Subjective Assignment : A13
Read the Questions and Answer -
1. a. Define operational excellence. How can information systems help achieve it?
. You work for an auto manufacturer and distributor. How could you use information systems to achieve greater custome
intimacy?
2. a. What is the difference between information technology and information systems? Describe some of the functions of
information systems.
. You are a marketing manager for a national movie theater chain. Give an example of data that your department could use fo
creating meaningful information. What type of information could that data produce?
3. Identify and discuss the major types of information systems that serve the main management groups within a business. What
are the relationships among these systems?
4. a. Describe at least three benefits of using enterprise systems.
. You have been hired to work with 10 salespeople from different
anches of a national business in creating an online training
site for new Sales employees. Identify six collaboration tools that are available to help the team work together. Which single
tool would be the most helpful for the project, in your opinion, and why?
5. a. Describe in detail the major factors to determine when performing a strategic systems analysis.
. How is Internet technology useful from a network economics perspective? Give examples.
6. a. Define and describe a business ecosystem?
. Value chain analysis is useful at the business level to highlight specific activities in the business where information systems
are most likely to have a strategic impact. Discuss this model, identify the activities, and describe how the model can be applied
to the concept of information technology.
7. a. What do you consider to be the primary ethical, social, and political issues regarding information system quality?
. How does the use of electronic voting machines act as a "double-edged sword?" What moral dimensions are raised by this
use of information technology?
8. a. Distinguish between Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), Web Services Description Language (WSDL), and Universal
Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI).
. What is scalability? Why is it essential to the success of the modern business firm?
9. a. List and describe three main capabilities or tools of a DBMS.
. List at least three conditions that contribute to data redundancy and inconsistency.
10. a. Describe and explain the idea of "network neutrality." Are you in favor of network neutrality? Why or why not?
. How are RFID systems used in inventory control and supply chain management?
11. Discuss the issue of security challenges on the Internet as that issue applies to a global enterprise. List at least 5 Internet
security challenges.
12. What is the most profound way in which e-commerce and the Internet have changed the relationship between companies
and their customers? Support your answer.
o
List and describe at least five different Internet business models. Which of these models do you think would be the most risky
for a startup business today? Support your answer.
13. a.What is Information security and control and state its objectives.
. Explain how one can provide Information security systems to Information Management?
14. a, There is an information explosion in today’s society. There are lot of advantages of DBMS
like proper maintenance of the data and maintaining security. Explain the process of data
transition using diagram and an example of your own.
. Artificial intelligent system functions like a human being and helps a manager in taking quick
decisions. Explain the different applications AI using diagram.
15. a.What is block chain and what are its implication in design of new generation of
Information system.
.What is crypto cu
ency. Explain how it can evolve as an alternate system in comparison
to cu
ent system?
The Coming of the
New Organization
y Peter F. Drucke
Reprint 88105
Harvard Business Review
PETER F. DRUCKER THE COMING OF THE NEW ORGANIZATION 88105
MANFRED F.R. KETS DE VRIES THE DARK SIDE OF CEO SUCCESSION 88107
ROBERT S. KAPLAN ONE COST SYSTEM ISN’T ENOUGH 88106
GERALD C. PARKHOUSE INSIDE OUTPLACEMENT – MY SEARCH FOR A JOB 88110
DAVID L. KIRP AND FAST FORWARD – STYLES OF CALIFORNIA MANAGEMENT 88108
DOUGLAS S. RICE
PAT CHOATE AND JUYNE LINGER TAILORED TRADE: DEALING WITH THE WORLD AS IT IS 88103
ROBERT D. ARNOTT AND THE RIGHT WAY TO MANAGE YOUR PENSION FUND 88101
PETER L. BERNSTEIN
SALLY SEYMOUR THE CASE OF THE WILLFUL WHISTLE-BLOWER 88111
FOR THE MANAGER’S BOOKSHELF
WICKHAM SKINNER WHAT MATTERS TO MANUFACTURING 88112
GROWING CONCERNS
JAMES MCNEILL STANCILL LBOS FOR SMALLER COMPANIES 88113
IDEAS FOR ACTION
TERRY L. LEAP WHEN CAN YOU FIRE FOR OFF-DUTY CONDUCT? 88109
ROBERT C. DORNEY MAKING TIME TO MANAGE 88104
GETTING THINGS DONE
W. BRUCE CHEW NO-NONSENSE GUIDE TO MEASURING PRODUCTIVITY 88102
SPECIAL REPORT
JAMES T. WRICH BEYOND TESTING: COPING WITH DRUGS AT WORK 88114
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1988
Reprint Numbe
HarvardBusinessReview
HARVARD BUS
The Coming
of the
New Organization
y Peter F. Drucke
The large business
20 years hence
is more likely to
esemble a hospital
or a symphony
than a typical
manufacturing
company.
HBR
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1988
The typical large business 20 years hence will have fewer thanhalf the levels of management of its counterpart today, andno more than a third the managers. In its structure, and in itsmanagement problems and concerns, it will bear little re-
semblance to the typical manufacturing company, circa 1950,
which our textbooks still consider the norm. Instead it is far more
likely to resemble organizations that neither the practicing man-
ager nor the management scholar pays much attention to today:
the hospital, the university, the symphony orchestra. For like
them, the typical business will be knowledge-based, an organiza-
tion composed largely of specialists who direct and discipline
their own performance through organized feedback from col-
leagues, customers, and headquarters. For this reason, it will be
what I call an information-based organization.
Businesses, especially large ones, have little choice but to become
information-based. Demographics, for one, demands the shift. The
center of gravity in employment is moving fast from manual and
clerical workers to knowledge workers who resist the command-
and-control model that business took from the military 100 years
ago. Economics also dictates change, especially the need for large
usinesses to innovate and to be entrepreneurs. But above all, infor-
mation technology demands the shift.
Advanced data-processing technology isn’t necessary to create an
information-based organization, of course. As we shall see, the
British built just such an organization in India when “information
technology” meant the quill pen, and barefoot runners were the
“telecommunications” systems. But as advanced technology be-
comes more and more prevalent, we have to engage in analysis
Peter F. Drucker is Marie Rankin Clarke Professor of Social Sciences and
Management at the Claremont Graduate School, which recently named
its management center after him. Widely known for his work on manage-
ment practice and thought, he is the author of numerous articles and
ooks, the most recent of which is The Frontiers of Management (E.P.
Dutton/Truman Talley Books, XXXXXXXXXXThis is Mr. Drucker’s twenty-fourth
contribution to HBR.
INESS REVIEW January-Fe
uary 1988 Copyright © 1987 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
THE NEW ORGANIZATION
4
Information
transforms
a budget exercise
into an analysis
of policy.
and diagnosis – that is, in “information” – even more intensively
or risk being swamped by the data we generate.
So far most computer users still use the new technology only to
do faster what they have always done before, crunch conventional
numbers. But as soon as a company takes the first tentative steps
from data to information, its decision processes, management
structure, and even the way its work gets done begin to be trans-
formed. In fact, this is already happening, quite fast, in a numbe
of companies throughout the world.
We can readily see the first step in this transformationprocess when we consider the impact of computertechnology on capital-investment decisions. Wehave known for a long time that there is no one right
way to analyze a proposed capital investment. To understand it we
need at least six analyses: the expected rate of return; the payout
period and the investment’s expected productive life; the dis-
counted present value of all returns through the productive life-
time of the investment; the risk in not making the investment o
defe
ing it; the cost and risk in case of failure; and finally, the op-
portunity cost. Every accounting student is taught these concepts.
But before the advent of data-processing capacity, the actual anal-
yses would have taken man-years of clerical toil to complete. Now
anyone with a spreadsheet should be able to do them in a few hours.
The availability of this information transforms the capital-
investment analysis from opinion into diagnosis, that is, into the
ational weighing of alternative assumptions. Then the informa-
tion transforms the capital-investment decision from an oppor-
tunistic, financial decision governed by the numbers into a busi-
ness decision based on the probability of alternative strategic
assumptions. So the decision both presupposes a business strategy
and challenges that strategy and its assumptions. What was once a
udget exercise becomes an analysis of policy.
The second area that is affected when a company focuses its
data-processing capacity on producing information is its organiza-
tion structure. Almost immediately, it becomes clear that both
the number of management levels and the number of managers
can be sharply cut. The reason is straightforward: it turns out that
whole layers of management neither make decisions nor lead. In-
stead, their main, if not their only, function is to serve as “relays”
– human boosters for the faint, unfocused signals that pass fo
communication in the traditional pre-information organization.
One of America’s largest defense contractors made this discov-
ery when it asked what information its top corporate and operat-
ing managers needed to do their jobs. Where did it come from?
What form was it in? How did it flow? The search for answers soon
evealed that whole layers of management – perhaps as many as
6 out of a total of 14 – existed only because these questions had not
een asked before. The company had had data galore. But it had al-
ways used its copious data for control rather than for information.
Information is data endowed with relevance and purpose. Con-
verting data into information thus requires knowledge. And
knowledge, by definition, is specialized. (In fact, truly knowledge-
able people tend toward overspecialization, whatever their field,
precisely because there is always so much more to know.)
HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW January-Fe
uary 1988
HARVARD BUS
Traditional
departments won’t
e where the
work gets done.
The information-based organization requires far more special-
ists overall than the command-and-control companies we are ac-
customed to. Moreover, the specialists are found in operations,
not at corporate headquarters. Indeed, the operating organization
tends to become an organization of specialists of all kinds.
Information-based organizations need central operating work
such as legal counsel, public relations, and labor relations as much
as ever. But the need for service staffs – that is, for people without
operating responsibilities who only advise, counsel, or coordinate
– shrinks drastically. In its central management, the information-
ased organization needs few, if any, specialists.
Because of its flatter structure, the large, information-based or-
ganization will more closely resemble the businesses of a century
ago than today’s big companies. Back then, however, all the knowl-
edge, such as it was, lay with the very top people. The rest were helpers
or hands, who mostly did the same work and did as they were told.
In the information-based organization, the knowledge will be pri-
marily at the bottom, in the minds of the specialists who do differ-
ent work and direct themselves. So today’s typical organization in
which knowledge tends to be concentrated in service staffs,
perched rather insecurely between top management and the oper-
ating people, will likely be labeled a phase, an attempt to infuse
knowledge from the top rather than obtain information from below.
Finally, a good deal of work will be done differently in the infor-
mation-based organization. Traditional departments will serve as
guardians of standards, as centers for training and the assignment
of specialists; they won’t be where the work gets done. That will
happen largely in task-focused teams.
This change is already under way in what used to be the most
clearly defined of all departments – research. In pharmaceuticals,
in telecommunications, in papermaking, the traditional sequence
of research, development, manufacturing, and marketing is being
eplaced by synchrony: specialists from all these functions work
together as a team, from the inception of research to a product’s
establishment in the market.
How task forces will develop to tackle other business opportu-
nities and problems remains to be seen. I suspect, however, that
the need for a task force, its assignment, its composition, and its
leadership will have to be decided on case by case. So the organiza-
tion that will be developed will go beyond the matrix and may in-
deed be quite different from it. One thing is clear, though: it will
equire greater self-discipline and even greater emphasis on indi-
vidual responsibility for relationships and for communications.
To say that information technology is transforming businessenterprises is simple. What this transformation will requireof companies and top managements is much harder to deci-pher.