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Summary Information Systems Strategy and Management
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Summary of Information Systems Strategy and Management for MA1 Business Engineering at the VUB.
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Information Systems Strategy and ManagementLecture 1: ISSM and the role of IS/IT
“Typing might be more efficient, but experts will tell you that writing by hand allows you to
learn better, retain more information, and stimulates your brain.”
“If technology is the answer, what was the problem?” à Technology is always the means to
an end, but it always needs to be linked to a business need/opportunity that can be fulfilled
using this technology, as the technology in itself without a need for it will not sell.
ð Market changes & opportunities as a driver vs. Technology opportunities as a driver
Some Thoughts and Questions:
• What problem does IS/IT solve? What opportunity does it (help) exploit?
• What is the role of technology + what do we need beyond technology?
• What alternative solution options exist?
• How are we organized to create, maintain, operate, support, and decommission IS/IT?
• What is the value of IS/IT?
o Value of data and information
o Value of products & services enabled or improved by IS/IT
o Internal in the organization and/or external to the organization (suppliers,
partners, customers, society, ...)
Information Systems Strategy & Management:
Big Picture:
1
,Information:
• Organizations want to become ”data-driven” à What does that mean? à Have to be
“Decision-driven”
• Too much data! More data does not necessarily lead to better decisions.
• Decisions:
o Supporting internal decision making & processes
o Supporting external (customer- or partner- (e.g., supplier) facing) decision
making & processes
• Feedback loop from results to data
Systems:
• A system is ‘a set of inter-related components that work together in a particular
environment to perform whatever functions are required to achieve the system’s
objective’.
• Data science: hindsight à insight à foresight
o Analysis (of historic data) + analytics (e.g., using statistics, machine learning +
business knowledge) to make predictions
o Tools: hardware & software
Information Systems (IS):
• An information system is ‘a system that gets the right information to the right person
in the right place at the right time’.
• Information systems (IS) are the means by which people and organizations, by
increasingly utilizing technology, gather, process, store, use and disseminate
information (intangible à how people use IT to come to business decisions/actions).
• The domain of interest for IS researchers includes the study of theories and practices
related to the social and technological phenomena which determine the development,
use and effects of information systems in organizations and society.
• It is thus concerned with the purposeful utilization of information technology, not the
technology per se. IS is part of the wider domain of human language, cognition,
behavior, and communication.
2
, • Computer science point of view: structuring, processing, shaping data
• Business & organizational point of view: economic, organization & communication
structure
• Also non-organizational use of IT: such as in social networking, computer gaming,
mobile personal usage.
Information (and Communication) Technologies (IT):
• I(C)T refers specifically to technology, essentially hardware, software, and
telecommunications networks (tangible), including devices of all kinds: computers,
sensors, cables, satellites, servers, routers, PCs, phones, tablets; and all types of
software: operating systems, data management, enterprise and social applications and
personal productivity tools.
• IT facilitates the acquisition and collection, processing, storing, delivery, sharing and
presentation of information and other digital content, such as video and voice.
Strategy:
• What is the role of IS/IT in relation to the business strategy?
• What drives what? Is business strategy driving IS/IT strategy or vice versa?
• Link between strategy and decisions + actions
Management (ensure things work well and reliably):
• “-ilities”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_system_quality_attributes à Quality
attributes (accessibility, adaptability, etc.)
• Software quality:
o Software functional quality reflects how well it complies with or conforms to a
given design, based on functional requirements or specifications. It is the
degree to which the correct software was produced.
o Software structural quality refers to how it meets non-functional requirements
that support the delivery of the functional requirements, such as robustness or
maintainability. It has a lot more to do with the degree to which the software
works as needed.
• Governance:
o Data and information quality requirements & control
o Guidelines & principles: e.g., always follow an API-first approach, technology
stack choices
o Build – Buy – Borrow IT
o Corporate governance (cf. ethical use of data)
o Risk & Security management
3
, • Project process:
o Project management methodologies, like “waterfall” (inflexible à Project
Management stays in line with original plan, whatever happens) and “agile”
(flexible à Project Management can deviate from original plan) methodologies
o Project sourcing
o IS/IT implementation in the organization + towards partners and customers
• BizDevOps tries to cross the boundaries between business (request and use IT),
development (build IT), and operations (run and support IT)
ð One could argue that the ‘strategy’ pillar drives the other pillars, i.e., an organization’s
strategy determines its information needs, what systems it requires to handle its
information (needs) and how it manages data, systems, and projects. This is a
reasonable approach.
However, a feedback loop from the other pillars should influence an organization’s
strategy. For example, do we learn unexpected things from our data and are we open
to act upon those learnings, i.e., adapt our strategy? What systems can we realistically
put in place (e.g., unavailable people skills may force you to rethink parts of your
strategy)? What level of quality management or risk reduction is feasible at what cost?
Agile Project Management Methodologies:
This is an example to show that many ”models” and approaches exist to describe and handle
all aspects of ISSM (here specifically some aspects of IS/IT project management).
• Lists ”some” agile project management methodologies, simply to demonstrate this is a
very active and broad domain in its own right.
• Similarly, many frameworks exist for other parts of the ISSM Big Picture. Some will be
discussed in this course.
4
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