"In the beginning was the Business and, only as a result of the business needing information, did the need to consider its provision through the medium of technology evolve". This statement might appear obvious, but an infinite amount of resources are tied up, consumed or wasted as a result of decisions where this type of thinking was not deployed at a critical point in time.
Whereas the IT strategy primarily lays the foundations for the information infrastructure, the information systems deployed are the subject of the Information Strategy. The senior management of any business need to determine the specific information requirements which, if supplied appropriately, on-time, concisely, accurately and in the correct format will facilitate the future development of the business.
Information Systems can be categorised in terms of those deployed for the following purposes:-
Operating systems are excluded from this, primarily because they are considered platforms rather than information sources. The chosen platform is a decision based on the choice of applications and the scale or size of the organisation.
Only when the Information Strategy is defined can one determine dow to develop, choose and enhance information systems critical to future success.
Legal & Statutory Compliance - primarily concerned with quality, financial and traceability of one parameter or other.
Operational Control & Monitoring Systems - these are generally dictated by the product, process and activity being monitored.
Transactional Processing and Control - the scope of which covers inputs, throughput tracking and outputs.
Performance Management - increasingly becoming defined as a dashboard or series of scorecards bringing together output from a variety of systems displaying it through a single portal, company wide
The strength of an organisation's Information Strategy tends to revolve around the degree of integration of all of its distinct systems providing management information. The benefits of integration come in the form of:-
The remainder of this segment will highlight how an integration models may be constructed. Integrated systems are most commonly considered to be deployed in larger companies, but they can quite easily and cost effectively be designed for and utilised in smaller entities.
SYSTEM MAPS
INTEGRATION MODEL OPTIONS
The alternatives to any of the above integration models range from re-inputting data from one system to another (manually or in some electronic form) to informal data sharing or separate information systems working completely in a vacuum.
It is strange to comprehend why any organisation from £2-3m turnover and above would not seek to gain the benefits from some degree of information, priming itself for future growth and upgrading from informal to formalised PMS / integration tools as the need arises - the communication and process integration culture implemented and evolved over time can only but prepare the organisation to effectively manage growth and change as step changes occur in the business lifecycle.
The skill sets and experience to engineer a bespoke, integrated framework can be resourced externally to the business initially. Utilising the ideal external resource, a process of knowledge transfer can be effected to bring a limited capability in house in controlled steps. Once the organisation experiences growth it should consider formally employing in-house resources, possibly whilst retaining specialised external support on an ad hoc or retained advisory basis.
