What did Ilearn during Class 1?

We all want to be mobile and have different devices at home and at work but we are not ready yet to rely entirely on technologies.

During Class 1, we first learnt why firms invest so much in IT. They are seeking operational excellence, meaning they want to keep abreast of things and information going on inside and outside the company. Customer and Supplier intimacy is another reason why firms invest in IT. For instance, warehouses use barcode so they know immediately when they are short on a certain product, can inform the supplier and customer accordingly and react immediately. IT can help decision making since we can do most things from home and do not need to be phisically in an office to work. Then, a competitive advantage can be reached through IT, the idea is to keep away the competition developing something that they do not have. An analysis of the 5 Porter forces can help identifying this competitive advantage. It can be the development of Xml sales for instance if the competition does not do it yet. It is important to realize that once you have a competitive advantage, the competition will try to do the same and then you have to look for something new. That’s why firms do invest a lot in IT and R&D.
One other reason is survival, the idea is to protect the company’s cloud and data from the competition. And the last reason is that IT can help creating new products, services and business ideas.

We debated in class the 3 dimensions that impact the success of IS which are the Management, the Organization and the Technology.
Management has to support IT at least financially for them to perform. Then if technology does not support IS, there can not be any IS. And if the Organization is not flexible and refuse to use the IS, this can not work either. We need flexibility from the Organization (employees for example) in order for IT to succeed. I do believe that Management has a huge responsibility in the success of IS since they are the one that allows the IT department to grow or not. However I agree that without the support from technology and the approval of the organization this can not work at all. A new IS can be implemented once these 3 elements support the general idea.

The 4 main types of IS that we studied are TPS, MIS, DSS and ESS. TPS is the base system that records all datas, for instance payroll is a TPS. MIS is the system that monitors and controls people, we are talking about routine reports that do not use outside datas. DSS is more precise than MIS and answers the “What if” type of questions. An employee who is suddenly sick and that we have to replace can be an illustration of a DSS. The last type of IS is ESS which is the executive side of the IS, ESS is not designed to solve specific problems.

Then, I learnt the 4 enterprise applications for IS that span functional groups.
The CRM helps obtaining customer satisfaction. The ES is an overview of everything. The KMS refers to the exchange and evaluation of the information in a company. Lastly the SCM is everything related to the inventory and supplies that come in.

I learnt many new concepts during week 1, one last thing that I remember is that Extranet protects the users outside the company while intranet protects the users inside the company.

I am sure there are a lot of other things to say about class 1 but the information above is probably what was the most relevant to me !

Pauline Targe