Chapter 1: Business Driven Technology

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY'S ROLE IN BUSINESS

•  Information technology is everywhere in business

Information Technology's  Impact on Business Operations

• Organizations typically operate by functional areas or functional silos
• Functional areas are interdependent

Information Technology Basics

• Information technology (IT) is a field concerned with the use of technology in managing and processing information
• Information technology is an important enabler of business success and innovation
• Information technology (IT) is the application of ccomputers to store, study, retrieve, transmit, and manipulate data or information, often in the context of a business or other enterprise.
• Management information systems (MIS) is a general name for the business function and academic discipline covering the application of people, technologies, and procedures to solve business problems
• MIS is a business function, similar to Accounting, Finance, Operations, and Human Resources
• When beginning to learn about information technology it is important to understand the data, information and business intellligence IT resources and IT cultures.

INFORMATION

• Data: raw facts that describe the characteristic of an event
• Information: Data cinverted into a meaningful and useful context
• Business intelligence: Applications and technologies that are used to support decion-making efforts

Example:

• DATA IN AN EXCEL SPREADSHEET

• DATA TURNED INTO INFORMATION

• INFORMATION TURNED INTO BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

These multiple sources include:

- Suppliers → Customers

- Competitors → Business partner

- Data from industry → Data from governmental sources

IT RESOURCES

IT CULTURES

• Organizational information cultures include:
• Information-Functional Culture - all employees use information as a means of exercising influence or power over others. For explample, a manager is sales refuses to share inforamtion with marketing. This cause marketing to need the sales manager's input each time a new sales strategy is developed
• Information-Sharing Culture - all employees across departments trust each other to use information ( especially about problems and failures) to improve perfomrance.
• Information-Inquiring Culture - all employees across departments search for information to better understand with current trends and new directions.
• Information- all employess across departments are open to new sights about crisis and radical changes and seek ways to create competitive advanatges.