Chapter 6 : Valuing Organizational

Organizational Information

• When addressing a significant business issue, employees must be able to obtain and analyse all the relevant  information so they can make the best decision possible
• Information granularity refers to the extent of detail within the information
• Successfully collecting, compiling, sorting, and finally analysing information from multiple levels, in varied formats, exhibiting different granularity can provide tremendous insight into how an organization is performing

The Value Transactional and Analytical Information

• Transactional Information encompasses all of the information contain within a single business process or unit of work, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of daily operational tasks
• Analytical Information encompasses all organizational information, and its primary purpose is to support the performing of managerial tasks

The Value of Timely Information

• Real-time information means immediate, up-to-date information
• Real-time systems provide real-time information in response to query requests

The Value of Quality Information

• Accuracy - Are all the values correct? For example, is the name spelled correctly? Is the amount recorded properly?
• Completeness - Are any of the values missing? For example, is the address complete including street, city, state and zip code
• Consistency - Is aggregate or summary information in agreement with detailed information? For example, do all total fields equal the true total of the individual fields?
• Uniqueness - Is each transaction, entity, and event represented only once in the information? For example, are there any duplicate customers?
• Timeliness - Is the information current with respect to the business requirements? For example, is information updated weekly, daily or hourly?

- Understanding the costs of poor information - wrong information can lead to making the wrong decision that can cost time, money, and even reputations

• Inability to accurately track customers, which directly affects strategic initiatives such as CRM and SCM
• Difficulty identifying the organization's most valuable customers
• Inability to identify selling opportunities and wasted revenue from marketing to non-existing customers and non-deliverable mail
• Difficulty tracking revenue because of inaccurate invoices
• Inability to build strong relationship with customers

Chapter 5 : Organizational Structure That Support Strategic Initiatives

IT Roles and Responsibilities

• Chief information officer (CIO) - responsible for overseeing all uses of information technology and ensuring the strategic alignment of IT with business goals and objectives
• Manager - ensure the delivery of all IT projects on time and within the budget
• Leader - ensure the strategic vision of IT is in line with the strategic vision of the organization
• Communicator - advocate and communication that IT strategy by building and maintaining strong executive relationships
• Chief technology officer (CTO) - ensuring the throughout,speed, accuracy, availability,and reliability of an organization's information technology
• Chief security officer (CSO) - ensuring the securities of IT systems and developing strategies and IT safeguards against attacks from hackers and viruses
• Chief privacy officer (CPO) - ensuring the ethical and legal use of information within an organization
• Chief knowledge officer (CKO) - responsible to collect, maintain and distribute the organization's knowledge

The Gap between Business Personnel and IT Personnel

• Business personnel - posses expertise in functional areas such as marketing, accounting, sales, and so forth
• IT personnel - the technological expertise

Organizational Fundamentals - Ethics and Security

1.    Ethics - the principles and standards that guide our behaviour toward other people

2.   Privacy - right to be left alone when you want to be, to have control over your own personal possessions, and not to be observed without your consent

• Issues affected by technology advances

• Although natural disasters may appear to be the most devastating causes of IT outages, they are hardly the most frequent or biggest threats uptime
• Sources of unplanned downtime

Chapter 4 : Measuring the Success of Strategic Initiatives

1. Measuring Information Technology's Success - key performance indicators (KPIs) are the measures that are tied to business drivers. Metrics are the detailed measures that feed those KPIs. Performance metrics fall into a nebulous area of business intelligence that is neither technology-nor business-centred, this area requires input from both IT and business professionals to find success

• Effectiveness IT metrics - measure the impact IT has on business processes and activities including customer satisfaction, conversion rates, and sell-through increases
• Efficiency IT metrics - measure the performance of the IT system itself including throughput, speed, and availability
• Benchmarking - a process continuously measuring systems results, comparing those results to optimal system performance, and identifying steps and procedures to improve systems performance

     2. The Interrelationship of Efficiency and Effectiveness IT Metrics

• Common types of efficiency IT metrics

• Common types of effectiveness IT metrics

     

     3. Metrics for Strategic Initiatives

• Website metrics

• Supply Chain Management (SCM) Metrics

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Metrics

• Business Process Re engineering (BPR) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Metrics
• Balanced scorecard  is a management system, in addition to a measurement system, that enables organizations to clarify their vision and strategy and translate them into action
• The balanced scorecard views the organizations from four perspectives :
• The learning and growth perspective
• The internal business process perspective
• The customer perspective
• The financial perspective