What is an Information System?
An information system is a combination of work practices, information, people, and information technologies organised to accomplish goals in an organisation.
What is a Strategic Information System?
Strategic information systems help differentiate a product from its competitors, provide value to customers, and/or play an essential role in a product's production, sales, and service therefor increasing the profits, saving time and decreasing costs.
What can an Information System do for you?
The opportunities start with improvements in internal company operations and become most visible in applications that create competitive advantage through direct benefits to customers. Information systems provide your business with possibilities.
What can Strategic Information Systems do for you?
Information systems may increase the customer's perceived value by enhancing products with information and services, customizing products, eliminating delays, improving reliability, making products easier to use, bypassing intermediaries, and reducing transaction times thereby maintaining a strong, long-term satisfied customer base.
Some Success Factors in Strategic Information Systems
External, not internal focus: looking at customers, competitors, suppliers,
even other industries and the business's relationships and similarities with the
outside business world. Although, the time spent on competitors is time not
spent on your own business.
Focus on adding value with cost reduction: although cost reduction
may be achieved through business expansion at reduced costs, providing a
better product or service is consistent with the requirements of companies
to differentiate themselves from competitors to succeed.
Sharing the benefits: within the organisation, with suppliers, customers, consumers,
and even competitors on occasion. Helping the industry, helps you.
Understanding customers: what they do with the product or service,
how they obtain value and benefits from it, and the problems they encounter
in gaining that value. Customers buy benefits, not products.
Business-driven innovation, not technology driven: IT often provides or enables a business opportunity or idea to be converted to reality. The lead or driving force
is to come from the business not the technology. Peter Keen says "Major failures in using IT are often based on much better
technology and bad business vision. Successes come from good enough technology and a
clear understanding of the customer." Technology does not produce sales.
Profit comes from business acheived not techology used.
Incremental development: not the total application vision turned into
reality. This means developing applications in portions and not stopping when
a success is achieved but considering wht could be done next. Using the
information gained from the system to develop the business farther.
In Summary
Success in managing Strategic Information Systems involves both maximising return on investment and a secure, long-term satisfied customer base with these systems within an organisation, and enabling the strategic use of information either to gain competitive advantage or to repel competitive threat.