This is a rather open ended question, but our purpose is to generate a lot of comments and discussions, and in the process, compile and create a white paper which can be downloaded by everybody to aid him or her in the IT systems management. So, the question is "What is your suggestion for an effective Information Systems Management"?

-- Bandi (bandi@monabandi.net), August 31, 2003

Answers

As we have been practised in the workshop, the first thing is to identify our business objective for every department. Knowing the function for each dept or section will help us to identify the issue/ problem behind the curtain. IT Plan actually is a problem solving tools that can be adapted in order to improve our services.

Then we analyse the requirements through collection of information for every section/unit.

Anyway, this is just my opinion. The hardest part actually lies on colleting infomation from officer and enduser. We have to understand well the business process involve in every task that they perform. Only then we can figure out what sort of process that can be improved.

-- JHD (louayy@hotmail.com), August 31, 2003.

Information Systems Management - the development stage.

Identifying one's core mission, vision, objectives and tasks is probably the most important step towards an effective information systems management. If an organisation does not know why it exists in the first place, better not do any IT systems.

I always like to look at an overview of the whole organisation - treat it like a map that shows the boundaries and its core business, the clients, and such. Identifying those will enable us to identify the workflows that exist.

The development of an IT system should not be a disparate process. Rather than develop separate systems for each department, there must be a common element in the IT system. User tables for instance exists for every system that you produce. Rather than duplicate the table, it is much more efficent for the table to be shared between applications. In a larger setting, for instance the store department may share data with Sales. Their application may be different but their data is related or shared to each other.

Bottom line - an information system should be developed bearing in mind the existence of other information systems in the organisations. If those systems do not exist yet, then effort should be made to identify the types of system the organisation will use. Think of it as normalising your data on a bigger scale.

There are good database systems out there that can be used for this "integrated" approach and includes Oracle and SQL Server.

-- bandi (bandi@monabandi.net), August 31, 2003.

Hi All, I promised Bandi I would contribute something to this forum and since I can't cook, this will have to be the best I can do. Well where do I start without submitting a thesis. A lot of what is required will come from good planning and it is sometimes very difficult to know where to start. Most of the understanding of the organistation, it's mission, purpose and workflow etc is part of the systems analysis and design of the eventual system. However, all systems should follow a system integration route as there are much more considerations apart from getting the correct software solution and the most common answer to the question is 'it depends'. Therefore things have to be found out and decisions made. Most being constrained by time and the almighty dollar. The most effective way, which is not good for the big high overhead vendors is to develop small systems and then grow them over time, rather than big bang and there you have committed yourself. Bear in mind over time the analysis you made of your organisation will change over time, so a large project will take such a time that may make your system obsolete for the organisations requirements. Anyhow, this is starting to get long and I am rambling ... suffice to say Rome was not built in a day, don't overcomplicate things. What we find works is this. Most systems - a systems integration of hardware, software, education planning etc has some characteristic components that make up the framework, no matter what organastion you are or what the results of your systems analysis are, these frameowrk components will always be present. Like on the cooking show where they pull out a previously made base of the cake and all that is left to do is choose the cake topping. I believe this is the best start and the rest, well that's more fine tuning. Will leave you here as all this talk of cakes has made me hungry and I'm off for a quick bite .....

-- John Gay (jctagay@yahoo.couk), September 23, 2003.

An effective Information Systems Management requires an effective manager. An effective manager is characterised by someone who has the pulse of his organisation; he knows the organisation's objective and is able to pull or identify the information resources required by the organisation to achieve its objectives. A good information system requires a big amount of investment in its system architecture as well as people architecture (it's tempting to say peopleware... is this politically correct?). Building up the synergy between the 2 elements take time if you are to build the expertise from scratch.

Large corporations normally cut straight to the chase by recruiting experts (be it from other companies / competitors) in order to jumpstart the corporation's competetive advantage. However such "injections" come at a high cost. These high costs should be examined and compared with the course of training "rookies". In training "rookies", the big question is whether the company is willing to invest in a training scheme that might take years to complete, and lose their competetive advantage. Recruiting experts in this sense is thus very justifiable.

-- bandi (bandi@monabandi.net), November 03, 2003.