Form Of Information System Research Articles

Interpreting Integration with Respect to Information Systems in Organizations – Image, theory and Reality

The integration of information systems (IS) is a phrase which is commonly used in both research and practice within the IS field and across many organizational contexts. This paper uses a historical review to explore how the image of integrated IS has been constructed, evolved over three decades and how this has resulted in the widespread acceptance of idealized goals and benefits. A literature search for an underlying theoretical basis for the concept of systems integration is made, highlighting a diversity of opinion. Two case studies are used to examine the meaning of integration relative to the images and ideals, theory and reality. The study concludes that there is an urgent need for better conceptual and theoretical models of integration to enable more effective discourse of the concept. These models must also encompass and include more diverse non-technical factors for the adoption of more complex forms of IS.

Strategic Information Systems Planning in the Public Sector

Strategic information systems (IS) are touted throughout the trade press and the academic literature as the way to achieve the greatest benefits from an investment in new information technology (IT). Using document imaging within state agencies as the backdrop, research hypotheses about the existence and comprehensiveness of strategic IS planning in the public sector are tested. Through a nationwide mail survey completed by state agency IT managers, the findings strongly support a relationship between formal IS strategic planning and an interest in strategic IS. State agencies that engage in comprehensive, formal strategic IS planning are able to foster an environment more supportive of the use of IT within state government.

The uses and abuses of information in contracting for speech and language rehabilitation

ABSTRACT This paper is concerned with the challenge to the profession represented by the purchase of rehabilitation by third parties, which is becoming the norm in the UK as well as in many other countries. Central to this process is the development of formal information systems as a basis for decision‐making about resource allocation. Experience of such procedures in other fields has let to the development of a body of knowledge and theory about the positive and negative aspects of such changes. These concepts are introduced and applied to speech and language rehabilitation. The particular information requirements of rehabilitation purchase are identified in more detail and examples of how they might be met are supplied. The examples are based on established and experimental information systems which are already being used in this context. The paper concludes that the profession must be pro‐actively involved in the specification of such decision support systems if the potential benefits are to be realised and the pitfalls avoided.

The Changing Role of the Information Manager

Explores the implications of one model associated with the changing business environment, for the nature of information management and the role of the information manager. Peters′ model of a successful business is characterized by an organization which: has niche oriented market creators; possesses a flat management structure with fewer layers; is fast in responding and adapting; has quality concerns; is internationalist, even if small; possesses smaller or stand‐alone business units within bigger organizations gain sharing, valuing participation and adding value through people. Argues that in such organizations, effective information management is of central importance, but may not always be easy to achieve. In particular, smaller businesses have a reputation for poor utilization of formal information systems. In such an environment it is especially important that informal information management approaches be exploited to the full. A better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of informal and formal information management within smaller organizations and stand‐alone business units is essential for successful businesses.

Information Systems and Internal Organization: A Study of the Dow Chemical Company, 1890–1914

My dissertation examines the relationship between innovation in information processing and innovation in management organization and strategy. Economists and historians have for years credited new information systems and new accounting techniques with providing necessary support for the growth of the large firm. More recently some have taken to blaming these same innovations for the decline in competitiveness and short term vision of American manufacturers. Frequently, however, little reference is made to the actual content of these changes and their implications for management decision-making. My dissertation attempts to evaluate these claims by examining the managerial demands placed upon the information system of one manufacturing firm during a period of organizational, technological, and strategic change. This case study draws on the Herbert Dow papers, which include company correspondence, financial statements, factory reports, lab books, etc. These records were formerly kept in boxes in the Company vault, protected by the secretary to Herbert Dow's successors (his son and then his son-in-law) whose diligence prevented their destruction. They are now housed in the company's archives: a one room schoolhouse where Mrs. Grace Dow taught before she married Herbert Dow. Before submerging myself in these voluminous records, I surveyed the literature on accounting systems in manufacturing firms during the late nineteenth century. Based on studies of the paper, nail, ice, textile, boat, auto, and machine tool industries, I propose a new periodization of changes in information systems. This periodization focuses less on changes in accounting technique than on changes in the function of information systems over this period. The first formal information systems were introduced to monitor people and processes. In firms where there had been increases in labor input

Aligning DSS development with organization development

One of the fundamental assumptions underpinning the strategic school of management is that the most appropriate structure for an organization is dependent on its strategy; strategy drives the structure and a change in strategy requires a change in administrative structure and also in formal information systems. Rockart and Scott Morton have proposed that information technology (IT) may have an essential role in organizational change. However, only a few researchers have studied MIS/DSS in the context of organizational development. Most of the research has been based on technological imperative. If an organizational imperative is adopted this leads to the consideration of the use of IT in the context of organization development. At present organizations are developing their strategies for the 1990's which demand structural changes or at least development of the organization's control and decision-making processes. The essential point is that the changes also effect the information needs of organizational actors. Thus, organizational change quite often requires the existing information systems to be reconstructed or even replaced. For MIS/DSS development the establishment of new information channels offers a challenging task. In this study a process approach to the analysis of the relationship of OD and MIS/DSS development is applied. The change process in a Finnish public-sector organization is observed in a longitudinal manner. In the first phase of this study the author's role was to assist in aligning the planning of a single information system — Workplace Information System (WIS) — with other organizational change processes. Empirical data was gathered through action research. One of the most important findings of this study was that new WIS options were created through organizational learning. Both researchers and organizational actors learned to focus on WIS as an opportunity for organizational change.

Marketing Information and Decision Support Systems for Services

Discusses the relevance of formal marketing information systems for services marketing. Examines information technology and its potential for services marketing, presenting a design for an integrated services marketing information system. Examines emerging technologies and their applications to service marketing problems. Considers the overlap between marketing and operations for service businesses. Concludes with a discussion of an implementation vector for exploiting the benefits of this overlap and of related managerial issues.

An information system profile of U.S. companies

The information system (IS) characteristics of U.S. companies were surveyed to produce an overall IS profile. This profile was examined for statistical differences as a function of size of company and stage of IS sophistication. In general, most firms surveyed are in the so-called integration or data administration stage. There were apparently no significant differences found in EDP/MIS expenditures, computing hardware expenditures, and MIS-supported activities, due to the organization's stage of IS sophistication. The size of company is found to have no significant effect on the stage of IS sophistication. Most companies have formal IS planning and control systems and some form of distributed data processing (DDP). The majority of the companies use software for conventional programming and database management purposes with very little emphsis on their use in decision modeling and statistical analysis. Quite surprisingly, IS is still being used primarily for operational and management controls rather than for strategic planning.

DIE EFFEKTIWITEIT VAN LANDBOUVOORLIGTING MET VERWYSING NA DIE KOMMERSRIëLE LANDBOUSEKTOR IN SUID-AFRIKA.

Abstract The effectiveness of information can be measured in terms of the extent to which it enables clients to adapt to changing circumstances. The degree of the development of such an adaptation depends on the value of the information passed on to the clients. The provision of appropriate and relevant information is, besides the conceptual framework on which it is developed, also influenced by the underlying institutional and operational frameworks. There are two distinct paradigms in the agricultural extension sphere of the RSA e.g. the technical-educational and economic, each with their own separate institutions. As a result of the total dominance of the technical-educational paradigm, the economic paradigm has not come into its own with the resultant poor development of both formal information systems and the managerial resource in agriculture. The ineffectiveness of the agricultural extension framework in the RSA in terms of the generation of information is further enhanced by the existence of separ...

Business Intelligence in the Post‐modern Era

In the post‐modern era, the business environment of the firm is becoming increasingly turbulent and chaotic. Many firms have responded by using business intelligence, usually in the form of scanning departments and formal information systems. However, these methods have not proved to be successful. This article examines some reasons why they have failed. With reference to empirical studies, it is argued that they have failed because decision makers prefer other sources of information when it comes to environmental issues. The article is also reformulating the problem with a changing environment and suggests an alternative, and post‐modern, way of treating environmental information.

The Management of Resources: An Overview

Occupational therapy managers have to set objectives which correlate with those for the health and social services and work towards achieving them through the management of resources. Cooperation in the collection of data, to give an adequate overview of the needs of the service as well as the actual resources available, requires an understanding of formal information systems: Körner, performance indicators, resource management, clinical budgeting and performance reviews can be used to manage services more efficiently and realistically.

Information Intensive Modeling

The interaction of formal information systems and organizational decision models will be examined in this article. It is conjectured that decision models and processes not only determine the information requirements, but that they are influenced by the organizational information systems that are designed to support them. T his type of circular relationship between the decision models and the information systems undermines the success of requirements analysis which traditionally views information systems as supporting structures for the decision models, and ignores their counter effect on the decision models. Four different examples are presented to demonstrate the effect of information systems on organizational decision models. The examples range form algorithmic to highly unstructured and speculative, but they all suggest that information-intensive models are qualitatively different from their information-poor counterparts.

Decision Support Systems and the Traditional Computer Information System Function: An Examination of Relationships during DSS Application Development

:Decision support systems differ in a variety of ways from other forms of computer-based information systems. The specific relationship of a decision support system to the formal information system function with regard to application development has been a topic of speculation. This article reports on such relationships as found from an investigation of eighteen decision support systems.

Information Needs of Top MIS Managers

Despite the importance of the role of the Chief MIS Executive, little is known about the Information Needs of Top MIS Managers. This article uses a Critical Success Factors (CSF) approach to explore the information needs of these managers. It has been widely speculated that top MIS Managers are remiss in their use of technology they provide to others. This article also reports on a study of the formal information systems used personally by chief MIS executives and contrasts these results with their needs as revealed by the CSF analysis.

Informal accounting information systems: Some tentative findings

This article reports research results regarding (1) the existence of informal information and (2) the relationships between formal and informal accounting information systems. The existence of informal accounting information systems was found to be widespread. The case for informal accounting information systems as a useful and necessary adjunct to formal systems is presented. Further, a factor analysis confirmed the belief that respondents viewed the formal and informal accounting information systems to be conceptually different. Contrary to our a priori beliefs the existence of these informal systems was not importantly correlated with formal accounting information system inadequacies.

Science Information and Governmental Decision-Making: The Case of the National Science Foundation

Some of the more familiar models of bureaucratic decision-making have been developed largely in response to perceived inadequacies of the classic economic rationality model. These models, including the satisficing, disjointed incrementalism, mixed-scanning and sequential decision-making models (all based on assumptions of sub-optimality), differ in respect to logical structure, range of application, assumptions about the decision-maker and assumptions about the decision environment. On one point, however, they agree: the cost of information is a critical variable in determining decision processes and decision outcomes. Herbert Simon lead the way in arguing that the rational model is not only unrealistic but may not even be useful as an ideal since it may encourage decision-makers to lose sight of satisfactory (but not optimal) decision-making quality. I Now that incrementalism, in one form or another, is the most widely accepted version of reality, some organization theorists and public administrators have begun to be concerned with a problem that might seem to some theorists, almost reactionary: how might it be possible to provide systematically a broader and higher quality information base for public decision processes? The complexities of contemporary policy-making are such that unquestioning and uncritical acceptance of incrementalism often seems inappropriate. Many have attempted to improve on incrementalism by reducing the costs of information and have often looked to computer scientists for help. Designers of formal information systems have long been concerned (in theory, if not always performance) with reducing the marginal cost of information. In many cases the hardware solution has proven viable-especially in those instances where the information that was to be infused into decision-making processes was descriptive (rather than explanatory), easily coded, decomposible, and readily available along some convenient channel. Unfortunately, information needs in policy-making often do not fit these specifications and, to date, little progress has been made toward infusing more complex kinds of information into public decision-making.

Formal and informal information systems and rural change in Papua New Guinea

Summary Solutions to the problem of equitable spatial distribution of the benefits of social, economic and political change will have incorporated within them a better understanding of the spatial diffusion process. Diffusion and information flow are directly related. This paper examines the operation of formal and informal information systems in rural areas of Papua New Guinea and suggests ways in which the flow of information into rural villages may be made more effective.

The chief executive and his information system

The authors examine the attitudes of British chief executives towards their information systems using recent survey evidence. They discuss the chief executive's individual computation needs and the extent to which he satisfies these personally, his attitudes towards computer-based information and corporate models, and his general informational and analytical requirements. Of particular interest, is the relative contribution as judged by chief executives of intuitive judgement, computer-based analysis and manual analysis respectively to strategic decision-taking; comparative valuations of formal and informal information systems are also ascertained. On the evidence provided by the chief executives, future prospects for computer systems and modelling techniques at strategic level are generally sound although it is difficult to see them achieving the dominance at top managerial level once envisaged by the more optimistic and imaginative management scientists and cyberneticians.

Information system design, organisational control and optimality

The paper identifies the importance of the Model of the User which is implicit in the development of formal information systems. The nature of the model is examined with particular reference to social variables; the relation between the criterion function and organisational goals is also discussed. The paper concludes with some thoughts on the implications for the nature of an appropriate methodology for systems development, and for its role in the organisation.

Decision systems analysis in industrial marketing

With so many mathematically bowdlerized, and computerized, versions of the application of systems analysis abroad it is a pleasure to welcome this purely descriptive account of the application of decision system analysis (DSA) to four marketing decision systems. Professors Capon and Hulbert describe the application of DSA to pricing, forecasting, advertising and new product development that they carried out with the cooperation of a large, multinational, British firm specialized in the marketing of processed raw materials to secondary processors. From their experience the authors conclude that the application of DSA to key marketing decisions yielded considerable insight into the problems faced by the company; and that the majority of problems identified were amenable to managerial solutions without formal information system development. DSA is recommended as a means of auditing marketing activity but the reader is warned that DSA can be labour intensive and expensive if there is a tendency to seek too much unnecessary detail.