, these encryption techniques are often not enough to protect the data-massive data warehouses. Furthermore, these encryption techniques are not effective in themselves as most of them only offer  encryption protection while data is in ‘ on transit’, and fail to protect it while it is ‘at rest.’ Encryption “on transit” is the technique of encrypting data while it is on transfer, that is, as it is being transferred from a local machine to the online server while encryption “at rest”, defines the technique of encrypting data while it is being stored in the serve ( Sun, Zhang, Xiong & Zhu 2014).  While encryption of data while “on transit” can protect it from hackers and hence continually keep it safe, the hackers can still get a free way to manipulate the data while it is ‘at rest,’ Since cybercriminals are increasingly seeking more security vulnerabilities in online platform, encrypting data while at rest becomes necessary (Erlich & Narayanan 2014).

What to be allowed in the network

While communities have their own standards of decency and definitions of what is obscene and what is not, the electronic information systems network has no such standards, and there are no set borders to define right or wrong (Kelly 2009). Therefore, obscenity has come to be a relativized. Furthermore, as the number of online traffic in the electronic information systems increases, issues of the morality on information that is shared often rise up. Cultural diversity also makes control of what can be shared in the network difficult as the traffic of network communication crosses international boundaries, and different cultures are guided by different moral values. What a particular culture appraises as noble may be just as base in another cultural setting. This is not only apparent in the pornography case, which is a major issue across the world, but may also involve controversial issues that are held by political, religious and cultural groups.

References

Aleem, A., & Ryan Sprott, C. (2012). Let me in the cloud: analysis of the benefit and risk assessment of cloud platform. Journal of Financial Crime, 20(1), 6-24.

Batyuk, L., Herpich, M., Camtepe, S. A., Raddatz, K., Schmidt, A. D., & Albayrak, S. (2011). Using static analysis for automatic assessment and mitigation of unwanted and malicious activities within Android applications. In Malicious and Unwanted Software (MALWARE), 2011 6th International Conference on (pp. 66-72). IEEE.

Bélanger, F., & Crossler, R. E. (2011). Privacy in the digital age: a review of information privacy research in information systems. MIS quarterly, 35(4), 1017-1042.

Cutillo, L. A., Molva, R., & Strufe, T. (2009). Safebook: A privacy-preserving online social network leveraging on real-life trust. IEEE Communications Magazine, 47(12), 94-101.

Fire, M., Goldschmidt, R., & Elovici, Y. (2014). Online social networks: threats and solutions. IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, 16(4), 2019-2036.

Gao, H., Hu, J., Huang, T., Wang, J., & Chen, Y. (2011). Security issues in online social networks. IEEE Internet Computing, 15(4), 56-63.

Jain, A. K., & Shanbhag, D. (2012). Addressing Security and Privacy Risks in Mobile Applications. IT Professional, 14(5), 28-33.

Kelly, D. (2009). Methods for evaluating interactive information retrieval systems with users. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval, 3(1–2), 1-224.

Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. P. (2015). Management information systems (Vol. 8). Prentice Hall.

Mason, R. O. (2017). Four ethical issues of the information age. In Computer Ethics (pp. 41-48). Routledge.

Siponen, M., & Vance, A. (2010). Neutralization: new insights into the problem of employee information systems security policy violations. MIS quarterly, 487-502.

Smith, H. J., Dinev, T., & Xu, H. (2011). Information privacy research: an interdisciplinary review. MIS quarterly, 35(4), 989-1016.

Subashini, S., & Kavitha, V. (2011). A survey on security issues in service delivery models of cloud computing. Journal of network and computer applications, 34(1), 1-11.

Sun, Y., Zhang, J., Xiong, Y., & Zhu, G. (2014). Data security and privacy in cloud computing. International Journal of Distributed Sensor Networks, 10(7), 190903.

Wang, C., Wang, Q., Ren, K., & Lou, W. (2010). Privacy-preserving public auditing for data storage security in cloud computing. In Infocom, 2010 proceedings ieee (pp. 1-9). Ieee.

Task 3

Introduction

Technology has dynamically transformed the way businesses operate and that change is the more witnessed in the recent years, as novel emerging technologies are coming up (Teece 2010). New technological advancements have put new demands on business organizations and has provided for new possibilities for the development of improved activities in the market as well as for the products. As there are many information technologies that are being adopted by various business organizations, possibilities of companies incorporating various technologies into their business procedures also varies. Some technologies have allowed for workers to share information from any part of the world, ordering of information and services remotely and implementing payment options in the cloud are some of the ways that technology has defined business such that technology has come to be viewed as an integral element in business (Clark & Landau 2010). Whichever way you look at it, technology and business cannot be separated. Without technology, it is not business as usual. Technology is business, and there cannot be business without technology. 

Technology as Business in Emerging Technologies

The current technologies are the main motivation behind the growth and expansion of the operation of business processes to the next level, and this has contributed to the advancement of the business world. Next level data analysis, applications with mobile cloud computing, the IoT with the rest of today’s technological advancement have led to the easy operation of model machinery which include shared services, the recreation of processes and worldwide provision. Many companies have altered their network layouts and policies in an effort to fit into these technological advancements to keep up with the speed and pace of the worldwide market (Anderson 2010).

For businesses to mature and prosper, for business deals to be sealed, for debts to be settled, a number of technologies have to be utilized to make this possible (Mansfield-Devine 2012). To enable for implementation of for global partnerships, the workforce of a number of technological tools have to be incorporated. Technology therefore, as it were, is a business issues. Below are some ways trends in information technology that have come to define technology as a business issue.

Advanced technological tools have made globalization in business possible. Human resource leads in business organizations must be ready to employment policies and strategies that will meet needs of employees who work from various locations in the world (Richardson & Director 2008).  While different regions in the world may have employees with varying views, research has shown that most workers are positive concerning technologies that would encourage more connections across variants of time and distance.

Due to teleworking technology, reporting for work no longer means to be physically in the office.  The emergence of office technology has practically changed how employees in business organizations work and allowing professionals to access their job portals from any place in the world (Richardson & Director 2008). Hence the teleworking movement has grown, as most workers are working from home. Businesses are consequently cutting down on costs of managing employees in their offices as a result of the teleworking movement.

As teleworking is a relatively novel technology, Human Resource leads in business organizations have to define strategies and polices that will accommodate the employees working from out of the office. Furthermore, teleworking may serve as an incentive to attract professionals who would want to balance work and other involvements.

Technology as Business in the cloud computing Platform

Because of the many advantages of outsourcing information from online cloud services, many business organizations are changing how clients can obtain the information that they require for completion of business transactions. Clients can now access information they need from any part of the world, ‘as a service model’ through the cloud computing platform. According to a research that was conducted by Deloitte, teleworking technologies have allowed workers to always be on schedule, which has consequently raised work expectations (Furnell, Tsaganidi & Phippen, 2008). For example, 45 % of employees feel obligated to respond to their hours after they have left their offices, while 47% have a feeling of guilt when they do not work either from the office or from home (Mason 2017).

New Technology – New Products – New Business

The expectations on the positive effect of technological advancement is rising as new technological mobility is being incorporated into the day to day business process (Basu & Jarnagin 2008). Businesses are therefore required to make use of these technological aspects, in an effort to fit into the global competitive market.

The portable devices are now in demand than the old business transactions that relied on the web platform. (Caldwell 2013). A larger portion of the small scale businesses make use of the mobile based transactions to generate conspicuous revenue. The mobile technology has forced many companies and businesses to restructure their activities in an effort to conform with the ever changing and expanding mobile technology. It is expected that the sprouting portable gadgets applications, device interconnection capacities, and improved communication shall extend to meet the worldwide needs. This needs include the ability to stay in track with the continuously increasing count of users of the smartphone. (Caldwell 2013).

Enterprises today confirm that they interact with a great number of its customers through the mobile platforms. These associations with their customers through this mobile based applications, has forced them to come up with better ways of receiving and handling the customer’s suggestions and issues. They are further faced to put up better ways of responding to them.

Moreover, technological innovations lead to provision of better products and growth and sprouting of new businesses as a result of new opportunities. This quite evident in the film and photography industry where new business has emerged with better and cheaper products (Mansfield-Devine 2011).  The advancement in technology has created major ripples in the business industry. The above mentioned scenarios are the vivid examples of the effect of technology in the business world.

Technological effect on forthcoming businesses

The business strategies and planning are greatly affected by technology. It has greater impact on policies and plans creation. This is however dependent on the type and advancement level of the technology in use. Many companies have embraced technology and are well aware that it is a requirement during business planning. Despite this attestation, many of them fail to come up with a technological based plan (Vidgen, Shaw & Grant 2017).

Bigger organizations tend list among the hindrance towards business advancement. Making use of the laid out technological availability has led to better revenue provision and better competitive advantage over upcoming and their peer competitors. It is well understood that many of the organizations’ leaders are always hesitant to incorporating emerging technologies in their organizations’. They believe in what they see and therefore require a working example of the technology and a list of the advantages and outcomes of incorporation before doing it (Mansfield-Devine 2011).  A change can be noted as various companies are absorbing the technology into their organizations as soon as they pop up in order to meet the demands of their clients and the global market thus ensuring that they have gained completive advantage. It is noticeable that with time various organizations are now putting resources in testing new technologies. With this, the global competition is expected to stiffen. The few companies that have failed to adapt technology into their processes will be forced to hop in or be outwit by the stiffness in the market.

Conclusion

With the fast evolution of technology and the emergence of new business technologies, technology is really taking shape as a key business requirement. Hence, many researchers are taking on researching about technology as a business issue. Technology has really become a part of business, and the line of demarcation between business and technology is progressively diminishing. Business that are fast in adapting to new technologies are expected to form a robust and flexible organizations that would be willing to adapt to changes in order to meet needs of the dynamically changing market. Both advanced business organizations and beginner companies agree that business in the current technologically advancing world is heavily and primarily reliant on technology, and that without technology there cannot be business. Hence, security is not just a technology issue, but a business issue.

References

Anderson, R. J. (2010). Security engineering: a guide to building dependable distributed systems. John Wiley & Sons.

Basu, A., & Jarnagin, C. (2008). How to tap IT’s hidden potential. Wall Street Journal, 3.

Caldwell, T. (2013). Plugging the cyber-security skills gap. Computer Fraud & Security, 2013(7), 5-10.

Clark, D. D., & Landau, S. (2010). The problem isn't attribution: it's multi-stage attacks. In Proceedings of the Re-architecting the Internet Workshop (p. 11). ACM.

Furnell, S., Tsaganidi, V., & Phippen, A. (2008). Security beliefs and barriers for novice Internet users. Computers & Security, 27(7-8), 235-240.

Mansfield-Devine, S. (2011). Hacktivism: assessing the damage. Network Security, 2011(8), 5-13.

Mansfield-Devine, S. (2012). Interview: BYOD and the enterprise network. Computer fraud & security, 2012(4), 14-17.

Mason, R. O. (2017). Four ethical issues of the information age. In Computer Ethics (pp. 41-48). Routledge.

Richardson, R., & Director, C. S. I. (2008). CSI computer crime and security survey. Computer security institute, 1, 1-30.

Schneier, B. (2011). Secrets and lies: digital security in a networked world. John Wiley & Sons.

Teece, D. J. (2010). Business models, business strategy and innovation. Long range planning, 43(2-3), 172-194.

Vidgen, R., Shaw, S., & Grant, D. B. (2017). Management challenges in creating value from business analytics. European Journal of Operational Research, 261(2), 626-639.

Task 4 

Enterprise systems are fast rising to become the first choice of many business organizations across the world (Seddon, Calvert & Yang 2010). As such, more organizations and businesses are embracing the systems, as they have shown evidence to increase business value.

When enterprise systems are effectively implemented, there is observed to be many benefits like reduction of error, reducing transactional time, and notable of productivity in organizations (Ramdani, Kawalek & Lorenzo 2009). This will lead to efficiencies in operations of organizations. Therefore, the contribution of enterprise systems can be accepted as ‘adding value to business.’ Exploiting enterprise systems as IT platforms will enable businesses to have better competition in the market. 

Literature that has been done on the business value of enterprise systems indicates that means by which enterprise systems enhance business  value is by increasing the operational efficiency (Bhattacharya, Seddon, & Scheepers 2010).

Furthermore, enterprise systems have been found to enhance operations of an organization for more than ten years now (Nightingale 2009).  In fact, the major reason why enterprise system exist is to offer efficiency in operation in the process of adopting organizations.  Many advanced organizations that have tried to use ERP systems have come out with many benefits. Furthermore, a study that has been done involving 190 business organizations have revealed that adoption of ERP systems greatly tend to make business organizations more profitable (Da Xu 2011).

Enterprise systems and business value

The real benefit of enterprise systems should go beyond enhancing operational efficiency. Recently, business enterprises are being looked at as not just means of providing operational efficiency, but as a way of promoting business value (Ayal & Seidman, 2009). Some of the benefits of business enterprises include the following: managerial, strategic, organizational, operational and infrastructural.

Case Studies

Success has always followed firms that have adopted CRM/ERP systems. SAP is a leading distributor of enterprise systems.  A study carried out by this entity involving 190 companies that had implemented enterprise systems revealed that adoption of CRM /ERP systems tends to increase the profit turn out of business organizations (Ceccagnoli, Forman, Huang & Wu 2012). For example, when Microsoft implemented ERP system, it gained efficiencies in operation such as reduction of its planning cycles, and ended up saving 18 million US dollars (Tamm, Seddon Shanks & Reynolds 2011). Nestle, when it adopted SAP enterprise system, it led to operational efficiencies which reduced operational expenses and increased investment. Finally, the last case study to consider is the army of the United States. When the army embraced ERP for its HR and finance logistics, it was able to attain its objective of ‘one army one enterprise.  All these case studies lead to the following propositions (Bhattacharya, Seddon, & Scheepers 2010).

1. Enterprise systems achieve efficiencies in operation of adopting organizations.
2. Enterprise systems give adopting organizations an impetus to carry out mergers and acquisitions.
3. Enterprise systems allow business organizations to be innovative.
4. Enterprise systems allow strategic making decisions to be formulated by organizations.

References

Ayal, M., & Seidman, A. (2009). An empirical investigation of the value of integrating enterprise information systems: the case of medical imaging informatics. Journal of Management Information Systems, 26(2), 43-68.

Bhattacharya, P. J., Seddon, P. B., & Scheepers, R. (2010). Enabling Strategic Transformations with Enterprise Systems: Beyond Operational Efficiency. In ICIS (p. 55).

Ceccagnoli, M., Forman, C., Huang, P., & Wu, D. J. (2012). Cocreation of value in a platform ecosystem! The case of enterprise software. MIS quarterly, 263-290.

Da Xu, L. (2011). Enterprise Systems: State-of-the-Art and Future Trends. IEEE Trans. Industrial Informatics, 7(4), 630-640.

Nightingale, D. (2009). Principles of enterprise systems. European Journal of Information Systems, 11(3), 39-46.

Ramdani, B., Kawalek, P., & Lorenzo, O. (2009). Predicting SMEs' adoption of enterprise systems. Journal of enterprise information management, 22(1/2), 10-24.

Seddon, P. B., Calvert, C., & Yang, S. (2010). A multi-project model of key factors affecting organizational benefits from enterprise systems. MIS quarterly, 34(2), 305-328.

Tamm, T., Seddon, P. B., Shanks, G. G., & Reynolds, P. (2011). How does enterprise architecture add value to organizations? CAIS, 28, 10. 

Task 5 

A business process is a list of activities that are used to accomplish a certain goal or to bring out something valuable that can benefit an organization or a client (Nonaka 2008). Business process analysis involves the process of managing an entire organization at the strategic level. One of the importance of business process analysis is that it promotes effective management of an organization (Trkman 2010).

Business process analysis involves tools and techniques that support management of operational procedures that may include applications and documents or other information sources. Business process models are very useful to an organization or a business companies. Business process analysis is considered as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) methodology for effective measurement of company processes through team work and empowering of the employees.  Following are five importance of business process analysis (Abrahamsson, Salo, Ronkainen & Warsta, 2017).

1. Importance of Business process Models.

Business process analysis aligns business operations with novel business strategies

In order for a business strategy to be modified, a change of operations must take place. Business process analysis enables the operational change to take place by enhancing the following activities (Al-Debei & Avison 2010).

1. Helping top managers to maintain consistent processes while managing the general strategy of an organization.
2. It ensures that right operations are carried out by workers and team members, so as to avoid failures.
3. It helps in highlighting areas of weaknesses and inefficient processes and thus helps in fixing them.
4. It enables the changeover process to be agile and communication to be clear in order to take on new business opportunities to meet any challenges.

2. Improves communication in the process

One of the key determinants of the success of businesses is a clear idea of what they are enabled to do, and how they are going to do it.  The role of each team member should be clearly highlighted. As such, communication in the processes will be clear, and consequently the whole process will run seamlessly. The advantages of effective communication in the process of strategy modification are as follows (Scherer & Palazzo 2011).

1. Knowledge will be transferred faster and uniformly to the involved teams.
2. Potential dangers and losses will be minimized.
3. It will help top managers to effectively communicate.
4. It sparks into life the documentation of the process initiative.

3. Increases consistency

When business processes are well designed and consistently applied, success follows. Business process analysis enhances this in the following ways (Zott, Amit, & Massa 2011

1. It officially documents all formerly existing processes.
2. Enables processes to be executed consistently and therefore removes the inconsistencies of man.
3. Eliminates presuppositions and much of guess work.
4. It enables exceptions to be executed away within the shortest time possible.

4. enhances operational efficiencies

No one would want to have inefficiencies in the operations of their organizations or businesses. Business process analysis enables for top managers to ensure that process are running seamlessly (Carlsson 2012). The business process analysis provides for this through the following steps:

1. Through simulation, business process analysis enables management executive to understand the flow of processes, and so helps them to determine risks or any inconsistencies and mitigate them on time.
2. It makes clear any spots within the flow of processes that need to be fixed.
3. It provides for trial and experimentation before implementation of the actual change. Thus it provides room for change.
4. It helps in the proper management and utilization of resources.

5. It helps to Gain a Competitive Advantage

This is the overall outcome of a properly formulated business process model. A company that has invested in simulation of its business processes will without doubt gain a competitive advantage in the market. Furthermore, the organization will be more aligned to its business strategies, it will be more flexible and agile and will have a good control of processes.

Role of business process analysis

Business process Management technologies help in a great way to enhance the ability of an organization to manage its processes, both internal and external. Business process modeling/analysis encourages an organization to reengineer its business processes, which will lead to modification of its information systems (Nonaka 2008).

References

Abrahamsson, P., Salo, O., Ronkainen, J., & Warsta, J. (2017). Agile software development methods: Review and analysis. arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439.

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