Management Information Systems, 13E

Laudon & Laudon

Lecture Files by Barbara J. Ellestad

Chapter 3 Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy

Chapter 3 describes how organizations and information systems work together, or sometimes against each other. The idea, of course, is to keep them in sync, but that’s not always possible. We’ll look at the nature of organizations and how they relate to information systems.

3.1 Organizations and Information Systems

You could say that this chapter relies on the chicken-and-egg theory to develop a relationship between organizations and information systems. You need to design information systems that serve the existing organization. At the same time you must be ready and willing to restructure the organization to take advantage of the improvements an information system can offer. So which one takes precedent—the organization or the information system? Actually neither one. The goal is to adapt one to the other.

What Is An Organization?

An organization is very similar to the information system described in Chapter 1. Remember Figure 1-4 from Chapter 1? Compare it to Figure 3-2 in this chapter.

[pic]

[pic]

Figure 3-2 The Technical Microeconomic Definition of the Organization

These two figures have many things in common. Both information systems and organizations require inputs and some sort of processing, both have outputs, and both depend on feedback for successful completion of the loop.

Information systems use data as their main ingredient and organizations rely on people. However, the similarities are remarkable. Both are a structured method of turning raw products (data/people) into useful entities (information/producers).

Think of some of the organizations you’ve been involved in. Didn’t each of them have a structure, even if it wasn’t readily apparent?