Strategic Management of Information Systems - Essay Example

INFORMATION SYSTEM BUSINESS ALIGNMENT AND INTEGRATION By Location Information system business alignment andintegration Introduction Information system business alignment and integration refers to the process of designing a business’ information system in a way that it will match the goal of the business organization in question. The process always includes matching it with the industry competitiveness and the business organization’s financial performance. The alignment process must look into factors such as culture, incentives, and objectives. Failure to look into these factors might result to very expensive information which will not aid the business organization in attaining its goals. This is because the process always aims at integrating the information system to the business organization’s missions, strategies, and goals. This means that before embarking on the process, the involved parties should be well informed on the goals, strategies, and mission of the business organization in question. This paper is a report on a research that was carried out to study the process of information technology and business alignment and integration. Literature review The research mainly dwelt on information that was collected through literature review. This was facilitated by the time frame that was allocated to the process. By going through literature materials high quality information, the report was able to come up with the information used in the compilation of this report. The literature materials that were used in this report include books and academic journal articles. The advantage of using literature review as a source of information is that the researcher can get a wide range of perspective from researchers who have researched on the same issue before. This helps a researcher in gaining information through the experience of other researchers thus saving time that would have been spent in seeking such information. Discussion There are five main methods through which business organizations can carry out information system business alignment and integration. These methods include: ARIS framework; the approach of longep; SEAM methodology; the integrated enterprise framework; and the approach of wieringa. 1. ARIS framework This method was developed by Nuttgens and Scheers. This method has four layers that are interdependent and connected. The layers include: process engineering, process control and planning, control of workflow, and application systems. The process engineering entails skills for evaluating, optimizing, and ensuring the process is of quality. The process control and planning layer shows current BPs primarily based on the cost analysis. The control of workflow layer is meant to transform BPs into IT support and also has the responsibility of executingBPs (Hussin&Suhaimi 2011, p.112). The application system layer serves the purpose of ensuring that documents and information that get to the workplace go through processing. 2. The approach of longep According to this method, information system and enterprise can be divided into for layers. These layers are functional layer, business layer, technical layer, and applicative layer. The functional layer refers to activities ranging from elementary activities to the macro ones. Elementary functions direct correspondence with the services that the information supports. Elementary functions are always organized in the functional architecture. There are two approaches that are enable mapping of functional layers and business. These approaches are: The top down approach which begins from the strategy of the business organization, then deduces the BPs for each business objective thus enabling the achievement of each objective. It also highlights the information system functionalities that each objective will require. The second approach is the bottom up approach which begins at the operations performed by stakeholders and elicits the business and the objectives that would need those operations. The business layer gives details of the business structure in relation to the activities of the business organization. The applicative layer enables structuring the support system communication software parts (Chan, Sabherwal& Thatcher 2006, p. 34). The technical layerdefines the technical components and information related to the system’s life cycle. 3. SEAM methodology SEAM methodology was developed by Wegman. This method considers the enterprise as a complex system whose primary characteristic is it continuous evolution. SEAM is an abbreviation for Systemic Enterprise Architecture Methodology. A SEAM project has an environment that goes through continuous evolution. The changes that result can, therefore, be represented through the enterprise architecture model. SEAM present three forms of development activities. These activities are production of a new model or modification of the current model of the business organization, to identify the gaps between the existing presentation and the intended and reduce them, and transforming the intended presentation to a state where it can be executed by people or software (Issa-Salwe, Ahmed, Aloufi&Kabir2010, p. 124). 4. The integrated enterprise framework When a business undergoes a change in the information system, it is important for them to adapt quickly to the new system for them to remain competitive. This model has the purpose of linking enterprise models to various wrapped legacy system modules. These modules are commonly referred to as BALES (binding Business-Applications to Legacy systems) (Grant, Hackney & Edgar 2009, p. 176). This message also enables the business organization to know how such mappings can address business change needs. This method has five layers. The first layer is the business objects layer which has the main task of taking into consideration the semantics of the entities of the business and procedures. This layer is followed by the BPs which provides generic and a number of primary building blocks. The third layer, the workflow layer, serves the purpose of assigning BPs to actors. This layer also transfers the work from one actor to another. BPs and business objects are supposed to be shaped in accordance to the mission and goals of the business organization. BALES recommend a two-step in incorporating changes in a business. The first step involves adapting the current enterprise model in order to reflect the intended business reality. The second step involves determining a new mapping between legacy systems and enterprise models. 5. The approach of wieringa Under this approach, an integrated framework for co-design of the information system architecture and the BPs are proposed. The proposal is supposed to aid the business organization form a reactive system with the supportive applications. This enables the classification of the properties of the system and identifies the classical difference between product and process. The product might be an enterprise or information system architecture and has both functional and quality properties. Those with functional quality are services that are availed to the environment, while those quality properties are those that characterize the values that the system avails to the stakeholders (King 2009, p. 98). There are there functional properties that characterize system services. The first is the behaviour aspect which consists of the ordering of services over time. The second is the communication aspect which includes the interactions with various other entities. The final aspect is the sematic aspect which consists of the translations of the symbols that are exchanged during the service. Recommendation The primary goal of the above discussed approaches is to give a specifications and controlling organization in a way that is highly flexible in order to enable the business organization to adapt to the market conditions. All these approaches have the main mission of reconfiguring the BPs so that they are able to satisfy the changing requirements of the business environment. This is a factor that is very important in the Information system business alignment and integration. This is because of the continuous changes that are experienced in business environments. The approaches can, therefore, specify the architecture of the enterprise by using several layers. Each layer brings a new perspective to the preceding layer without specifying how to map these layers. The approaches also serve the purpose of evaluating simulating the BPs with the purpose of improving their general efficiency. They also go ahead and develop a link between processes that have been reconfigured and the new applications built on the legacy one by introducing new functionalities (Centeris 2010 &Varajao 2010, p. 99). They also bring forth a suggestion of decomposition of the support system into loosely paired tiny modules. This is a major interoperability requirement. All the above approach can be appropriate depending on various factors. For instance, it will be highly dependent on what the business organization wants to achieve through the process. It will also depend on the time available and the financial resources at disposal. This will mean that a business will have to take a proper evaluation of the current business status in order to decide on a certain approach. They will also have to take into consideration the desired of the whole process. Failure to take these factors into consideration might lead to recurrent business information system and business alignment incompatibility problems. The most recommendable approach would be the integrated enterprise framework. This is because of the ease in which it can be understood and followed up. This leaves very minimal chances of there being complexity related problems. The lack of complexity makes it even more economical to a business organization if they choose to opt for this approach. If a business organization chooses to use this approach, they will also be saving on time because it does not have complexity that might make it hard to implement. Conclusion Information system business alignment and integration process is clearly not a walk in the park. However, it is clearly evident that it is very important to a business organization. This is because it enables the business information system and the business objectives, mission, and goals to function as a single unit. This enables a business to remain competitive in a very competitive business environment. This advantage comes because Information system business alignment and integration brings about various advantages in a business. The integration can enable a business organization to improve the quality of goods and services that they produce. They will also be able to reduce the cost of production. This will enable them to remain competitive by charging less for their goods or services. Information system business alignment and integration can also reduce the time that a business organization will require to produce goods or services. However, if the information system business alignment and integration is not handled with complete caution the business organization might have to suffer the consequences. Given the unforgiving nature of the market, such an incident might lead to the collapse of a business organization. This means that business organizations should be keen to follow all the details of the approach or method of choice in order to avoid the occurrence of such a scenario. Bibliography Centeris 2010, &Varajao, J 2010. ENTERprise information systems: international conference, CENTERIS 2010, Viana do Castelo, Portugal, October 20-22, 2010 : proceedings, Springer, Berlin. Chan, Y. E., Sabherwal, R., & Thatcher, J. B 2006. Antecedents and outcomes of strategic IS alignment: an empirical investigation, Engineering Management, IEEE Transactions on, 53(1), 27-47. Grant, K., Hackney, R., & Edgar, D 2009. Strategic information systems management, Cengage Learning, Andover. Hussin, H., &Mohd. Adam Suhaimi 2011. Information technology and business alignment in Malaysian SMEs. IIUM Press, Selangor, Malaysia. Issa-Salwe, A., Ahmed, M., Aloufi, K., &Kabir, M 2010.Strategic Information Systems Alignment: Alignment of IS/IT with Business Strategy, JIPS, 6(1), 121-128. King, W. R 2009.Planning for information systems, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y.http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=435237. Read More