Topic Research

Topic Research

IS Strategy Triangle

The IS Strategy Triangle (Pearlson, Saunders, & Galletta, 2015, p. 18) is a simple framework for describing the alignment necessary with business systems and for understanding the impact of IS on organizations. This framework is called the Information Systems Strategy Triangle because it relates business strategy with IS strategy and organizational strategy. IS strategy can itself affect and is affected by changes in a firm’s business and organizational design. IS strategy always involves consequences—intended or not—within business and organizational strategies. This framework helps organizations find out whether or not their Organizational Strategy and Information Strategy are in alignment with their Business Strategy.

Organizational Structure

The Organizational Structure (Pearlson, Saunders, & Galletta, 2015, p. 58) which is represented by the chart above, illustrates how different organizational strategy decisions are made by top level management. This helps enable the firm to relay it’s message(s) from top to bottom ensuring each department is aligned with the company’s business strategy. The four structures above is a design that ensures that decisions are being correctly assigned according to the company’s power structure. Every company has some kind of reporting relationship that typically reflects the flow of communications and decision making within each department and through the chain of commands. Now, some traditional companies tend to be more hierarchical, flat, or matrix, while the networked structure is a modern and newer organizational form. 

Business Transformation 

There are two different types of business perspectives when a manager take a business process perspective. They can maximize the value that customers and their management receive by wisely managing the flow of their tasks at hand.  A silo perspective is used when different units such as the marketing, operations, finance departments are self contained without it being a cross functional business processes. This makes it very difficult for departments to engage with one another when issues arise and they need to serve their customers. 

In contrast, the business process perspective (Pearlson, Saunders, & Galletta, 2015, p. 103) offers the managers to analyze the processes and cases much easier. It gives them the accessibility to use the resources in the company from other departments much more efficiently. Ultimately resulting in a much better quality of service to their customer base. For example, customers may not need to wait on the line or speak to multiple people in order to get assistance. Having one representative to speak to is far greater than speaking to a variety of specialists in order to assist the customer with one simple issue. 

ERP System 

ERP (enterprise resource planning) system (Pearlson, Saunders, & Galletta, 2015, p. 110) is designed to large companies manage the fragmentation of information. These information are from individual desktops, different departments and business units computers across the company. Later on, ERP II system came out. It can make company information immediately available to external stakeholders, such as customers and partners. ERP II enables e‐business by integrating business processes between an enterprise and its trading partners.  (Pearlson, Saunders, & Galletta, 2015, p. 111) Furthermore, ERP system includes some characteristics: integration, packages, best practices, some assembly required and evolving. These characteristics reflect some advantages and disadvantages by ERP system.

IT Infrastructure

IT infrastructure (Pearlson, Saunders, & Galletta, 2015, p. 125) includes four basic components : hardware, software, network and data. Hardware is about physical components help to handle computation, storage, or transmission of data. It includes computers, hard drivers, servers and so on. Software is about the programs can work based on hardware and perform such as operating systems like ISO and Windows,  applications and platforms. Network is about local and long-distance networking. It includes switches, hubs, routers, cable, fiber, and microwave paths for communication and data sharing. Data is about the electronic representation of the numbers and text.

IT infrastructure can support everything from IT architecture requirements that can increase the efficiency on meeting each goal for the company. There are three common configurations of IT architectures -- centralized, decentralized and service-oriented architectures. Different type of IT architecture can influence its IT infrastructure. 

Building a Business Case

Many times, IT organizations are in charge of putting a case together when providing solutions. Most of the time business managers do not have the technical knowledge to find multiple solutions and they require guidance on what applications, software, or hardware they need to. However, due to tight budgets, they still need to provide a solution that is a good IT investment that can be backed up with data as to why it is  a good business investment. We found that creating a business case(Pearlson, Saunders, & Galletta, 2015, p. 173) will help us gain support and approval from upper management. In our analysis, it is important to cover both costs and benefits, both financial and nonfinancial terms.