Building Successful Information Systems Five Best Practices to Ensure Organizational Effectiveness and Profitability

Annotation The intent of this book is to help organizations better utilize their information systems by helping managers understand the fundamental purpose of these systems within the business organization. This book will help readers analyze business processes with an eye toward how data is created, transferred, analyzed and used within the organization. From this understanding, the user can then design, build and implement information systems that accurately reflect the flow of the business processes in their organization, adjust quickly to support critical functions and provide efficient and effective value added services to employees to maximize the profitability of the company. In attempting to provide readers with a clear path to understanding and implementing an information system within their organizations, the book has adopted a best practices approach that is built around five critical concerns that must be addressed prior to the implementation of any information system. The person charged with implementing the system must have an understanding of what constitutes: 1. The Right Data: Whatever the information system can and needs to provide that enhances the performance of an organization. A manager trying to implement an information system must understand that the goal is not to provide more data but rather the appropriate data to the people performing different organizational functions. 2. The Right Place: Locating data wherever it is needed. For people working within the physical infrastructure of the company the right place may be on the company network. For field sales people, or suppliers within a company's supply chain, or customers to whom the company wishes to provide access to certain data, an external network or cellular tower, or hot spot or cloud may constitute the right place. The considerations of both security and accessibility must always be taken into account in making data placement decisions. 3. The Right Time: Having the data available precisely when it is needed to aid in conducting successful transactions. 4. The Right Person: Ensuring that the right data and only that data are received by or accessible to the right person. The challenge with this aspect of data delivery is making sure that appropriate people receive all the data that is relevant to their role within the organization without receiving data that is extraneous to it. 5. The Right Format. For any information system to be successful, that system must be able to provide information that is requested in a format that communicates correctly not only the intended data but the intended message.