Industry and Business Strategy in Which the Company Operates in for Competitive Forces - Assignment Example

Name Tutor Course Date Exam Questions for Management Information System Question 1: Write the common departments in an organization Accounting department: The department is responsible for recording, measuring and recounting financial information that is provided quantitatively from within the department. The accounting department also involves auditing personalities for accountability. Human resource department: This department is mainly involved with management of the organization’s human resource through implementation of appropriate policies and procedures that ensure effective employee management. Human resource department establishes human resource needs, acquires human resources and maintains them. It involves employee appraisal for monitoring employee performance. Sales department: most organizations have a sales department separate from other departments. It mainly deals with selling of organization goods or services to customers with the goal of maximizing organization’s revenues through increased customer sales. Marketing department: organization department in charge of sales promotion of organization goods or services. The department is obligated to offer support to sales department by increasing quantity of products sold through awareness, sensitization and promotion. Information technology (IT) department: Some organizations refer to it as management information systems (MIS) department. It involves application of information systems to solve business problems in the organization. Information systems comprise of procedures or policies, technologies and people. Finance department: This department is concerned with vital matters in finance that affect the operations of the organization. Financial department observes laws, regulations and social responsibilities while seeking to increase company value through efficient financial management. Production department: Also referred to as the operations management department. It is concerned with managing organization procedures and systems that are involved in transforming resources. Question 2: What are the porter’s five force model and three generic model? Porter’s five force model is a framework analyzing the industry and business strategy in which the company operates in for competitive forces. The model identifies open opportunities for a company to increase its profitability in the industry. Porter identifies those aspects surrounding the company, also referred to as micro-environment, which affects a company’s potential to effectively serve its clients and increase its profits. Three forces identified by porter arise from horizontal competition: threat of a substitute product or service that are likely to steal customers, new market entrants who are likely to take up potential investment capital and threat of established rivals who are likely to be pitted against each other and the company by knowledgeable customers with an intention to force down prices. Two forces from vertical competition include the supplier’s bargaining power and customers’ bargaining power. Suppliers who are influential will easily suppress profits by charging high prices on supplies while competition can cause customers to shift demand. Porter’s three generic model illustrates ways of attaining business competitive advantage through three general strategies. These include broad cost leadership, focused or segmentation strategy and broad differentiation or strategy which include demand and supply dimensions. Porter’s broad strategies imply a larger market segment and his focused or segmentation strategy involves a specifically targeted market with differentiation or cost leadership. Porter suggests that applying one strategy is enough, however, a case of combination or multiple strategies can only be done with product differentiation strategy and market segmentation strategy. Question 3: Write seven principles of business process reengineering Business process reengineering involves workflow redesigning and analysis between enterprises and with individual enterprises. Hammer and Champy designed seven principles for business reengineering. The first principle is organization around results or outcomes but not tasks. For effective business process reengineering, a business organization must seek to organize itself based on performance outcomes and avoid depending on tasks around the business environment. Second principle involves identification of all processes in the organization and prioritizing them according to urgency for redesigning. This involves a sort of planning such that most important areas are given priority in terms of resources, therefore enhancing their effectiveness in business process reengineering. Third principle is integration of information processing work into actual work that will generate the information. Information processing work is of no use in the reengineering process if it is not incorporated into actual work to produce appropriate information. The fourth principle is treatment of geographically spread information. This information is treated as though it is centralized so as to be able to carry out effective reengineering. Dispersed information cannot be able to construct a complex reengineering framework. Fifth business reengineering principle is linking parallel workflow activities in the reorganization process instead of concentrating on simple integration of results. Working together as a team is more effective in organizing than linking final outcome of different activities.The business must consider putting the decision point at appropriate positions where work performance is being carried out. It should then construct an environment of control into the reengineering procedures. Finally, the seventh principle involves a onetime seizure of information from its source. Question 4: What are the common types of effective and efficient IT metrics? Effective IT metrics measure the capacity at which a given business is meeting its objectives and if actions taken towards meeting those objectives are the right ones. It indicates impacts of information system on organization’s business processes and activities such as conversion rates, customer satisfaction activities and increasing sales. Benchmarking is a common and appropriate measure of effectiveness for a business information system where progress is assessed and analyzed. It involves continuous measurement of outcomes from an information system and making a comparison of the results with those of an optimal performance system known as benchmark values. This is then followed by identification of procedures or steps to effectively improve performance of the system. Surveys can also be used to measure effectiveness of information technology systems in the organization. This involves interacting with consumers to find out their opinions. Efficient IT metrics involves the technical aspects of an information technology system and measures availability, rates of speed and throughput. Efficiency is interested in optimality in resource utilization within the business. Traffic on website is a common measure of efficiency and involves the total number of people visiting a given website at a specific period of time. A system can be able to sustain a given level of traffic beyond which compromises its efficiency to deliver services. Speed is also a benchmarking aspect of efficiency and involves time taken for information to move within the business information technology systems. High speeded systems indicate a higher efficiency level. Question 5: Brief high quality information’s common factors Brief and high quality information is characterized by a number of common factors like consistency, timelessness, accuracy, uniqueness and completeness. Information control ensures that flaws which are controllable are dealt with. Consistency: Information that is free from variations is quality information and is important when feeding information into the organization database. For example, providing specific instructions on the data base like specific word count where information that does not meet the instructions like less or more word count will not be accepted. Consistency is also in the area or data entry by the organization where data entered should agree with related data that was previously posted. In case of changes, adequate explanations must be posted for clarification. Another factor of quality information is timelessness. Data that is fed in the data base must observe the aspect of time to be able to qualify to be quality information. An organization will find useful and valuable information that is more current compared to that which is outdated. With advanced technology, companies can easily lose in the competitive world and fail to attain their [potential as a result of holding outdated information. Accuracy is another common factor for brief quality information. Accurate information is information that is free from errors. Programmers, expertise and data entry personnel must ensure that errors are avoided for the sake of reliability. Quality information must display a degree of uniqueness. In order for an organization’s information to be of high value to the host and users, it must be distinct and unique from other organization information. Unique information gives the organization and identity and competitive advantage. Lastly, completeness is another component and factor of quality information. Partiality in organization information compromises its reliability. Partial information is incomplete and not useful. Complete information provides all details needed. Question 6: What are the issues affected by technology advances? Productivity of employees or labor: Advanced technology improves productivity of employees through simple methods of production. Improved technology motivates employees to work since procedures of working are improved rom manual procedures. Costs of communication: Organizations, especially those operating in the telecommunication industry and also other sectors that involve intense communication to coordinate activities. Improved technology improves communication through quicker and cheaper methods of communication since its instant. For example before emergence of emails and mobile phones, organizations used to spend more on communication through postage, messengers and physical delivery. Another issue is the employment of human function of the organization. Advanced technology provides easier technical ways of operations through improved capital processes where more technology is applied in organization departments. This might lead to less needs of human resource in the organization. Although technology is good, it also has negative effects. Organization might therefore tend to resist technology for this reason since they fear that they will lose their jobs. The issue of time is also affected by technology. Organizations spend less time in carrying out activities as a result of improved technology. This increases efficiency. Another issue is people’s living standards. Advanced technology creates a favorable working environment and living standards of workers. Other than providing sophisticated devices that make life easier, it leads to innovativeness and serve as motivating factor for development. Cost of production is another issue in the organization that is affected by advanced technology. This is positive since through improved technology, the organization needs less human power which could have been expensive to hire. Wastage is also reduced and time taken in production cut. Reduced time in production saves cost by reducing wastage and ensuring that less is spent on production process. Question 7: Advantages of data driven websites Development: Allow development by the owner at any given time. In case the owner wants to develop their website, they simply add information detail to make the changes any time. This does not require any expertise or specialized knowledge. Future expandability: Data driven websites allows quicker growth of the website unlike a static site. This is because data can constantly be updated at any time. Enhanced stability: Data based websites are stable unlike static websites where a programmer must be very careful and ensure a high degree of organization to keep trail of all previous and current source files. Easier content management: In most cases, a website that is static needs constant updating by the programmer. Data driven websites have templates that controls the type of data displayed at a given time. Once the design is set, updates are easily displayed. Improved efficiency: websites are more efficient when they are data based unlike static. Maintenance of data is easy just as computers are capable of maintaining large volumes of data intact. Reduced human error: using a data based website saves the company from common errors committed by programmers. Errors give way to bugs and cause discrepancy of information which is expensive to identify and repair and also time consuming. Errors occur even where competent programmers are employed to maintain the pages due to high number of pages. Reduced costs of production and updating: updating and publishing a data driven website does not require an expertise in that field but any person who is competent in data entry and administration. Expertises are usually expensive to hire. Question 8: Information cleansing and scrubbing Information cleansing or scrubbing involves the amendment or data removal procedures of incorrect data, data that is duplicated, incomplete or improperly configured from database. Scrubbing or cleansing process tidies a data base by eliminating, correction and fixing content data. Discarding data that is not useful from the system ensures that high quality information is maintained in the data warehouse of the organization or data mart. These procedures are extremely important in ensuring that efficiency is observed in the data warehouse. Data scrubbing and cleansing procedures are vital for companies dealing in banking sector, transport, retailing, insurance or telecommunications since such companies involve data intensive systems. Scribing process will help in identification of defects through rule application of algorithms and checking tables. The cleansing tool includes detecting and correction programs for identifying errors like missing zips and adding them to the system. Data scrubbing employs statistical methods to audit data specifies a workflow by identifying and eradicating errors executes work flow and applies control and post processing procedures. The sophisticated algorithms special software tool applicable in scrubbing is used to standardize, match, consolidate, parse and correct information in the data warehouse. Cleansing is important since at times a data warehouse may contain data from separate databases whereby others are not for the business but external. Manual fixing of errors is usually hectic and time consuming and at times may lead to more errors. Scrubbing tool helps database administrator by simplifying work that could have been done manually, reduces a greater amount of costs that are likely to be incurred and saves time. Other advantages of using data scrubbing is that it ensures accuracy, completeness as it meets all data requirements, validity and consistency since it is free from variations. Read More