CHAPTER 6

ORGANIZATIONAL INFORMATION

• Employees must be able to obtain and analyze different levels, format ans granularities of organizational information to make daily decisions.
• Collecting, compiling, sorting and analyzing information provide tremendous insight into how an organization is performing.

Level, format and granularities of organizational information

• Transactional information verses analytical information

THE VALUE OF TIMELY INFORMATION

• Timeliness is an aspect of information that depends on the situation.

- Real time information: immediate, up to date.

- Real time system : provides real time information in response to query resquests.

THE VALUE OF QUALITY INFORMATION

• Business decisions are only good as the quality of the information used to make decisions.
• Characteristics of high quality information : 

- Accuracy

- Completeness

- Consistency 

- Uniqueness

- Timeliness

UNDERSTANDING THE COSTS OF POOR INFORMATION

• The 4 primary sources of low quality information :

- Online customers intentionally enter inaccurate  information to protect their privacy.

- Information from different system have different entry  standarts and formats.

- Call centre operators enter abbreviated or erroneous information by accident or to save time.

- Third party and external information contains inconsistencies, inaccuracies and errors.

• Potential business effects resulting from low quality information included :

- Inability to accurately track customers.

- Difficulty to identify valuable customers.

- Inability to identify selling opportunities.

- Marketing to nonexistent customers.

- Difficulty tracking revenue due to inaccurate invoices.

- Inability to build strong customer relationship.

UNDERSTANDING THE BENEFITS OF GOOD INFORMATION

• High quality information can significantly improve the chances of making good decisions.
• Good decisions can directly impact an organization bottom line.

 

CHAPTER 5

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE

• Organizational employees must work together to develop strategic initiatives that create competitive advantages.
• Ethics and security are fundamental building block that organizations must base their business upon.

IT ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Recent IT related strategic positions :

- Chief Information Officer (CIO)

- Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

- Chief Security Officer (CSO)

- Chief Privacy Officer (CPO)

- Chief Knowledge Office (CKO)

• Chief Information Officer (CIO) - oversees all uses of IT and ensures the strategic alignment of IT with business goals and objectives.
• Broad CIO function included : 

- Manager ensuring the delivery of all IT projects on time amd within budget.

- Leader ensuring the strategic vision of IT is in line with the strategic vision of the organization.

- Communicator building and maintaining strong executive relationships.

• What concert CIO the most

• Chief technology officer (CTO) - responsible for ensuring the throughput, speed,accuracy, availability and reliability of IT.
• Chief Security Officer - responsible for ensuring the security of IT system.
• Chief Privacy Officer (CPO) - responsible for ensuring the ethical and legal use of information.
• Chief Knowledge Office (CKO) - responsible for collecting, maintaining and distributing the organization knowledge.

THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS PERSONNEL AND IT PERSONNEL

• Business personnel possess expertise in functional area.
• IT personnel have the technology expertise.
• Causes a communications gap between business personnel and IT persannel.

IMPROVING COMMUNICATIONS

• Business personnel must seek to increase their understanding of IT.
• IT personnel must seek to increase their understanding of the business.
• CIO responsible to ensure effective communication between both personnel.

ORGANIZATIONAL FUNDAMENTAL- ETHICS AND SECURITY

• Ethics and security are two fundamental building block that organizations must base their businesses on to be successful.

ETHICS

• Ethics is the principles and standarts that guide behaviour towards other people.
• Privacy is major ethical issue

-Privacy is the right to be left alone when you want to be, to have control over your own personel possessions and not to be observed without your consent.

• Issues affected by technology advance

- Intellectual property : intangible creative work that in physical form.

- Copyright : the legal protection afforded an expression of an idea.

- Fair use doctrine : in certain situations, it is legal to use copyrighted software.

- Pirated software : the unauthorized use, duplication, distribution of sale of copyrighted software.

- Counterfeit software : software that is manufactured to look like the real thing and sold as much.

SECURITY

• Organizational information is intellectual capital that must be protected.
• Information security security - the protection of information from accidental or intentional misuse by person inside oe outside an organization.
• E-business automatically creates tremendous information security risks for organization.

CHAPTER 4

MEASURING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY'S SUCCESS

• Key performance indicator-measure that are tied with business drivers.
• Metrics are detailed measures that fed KPI.

EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS

• Efficiency IT metric-measures the performance of IT system.
• Effectiveness IT metric-measures the impact of IT on business process and activities.

BENCHMARKING-BASELINES METRICS

• Benchmarks are baselines values that system seek to attain.
• Benchmarking- a process of continously measuring system result to optimal system performance, identify step and procedure to improve system performance.

THE INTERRELATIONSHIPS OF EFFICIENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS IT METRICS

• Efficiency IT metric focus on technology and included:

- Usability

- Customer satisfaction

- Conversion rates

- Financial

EFFECTIVENESS IT METRICS

• Usability-The ease with which people perform transaction or find information, which measures the number of clicks required to find desired information.
• Customer satisfaction- Measures by benchmarks as satisfaction survey, percentage by existing customer retained and increase in revenue per customer.
• Conversion rates- The number of customer an organization "touches" for the first time and persuades to purchase its product or services.
• Financial- Such as return on investment,cost-benefit analysis (the comparison of project revenue and cost including development, maintenance, fixed and variable) and break even analysis (point at constant revenue equal to ongoing cost.) 

1.  Security is issue for organization offering products or services over the internet.

- However to be effective , it must implement Internet security.

- Secure Internet connection must offers encryption and Secure Sockets Layers (SSL denoted by the lock symbol in the lower right corner of a browser)

Metrics for Strategic Initiatives

• Metrics for measuring and managing strategic initiatives included:  

- Web site metrics

- Supply Chain Management metrics (SCM)

- Customer Relationship Management metrics (CRM)

- Business process reengineering metrics ((BPR)

 - Enterprise Resource Planning metrics (ERP)

Web Sites Metrics

Web sites metrics included:

- Abandoned shopping card

- Click through

- Conversion rates

- Cost per thousand

- Page exposures

- Total hits

- Unique visitors

• Abandoned registrations- number of visitors who starts the process of completing a registration page and then abandon the activity.
• Abandoned shopping carts- number of visitors  who create a shopping carts, start shopping and then abandon the activity before paying for the merchandise.
• Click through- count the number of people of visit a sites, click on ad and taken to the sites of the advertiser.
• Conversion rates- percentage of potential customer who visit a sites  and actually buys something.
• Cost per thousand (CPM)- Sales dollar generated per dollar of advertising. This is commonly  used to make the case for spending money to appear on a search engine.
• Page exposures- average number of pages exposures to individual visitor.
• Total hits- number of visits to a web sites,many may be by the same visitor.
• Unique visitors- number of unique visitors of a sites in a time given. It commonly used to rank the most popular web sites.

Supply Chain Management metrics

• Back order-is demand against an item whose current stock level is insufficient to satisfy demand.
• Customer order promised cycle time- the anticipated or agree upon cycle time of a purchase order.
• Customer order actual cycle time- the average time it takes  to fill a customer purchase order.
• Inventory replenishment cycle time- measure of the manufacturing cycle time plus the time included to deploy the product to the appropriate distribution center.
• Inventory turnover- the number  of times that company inventory cycles or turn over per year.It is one of the most commonly used supply chain management.

Customer Relationship Management Metrics

• Measures  user satisfaction and interaction and include:

- Sales metrics

- Service metrics

- Marketing metrics

BPR and ERP metrics

• The balanced scorecard enables organizations to measures and manage strategic initiatives.