Реферат: Strategic Information Systems Essay Research Paper The

(3) Innovation

Innovation is the adoption of the new products or processes. Product innovation involves the creation of new products, or of new features in existing products, in order to satisfy customer needs or wants which were previously unmet.

Process innovation, on the other hand, improves the efficiency or effectiveness of a process involved in the production or delivery of a product. It generally addresses one or more of the links in an enterprise or industry value-chain. It may involve technological change, organisational change, or often both. An innovation thrust can be aggressive, or employed defensively to imitate or neutralise a competitor’s innovation.

(4) Growth

There are several ways in which an enterprise can grow:

? product growth, which may involve:

o ‘length’, i.e. new products of the same kind as existing ones (e.g. a PC supplier may add laptops and handhelds to its desktop lines);

o ‘depth’, i.e. variants to existing products (e.g. additional options which can be selected by customers when buying a desktop); and

o ‘width’, i.e. new products which complement existing ones (e.g. modems, printers and accessories).

? functional growth, by performing additional business functions. Often this is through ‘vertical integration’ along the industry value-chain, which may provide benefits from direct control over supply, distribution or service, such as cost reduction, quality assurance or reliability. Sometimes the new functions are support services, such as the gathering and delivery of industry statistics;

? geographic growth, by acquiring from additional locations, or selling into additional locations;

? lateral growth, by applying excess capacity, by-products or expertise, in order to address new marketplaces.

Growth of any kind tends to be associated with the economies of scale or scope mentioned earlier.

(5) Alliance

By an alliance, Wiseman means a combination of two or more groups or individuals, whether intra- or supra- to the enterprise, which works together to achieve a common objective. Four types of alliance are identified:

? product integration;

? product development;

? product extension; and

? product distribution.

Other important contributions have been made to the process whereby strategic systems are, can be and/or should be uncovered (Wiseman & MacMillan 1984, Rackoff et al 1985, Earl 1986, EDP Analyzer 1986a, 1986b, Vitale et al 1986, Somogyi & Galliers 1987, Madrick 1987, Henderson et al 1987, Lederer & Mendelow 1988, Lederer & Sethi 1988, Laudon & Turner 1989, Main & Short 1989, Clemons & Weber 1990, Clemons 1991, Reich & Huff 1991, Dennis et al 1991, Lederer & Gardiner 1992a, Yetton & Johnston 1993).

Directions of Development

One of the findings by Scott Morton’s `Management in the 1990s’ Program’ was that IT is a critical enabler of the re-creation (redefinition) of the organisation. The recognition and exploitation of IT capabilities is fundamental to strategic choices of business scope, governance mechanisms, organisational reconfiguration, and competitive actions in the marketplace.

Approached from a different perspective, IT can be used to create an opportunity for change in organisations, whether or not the technology is actually central to the delivery of the benefits sought. The business process redesign and business process re-engineering (BPR) movements became highly influential during the early 1990s (Hammer 1990, Hammer & Champy 1993). The point was reached where it was difficult to submit papers to conferences, even those of an academic nature, without including the phrase in the title or abstract.

BPR is a further development of the enterprise value-chain notion. What it essentially does is to re-assert that organisational process is more important than organisational structure, and that organisational structure (form) must be determined by what it is that the enterprise does (function). IT is an enabler for BPR, because information systems support data flows, and are hence intrinsically oriented toward function rather than form, and because IT requires re-conception and re-development periodically, and such re-developments cause considerable upheaval and can therefore be used as a catalyst or opportunity for greater change than mere re-automation of existing arrangements.

Other recent theme of relevance to SIS is assessment of IT’s contribution to financial performance (e.g. Floyd & Woodridge 1990).

In addition to these well-established lines of analysis, there is a number of areas in which maturation is incomplete. The comments in the remainder of this section are therefore particularly judgmental and tentative.

A first concern is the prevalance of the use of the terms ‘comparative advantage’ and ‘competitive advantage’ as though they were equivalent and interchangeable. The notion of ‘comparative advantage’ was developed many years ago, as one of Ricardo’s contributions to ‘classical’ economics. It refers to the notion of market forces allocating resources to nations where they would be relatively most productive, and is therefore applicable at high levels of aggregation, e.g. national and regional economies.

The idea of ‘competitive’ advantage differs from comparative advantage in the scale at which it operates. Rather than relating to a broad geo-political area, competitive advantage accrues to individual corporations, provided that they are operating in relatively free-market environments. Although the notion of competitive advantage also originated in micro-economics, it has been much used in marketing and management strategy. The terms are becoming somewhat confused, in that, where enterprises which have competitive advantage are clustered within a country, that country may be said to derive a competitive advantage (Porter 1989, Adcock et al 1993, Soh et al 1993).

Another matter that creates difficulties has been the marked tendency to discuss competitive strategy predominantly in terms of leadership, or ‘first-mover’ status. The sufficiency of this approach is overdue for careful examination. It is entirely tenable for an organisation to intentionally defer aggressive moves, and instead consciously seek ’second-mover’ or ‘late-adopter’ status. Circumstances in which senior executives may judge this to be the appropriate strategy include where: