Business Information Systems I Review II A Business

Business Information Systems I Review II

A Business Perspective on Information Systems • Business Strategies: • Decreasing costs, attracting new customers, increasing customer loyalty, increasing sales, developing new products and services, entering new markets… • When business strategies match core competencies: Competitive Advantage • What is competitive advantage? • Why is it usually temporary?

Staying Competitive • To be able stay competitive, firms need information from the environment. • Business intelligence is the process of gathering information about the competitive environment, including competitors’ plans, activities, and products, to improve a company’s ability to succeed. • Managers use this business intelligence and develop competitive advantage by following analyses:

Staying Competitive • 1. The Five Forces Model (for evaluating industry attractiveness – it is about where to compete). • 2. The three generic strategies (It is about which market to operate: a broad market or focused strategy- for choosing a business focus). • 3. Value chain analysis (It is about how to compete - for executing business strategies).

Value Chain Analysis • Porter creates value chain analysis to identify the competitive advantages. • VCA views the firms as series of business processes that each add value to the product or service. • VCA analyzes the organization’s activities to identify where the value can be added.

The Overview of Decision Making • Types of decisions at different organizational levels: • Operational: Daily operations, closest to customer, routine decisions, short term; structured decisions. • Managerial: short to medium range decisions, how the organization should achieve the goals and objectives set by its strategy, semi-structured decisions. • Strategic: overall business strategies, highly unstructured decisions

Information Characteristics for Different Levels of Management Source: Curtis and Cobham (2005), Business Information Systems Analysis Design and Practice, 5 th ed, p. 10

Business Process • BP is the manner in which work is organized, coordinated, and focused to produce a valuable product or service. • It is the collection of activities that are required to produce products or services.

Business Process • Unique to the firm. • Supported by flows of material, information, and knowledge • Every business can be seen as a collection of business processes.

Systems for Different Management Groups • 2 types of information system: 1. Transaction processing system 2. Business intelligence systems a. Management information systems b. Decision support systems c. Executive Support Systems

References • Laudon K. and J. Laudon (2014), Management Information Systems Managing the Digital Firm, Pearson, 13 th ed. • Baltzan P. (2018), Business Driven Information Systems, Mc. Graw Hill Education, 6 th Ed. • Porter M. and V. Millar (1985), How Information Systems Gives You Competitive Advantage, HBR