Management Information System, Recommendations - Assignment Example

Individual Consultancy Assignment (A1) 1.1 Executive Summary This study intends to provide a description of the present position of Newark Ophthalmic Centre in terms of Information Systems Management, organization structure, Risk Management, procurement, change management and business processes. It refers to the case of the Newark Ophthalmic Centre as a case study to identify the elements of Management Information System. This study goes through the various processes in the case study, the relationship between entities and the various dependencies involved. Change management will feature as the dominant element of the organization in the case study. It will then seek to identify the areas that need to be changed, the reasons why they need to b e changed, who needs to participate, the resources required and the expected results. It will show the necessary recommendation for organization change and decision making. The study of the processes and changes in the organization will enable the decision makers to identify the possible risks expected and how to mitigate them. Of course each change process has a certain amount of exposure to risks and losses, but the management of Newark Ophthalmic Centre has to assess and measure the amount of exposure the company can withstand, based on the recommendations (Ward & Peppard, 2000). In the study of processes, the study will describe the meaning of processes and the purpose of processes. It will explore the organization culture of Newark Ophthalmic Centre and its main characteristics. It will study the different types of cultures that exist in the case study. The study will continue to investigate the model of project management in Newark Ophthalmic Centre including the life cycle of project management that Newark Ophthalmic Centre uses. It will conduct a research process using both primary and secondary data to measure various parameters before arriving at recommendations and eventually conclusion. 1.1.1 Task Summary The study does a summary of the tasks that are involved in the operation of Newark Ophthalmic Centre. The company background exhibits the nature of the organization structure and the tasks that every entity performs. It checks the levels of the organization where decisions are made. It also considers the tasks that are performed by the system. There is a subdivision of major tasks into subtasks that the organization has to take into consideration. In Newark Ophthalmic Centre, there are major tasks such as System Acquisition and system search. System acquisition is for example split into sub tasks such as system requirement study, preliminary study, feasibility search, conceptual design, logical design, functional design and development, testing and documentation tasks. The study will also describe the sequence of the task using process mapping, to show the sequence in which the tasks need to flow, in the order beginning with pre-requisites. Of course in between the tasks, there are resources and dependencies that determine whether the next task can pick up or not. The study in this section will also check the risks involved in performing the tasks, for example delays of commencing certain tasks and unexpected errors. If certain resources are lacking for a certain task, it means the commencement of the subsequent task will delay or will not be successfully. Task management will fall under the project management element of management of Newark Ophthalmic Centre management information system. Project management will use tools such as GHANT charts or data flow diagrams to illustrate the sequence and the timings of the tasks (Ward & Peppard, 2002). The end result of task management will be a specific change of either qualitative or quantitative nature. Mr Collington is afraid of outsourcing because it appears to be a waste of time and an added cost of operation. This is the reality of task management. There are tasks that work better when outsourced, but not all tasks. Procurement for example may not work well if it is outsourced to external consultants because the consultant may not be able to ascertain the need of certain assets in the organization. 1.1.2 Summaries of the conclusions The study will integrate all conclusions from the various recommendations into a single form of documentation, which will support decision making and change processes in the Newark Ophthalmic Centre. For example, in the risk management section of the management information system of Newark Ophthalmic Centre, the study will list all possible risks, their indicators, their measures of impacts and probabilities of occurrence and the possible mitigation procedures. Another example is in the information system procurement, we will explore the processes of acquisition of assets, including identification of stakeholders, specification of tenders, applications evaluation and the appointment of the stakeholder based on criteria of qualification. This involves difficulties such as the delay of approval of computer systems in Newark Ophthalmic Centre. Of course in project management there will be a summary of the steps followed in performing all tasks and the time frames allocated to the tasks. From the tasks, it should be possible for a reader to identify the order of the tasks and the duration that each task can consume using the timeframes. In the organization culture, there will be a summary of the influences and influencers, the type of cultures that exist in organizations whether generic or specific, the need for culture change and the steps of integrating information systems and the end users of the system in Newark Ophthalmic Centre. This study will also have a summary of the processes of information systems management and change procedure. The business processes are classified as important processes, broken processes, feasible processes and complex processes. It will also present the summary of business process re-engineering in the organization. Finally, it will provide a description of change management processes for the Newark Ophthalmic Centre such as process mapping, identification of the system processes to be re-engineered, understanding of the process, and definition of objectives, new process design, piloting, implementation and documentation. 1.1.3 Summaries of the recommendations This study will provide a documentation of the recommendation from the various sections of the management information system. The collection is vital because the study of the management information system is extremely very wide. The recommendations are derived from the conclusions in the various elements and a critical relation to the study at the Newark Ophthalmic Centre. From the review of all the systems that Newark Ophthalmic Centre is interested in buying, it will be necessary to use the recommendations to decide on the system of choice to procure. There was a variety of Management Information Systems from different vendors such as Data Strategies Corporation, Advanced Software Company and Ivy Technologies. The recommendations have to be comprehensive enough to assist the Newark Ophthalmic Centre in selecting the best management information system. The summary of the recommendations on the organization culture will assist Newark Ophthalmic Centre to make changes on the job descriptions of the present workers and identify the areas that require additional staff as well as the redundant departments. There will also be a recommendation on the need for outsourcing and procurement. In Newark Ophthalmic Centre, not all processes require outsourcing. Outsourcing is accompanied by several costs and sometimes, a number of adverse consequences. At the same time, procurement only needs to take place when need arises, but not always. This considers the fact that procurement has an exposure to risks. Recommendations will assist the Newark Ophthalmic Centre management to assess the risks before acquisition of assets to minimize the risk exposure. Preparation of the recommendations has to cover the roles of the department of information Systems in change management and processes re-engineering. Recommendations relate the previous status of the management information system, from which the need for change is established. 1.2 Research Undertaken This study involves the data and information collected from the case study of the Newark Ophthalmic Centre and other electronic documents. It will be the driving force and the guideline for the various recommendation and conclusions. The research process is based on secondary data as already presented in the case study, and the supportive materials from other documented sources. There is no opportunity to use primary data because it is possible that so many changes have taken place since the documentation of the case study. This therefore, minimizes the risk of inconsistency and contradictions. The research process involves data collection, data analysis, data interpretation, information presentation, conclusion and finally recommendation. The recommendation will require implementation of various actions that will determine the structure of the organization and the roles of every department. Some of the data used in this research are qualitative and require conversion to quantitative form in order to be measured before analysis and conclusions. A good example of qualitative information is the attitude of the management of the Newark Ophthalmic Centre towards the computerization of the organization. 1.2.1 Secondary Research (i.e. from documents, electronic or paper) The research for this study is a secondary research using secondary data from electronic documents. One of the documents is the case study of the Newark Ophthalmic Centre. The other documents include the document of outsourcing, procurement, information management departmental roles, business processes, project management, and risk management and organization culture (Hayes, 2007). Most of the information in this study is qualitative, including the reactions of the management of Newark Ophthalmic Centre towards the systems that the organization ought to review and procure. The sources are reliable because they emerge from documents of professional studies. The data concentrates on the parameters that affect the organization performance and processes. For example the comparison between the costs of system acquisition and the amount of resources to be consumed in the process are the key decision making parameters. Another parameter is the number of staff members that exist in each department and eventually makes up the entire organization structure. A sample of data collected from the studies of the secondary information is the specifications of the various systems. The data is presented in the table below: System Description Capacity (Number of People) Cost (GB Pounds) CCA Medical, London. CCA Medical is proprietary medical software which performs general medical functions and office use. 40000 85000 Ivy Technologies Company, Essex A customized application system for ophthalmologic practices 10000 39500 Data Strategies Corporation, Leeds It is customized medical system software for performing general purpose medical functions. It doesn’t have any integration between its various modules. 10000 32500 Table 1: Three systems presented to Newark Ophthalmic Centre From the data in the table, we can have sample analysis of the results by listing the key aggregate functions such as maximum, average, median and minimum values (Robson, 1997). For example, the most expensive system in the list is CCA Medical system from London, with the maximum price of GB Pounds 85000. The least expensive system is Data Strategies Corporation (DSC) from Leeds. It goes at the least price of GB Pounds 32500. Considering the capacity, the most suitable system is CCA Medical system, which can serve the maximum capacity of 40000 people. Newark Ophthalmic Centre serves 8000 patients and has a budget of between 50000 GB Pounds to 60000 GB Pounds. The costs and other related functional parameters have effects on the attitude of the system. Of course majority of the administrators will agree on the most cost-effective system as opposed to the exorbitant costs. Data presentation can therefore compare these parameters in a graphical manner in the figure below: Figure 1: Cost and capacities for the three systems 2.2.2. Divided into appropriate topics (possibly IS/IT issues, business issues, people) The research can be divided into various categories such as Information Systems issues, Business issues and people’s issues. Information systems or IT issues are the IT related parameters such as the software requirement specification, the functionality of the system, the mode of integration, the possibility of maintenance, the server type and the operating system on which the application can run. CCA Medical system for example runs on windows 7 and UNIX server. Ivy Technologies on the other hand runs on Apple MacPro 8 core server. The people’s issues are related to the issues of human resources, the organization structure, the cost of training and the patients’ issues such as the capacity of the system. The organization structure presents the number of employees per department, which enables the human resources to take care of the employees (Hammer & Champy, 1993). The human resources department also uses the information to arrange the budget for training of the staff on the use of the system. The Information system experts will be able to distribute the network according to the distribution of the workers in every department. The employee distribution is presented in the table below: Department Number of workers Medical Director’s Office 1 Business manager’s Office 1 Technicians’ Section 5 Nurses 3 Administration 3 Table 2: Staff Distribution per Department Figure 2: Distribution of Staff per Department The issues of patients also fall under the people’s issues. This section specifically discusses the number of patients that the system can serve. The organization is only ready to serve 8000 patients; hence it requires a system that can serve not less than 8000 patients. 2.2.3. Issues – it is your choice) In this section, I choose to discuss the business issues related to the case study of Newark Ophthalmic Centre. These issues include the cost of procurement of the system, the cost of maintenance measured in GB pounds per year, the cost of training staff on the use of the system, the value it adds to Newark Ophthalmic Centre, measured by capacity, which is the number of patients the system can serve. Costs have direct impacts on the financial performance of the Newark Ophthalmic Centre, hence requires a very critical review. In this section, we collect secondary data from the case study related to the costs before we compare them. Having compared the costs of procurement of the system, it is necessary to compare another very vital cost aspect, the cost of training and the cost of maintenance per year. System Cost of maintenance in Pounds per year (% of the purchase cost) Cost of training packages Training (5 people in one month) CCA Medical 5 15000 Ivy Technologies 8 15000 Data Strategies 6 15000 It apparently occurs that the cost of maintenance is the same, 15000 GB pounds. The distinguishing factor here is the maintenance costs. The overall combination of these factors presents a platform for the organization to position itself strategically in the business. In the business perspective, the organization aims at saving on the cost while maximizing the efficiency of the system to increase the value that it adds to the organization, by the number of patients it can serve. It doesn’t mean that if the percentage appears to be larger the maintenance cost is higher. This is because the maintenance cost is a percentage of the purchase cost. People’s issues may not therefore be the determinant factor in deciding on the choice of a system to purchase. 1.3 Primary Research (interviews, questionnaires etc) The study can also use primary data to conduct the assessment. The most influential primary data it can use is interviews and questionnaires. Questionnaire will provide the respondent with confidentiality and freedom to answer the questions. Interview is a good choice for this study because some of the respondents are do not like writing a lot as the questionnaire requires. They prefer eye contacts with the interviewer. In this study, we questionnaires will be able to cover many areas which interview could not handle because of fatigue in answering questions. Questionnaire allows the respondent to protect sensitive information. An interviewer will be able to identify the sensitive questions to avoid, hence avoid violating the freedoms and fundamental rights to privacy of the respondents. 1.3.1 Interview process The number of people that will be available in the Centre for interview will be sufficient enough to collect exhaustive information for the data analysis and recommendations. The best choice for this data collection process is interview. The interview will however need to be simple and precise. The language used has to be clear for the reader to understand. The interview will be a standard quantitative and quantitative data collection. Before the interview, there is need to have the background information about the organization. Apart from just having the organization structure, the business manager and the director ought to present to me the history and the profile of the organization so that I can notice the parts of the management information system that has not been properly functional. 2 Summary 2.1 Drawing together the main points discovered This study has discovered that in every organization, there is an inevitable need for change. Change management is very vital and requires critical review of the current system. It has also exposed the need for process re-engineering, process mapping and the preparation of documentation of processes (Hamel & Prahalad, 1994). It has appeared that the organization structure is very important in determining the type of management information system to adopt and implement. This study has enabled me to realize that a research can use a combination of both primary data and secondary data at the same time. I have realized that task management has to follow a sequential pattern of activities with respect to the time frames allocated to the tasks (Tansey, 2003). At the same time, this study has enabled me to know the kind of risks to expect and their possible mitigating methods. I have learnt that outsourcing and procurement have rules governing their processes. Finally, this study has presented to me the complex nature of interrelated tasks and the importance of project management in organizing the tasks, for example, the way they appear in the case study. I have discovered the exorbitant cost of procurement and outsourcing, and the need to do a cost reduction at these critical stages. 3 Conclusions 3.1 Views, based on the findings of the research From my findings, I realize that every organization needs change management strategies because change is extremely necessary for all organizations. I therefore consider changes within organization as very vital elements and consider the review and assessment of risk factors as a continuous process. Before introducing a new product, there is need for risk assessment, in which an organization engages the procurement and the risk management department into the analysis of the parameters of the product or service which determine the performance of the organization. Likewise, before outsourcing a task, an organization has to analyse the effects of the outsourcing to the other tasks in the organization. The organization has to compare the costs of outsourcing to determine whether it is a feasible process, an important process or a broken process (Groucutt & Griseri, 2004). This study has made me realize that that outsourcing is very expensive if there is no proper cost effectiveness study. In my view, the time spent in doing risk analysis is not a waste. Rather, it is value adding and critical. I have realized that recommendations have to be made based on a systematic and holistic study on the present and the past status of the organization. There are important features of a system that needs to be considered before it is procured, for example, the cost of the system purchase, the cost of maintenance, the cost of training, and the number of people it will be able to support. The nature of integration of the system is very essential because not every system has the ability to integrate with other existing systems, or even within its modules. 4 Recommendations 4.1 What Harrison needs to do to achieve his objectives From a discussion over the phone, Dr Harrison has provided to me a brief statement of the interview response. Dr Harrison recommends that before I conduct an interview on the Newark Ophthalmic Centre staff members, I should consider reading the background information of the activities that go on in NOC. It then means that DR Harrison had to present to me the organization structure to enable me have the overview of the nature of the organization. Secondly, he had to present to me the organization profile to inform me about the performance of the organization so that I could measure the truth of the information the respondents were giving (Hammer, 1996). The highly qualified consultants would probably convince me that they have done wide-ranging investigation, without restricting themselves to the sources that NOC has presented. They would like to appear as competent organizations so that they can win the opportunity and appear as useful organizations. The purpose of the background search is therefore; to illustrate the fact that our recommendations are purely based on informed and realistic investigation and perspectives and therefore Newark Ophthalmic Centre deserves to adopt them. From what Dr. Harrison provides, it will be possible to identify the issues that need to be discussed within the Newark Ophthalmic Centre. The truth is that NOC may be in dire need of a joint review and documentation of the structure of its management information system and processes it conducts. I am not expected to cause any delay on the tasks. One of the issues that we had identified as a possible challenge of the task management is the delay in the commencement of certain critical tasks. This according to the continuous review of the new product will be a repeated activity. The ideas we generate from the background study will develop as we discover more new information. It may change our ideas as we proceed to other sections of the interview. The study may lead to other new questions that did not exist from the onset of the interview. 5.2 What James Collington (his Business Manager) needs to do. For the past 10 years, James Collington reveals his vision about the business that he has been developing as a successful eye consulting room in the private sector. He says that his vision was to build a business which could not come to a haut but must continue to expand. James Collington, being Business Manager, says there is need to computerise NOC. The main task of the computerization is to introduce a well integrated system of high capacity and stable functionality. James Collington is a young manager with every right credentials of a business manager. This is a great value for me, making me realize that the tasks that need to be conducted are the right ones. One of the descriptions he has presented is a new management information system which will enable the organization to progress for the subsequent minimum of 5 years. Collington is worried that the current situation of management was not right, but he did not know the best option because he was not a computer expert to offer a good judgement. It’s very difficult to have a discussion with Collington because he talks about very huge visions which apparently are not realistic. Collington has never outsourced any task to consultants before, because he considers them as very expensive and time wasting. However, he is ready to pay for the cost of research hoping to receive value for the cost incurred. He is interested in discovering whether there is anything wrong with the nature of computerization computerisation project. Finally, Collington wants to know if there is any remedial action he can implement before spending too much money. 5 Sources 5.1 Bibliography and references Groucutt, J., & Griseri, P., 2004. Mastering e-Business. London: Palgrave. Hamel, G., & Prahalad, C.K., 1994. Competing for the Future. Harvard: Harvard Business School Press. Hammer, J., & Champy, J., 1993. Re-engineering the Corporation. New York: Nicholas Brealey. Hammer, J., 1996. Beyond Reengineering. Washington: Harper Collins. Hayes, J., 2007. The Theory and Practice of Change Management (2nd ed). London: Palgrave. Hayes, R. et al., 2005. Operations, Strategy, and Technology. London: Wiley. Robson, W., 1997. Strategic Management and Information Systems. New York: Pitman. Tansey, S. D., 2003. Business, Information Technology and Society. London: Routledge. Ward, J., & Peppard, J., 2000. Strategic Planning for Information Systems. London: Wiley. Ward, J., & Peppard, J., 2002. Strategic Planning for Information Systems. London: Wiley. Read More