Transcript PPT

Information Systems
Planning
1
Information Systems Planning
2 Distributed Systems Architecture
Paradox of IS Planning
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Most organization's survival now depends on IT
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IT is changing so fast
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Planning of its effective use is a matter of
organizational life and death
Is it useless to do IS planning?
A variety of approaches, tools and mechanisms
available for IS planning
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No best way to do it.
Mindset for Planning
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Traditional view
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A better view
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Determining what decisions to make in the future
Developing a view of the future that guides
decision making today
Difference : strategy making instead of
planning
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Strategy: stating the direction in which you want to
go and how you intend to get there
Types of Planning
Horizon Focus
Issues
Primary
Responsibility
3-5
years
Strategic
Vision,
architecture,
business goals
Senior
management, CIO
1-2
years
Tactical
Resource
allocation, project
selection
Middle management,
IS line partners,
Steering committees
6 month
-1 year
Operational Project
management,
meeting time and
budget targets
IS professionals,
Line managers,
partners
Why Planning Is So Difficult? (1)
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Business goals and systems plans need to align
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Strategic systems plans need to align with business
goals and support those objectives
Will be difficult if CIO is not part of senior management
Technologies are rapidly changing
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Continuous planning based on monitoring and
experimenting new technologies
Advanced technology groups
Why Planning Is So Difficult? (2)
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Companies need portfolios rather than projects
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Evaluation on more than their individual merit
How they fit into other projects and how they balance
the portfolio of projects
Infrastructure development is difficult to fund
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Often done under the auspices of a large application
project
Challenge: develop improved applications and
improve infrastructure over time
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Mainframe C/S ERP Web application Web Services
Why Planning Is So Difficult? (3)
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Responsibility Needs to be Joint
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Systems planning has become business planning, not
just a technology issue
It is better done by a full partnership of C-level officers
Other planning issues
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Top-down Vs. bottom-up
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Radical change Vs. continuous
Planning culture in which the systems planning must
fit
Tradition Strategy Making
Step 1
Business Strategy
Where is the
•Business decision
business
•Objectives and direction
going and
•Change
why?
Supports
business
Step 2
What is
required?
Direction
For IS
System Strategy
•Business-based
•Demand-oriented
•Application-focused
Infrastructure
and services
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Assumptions:
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Needs and
priorities
IT Strategy
Step 3
How can it
•Activity-based
be delivered? •Supply-oriented
•Technology-focused
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The future can be
predicted
Time is available to
do these 3 parts
IS supports and
follows the business
Top management
knows best (broadest
view of firm)
Company: like an
"Army"
A World of Rapid Change (1)
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Today, due to the Internet and other
technological advances, these assumptions
no longer hold true:
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The future cannot be predicted
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Discontinuous change
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Who predicted Internet, Amazon, eBay etc.?
Time is not available for the sequence
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Never enough time in Internet Age
IT implementation planning needs to go ahead of
business strategizing
A World of Rapid Change (2)
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IS does not JUST
support the business
anymore
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Top management may
not know best
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Inside out Vs. outside
in approach
Customer
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An organization is not
like an army
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Industrial era metaphor
no longer always
applies
and
Core
Today's Sense-and-Response Approach (1)
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Let strategies unfold
rather than plan them:
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A sense-and-respond
approach when
predictions are risky
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Sense a new opportunity
and immediately respond
by testing it
Myriad of small
experiments
Old-era strategy
One big choice, long commitment
Time
New-era strategy
Many small choices, short commitments
Time
Strategic
envelop
Case Example: Microsoft
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Abandoned proprietary network despite big
investment when it did not capture enough
customers
Moved on to buying Internet companies as well as
aligning with Sun to promote Java
Over time, they moved into a variety of technologies:
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Not all strategies came from top management
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Web, Cable news, Digital movies, Cable modems,
Handheld OS, Video server, Music, Xbox, .Net, Search
engines...
e.g. first server came from a rebel's unofficial project
Getting its fingers into every pie that might become
important
Today's Sense-and-Response Approach (2)
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Formulate strategy closest to the action:
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Close contact with the market
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Employees who interact daily with customers, suppliers
and partners (organizational edges)
Employees who are closest to the future should
become prime strategists.
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In the Internet Age, this means younger employees
Today's Sense-and-Response Approach (3)
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Guide strategy-making with a “strategic
envelope":
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Having a myriad of potential corporate strategies
being tested in parallel could lead to anarchy
without a central guiding mechanism
Top management set the parameters for the
experiments, and then continually manage that
context
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Experiment by territory (as Microsoft did)
Strategic conversation
Meet regularly with the experimenters
Today's Sense-and-Response Approach (4)
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Be at the Table
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IS executives should be actively involved in business
strategizing
The IS function needs to be strategy-oriented
CIO need to make their departments credible and
outsource most operational work
Test the Future
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Need to test potential futures before the business is
ready for them (thinking ahead of the business)
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Provide funding for experiments
Work with research organizations
Have an emerging technologies group
Today's Sense-and-Response Approach (5)
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Put the Infrastructure in Place:
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Moving quickly in Internet commerce means
having the right IT infrastructure in place.
IT experiments are recommended to include those
that test painful infrastructure issues
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Create and maintain common, consistent data
definitions
Create and instill mobile commercial standards among
handheld devices
Implement e-commerce security and privacy measures
Determine operational platforms (ERP, Supply Chain
Management …)
Stages of Growth (1)
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Richard Nolan et al observed four stages in the
introduction and assimilations of a new
technology
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Early Successes
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Contagion
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Interest grows rapidly; growth is uncontrolled; learning period
for the field
Control
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Increased interest and experimentation
Efforts begun toward cost reduction and standardization
Integration
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Dominant design mastered; setting the stage for newer
technology
Stages of Growth (2)
Organizational Learning
Technological
discontinuity
Network Era
Micro Era
DP Era
Stage 2:
Stage 4:
Integration Contagion
and Stage 1
Stage 3: of Micro Era
Control
Stage 1:
Initiation
Stage 3:
Control
Stage 2:
Contagion
Stage 3:
Control
Stage 4:
Integration
Stage 4:
Integration
and Stage 1
of Network
Era
Stage 2:
Contagion
1960
1980
Time
1995
2010
Stages of Growth (3)
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The importance of the theory is understanding
where a technology or company resides on the
organizational learning curve
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e.g. Web Service is currently in Stage 2, too much
control at the learning and experimentation stage can
kill off new uses of technology
Management principles differ from stage to
stage
Different technologies are in different stages at
any point in time
Competitive Forces Model (1)
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Michael Porter's Five Forces Model
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A model that determines the relative
attractiveness (competition) of an industry.
Five forces
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Bargaining power of customers and buyers
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High when buyers have many choices of whom to buy
from, and low when the choices are few.
Bargaining power of suppliers
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High when buyers have few choices of whom to buy
from, and low when there are many choices.
Competitive Forces Model (2)
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Threat of substitute products or services
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Low if there are very few alternatives to replace the
product or service.
Switching costs
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Threat of new entrants
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Costs that can make customers reluctant to switch to
another product or service.
High when it is easy for competitors to enter the market
The intensity of rivalry among competitors
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High when the industry is less attractive.
Competitive Forces Model (3)
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How will the business react
to threats (and
opportunities)?
Potential
Entrants
Threat of new entrants
Industry
Competitors
Bargaining power of
suppliers
Customers and
Buyers
Suppliers
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Rivalry among
existing firms
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Substitutes
Bargaining power of buyers
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Threat of substitute products or
services
Competitive Forces Model (4)
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Potential
Entrants
Threat of new entrants
The strategy and actionsIndustry
an organization adopts depend upon its
Bargaining
power
of
Bargaining power of buyers
perceptions of itself and Competitors
these threats.
suppliers
Customers and
Buyers
Suppliers
Porter’s strategies:
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• Product differentiation
(non-duplicable
product or service)
Rivalry among
• Low-cost producer
existing
firms
• Market niche (market segment
or geographical
market)
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Substitutes

Threat of substitute products or
services
Five Forces Analysis of the Internet
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The Internet tends to dampen the profitability of
industries
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Increases the bargaining power of buyers
Decreases barriers to entry
Increases the bargaining power of suppliers
Increases the threat of substitute products and
services
Intensifies rivalry among competitors
Success depends on offering distinct value
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Firms should focus on their strategic position in an
industry and how they will maintain profitability
1
Information Systems Planning
2 Distributed Systems Architecture
Definition:
IT Architecture VS. IT Infrastructure
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An IT architecture is a blueprint showing how the
parts will interact and interrelate.
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System, information, departments...
Multiplicity of structures and views
An IT infrastructure is the implementation of an
architecture.
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processors, software, databases, electronic links, data
centers, standards, skills, electronic processes...
We now tend to divide computing into applications and
infrastructures
The Evolution of Distributed Systems
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Mainframes: with dumb terminals
Minicomputers moved computing into
departments
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Microcomputer moved processing power into
desktop, briefcase and handhelds
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The master-slave computing model persisted and
processing was mainly centralized
Client/server computing
Internet: a globally distributed system
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Interesting twist: power returning to a type of
centralized processing with networks of servers
Four Attributes of Distributed Systems
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The degree to which a system is distributed
can be determined by answering four
questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
Where is the processing done?
How are the processors and other devices
interconnected?
Where is the information stored?
What rules or standards are used?
Distributed Processing
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Limited processing power of a single node VS.
increasing application demands
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Balance the load and improve overall performance
Let machines handle the work they do best
Interoperability: information exchange between
heterogeneous computing platforms
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Protocols
Two-way message passing between user applications
Connectivity Among Processors
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Data exchanges through electronic
communication links
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TCP/IP
Ethernet, ATM, FDDI, Frame relay...
Planned Redundancy for reliability
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Two or more independent paths between two
nodes to provide automatic alternate routing
Topology and reliability of the Internet
Distributed Databases
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Two distributed database schemes
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Divide a database and distribute its portions
throughout a system without duplicating the data
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Transparent user access
Store the same data at several different locations,
with one site containing the master file
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Synchronization issue
E.g. edge servers
System-wide Rules
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Rules governing communication between
nodes, security, data accessibility, program
and file transfers, and common operating
procedures
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Open standards after 1990s
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OSI Reference Model
SQL
API: standardized interface
TCP/IP
Open source
Internet---A Scale-free Network (1)
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Internet is not designed, but evolved
Internet is a scale-free network
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Scale-free networks are very common and a very
important category of real networks.
Scale-free networks are the direct result of selforganized growth
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Growth: networks continuously expand by the addition of
new nodes
Special type of growth called preferential attachment
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Preferential Attachment : The attachment is NOT uniform
A node is linked with higher probability to a node that already
has a large number of links
Internet---A Scale-free Network (2)
Random/
Five nodes with most links
First neighbors of red nodes
27%
reach
60%
reach
Internet---A Scale-free Network (3)
Poisson distribution
Power-law distribution
P(k)~k-γ
Exponential
Network
Scale-free
Network
Internet---Topological Robustness
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Topological robustness: the Internet is robust
in the presence of random failures.
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At any given time hundreds of routers are down
but the performance is not impacted
It will function even if we remove randomly 80% of
the nodes.
Theoretical and experimental investigations
show that scale-free networks are
topologically robust
Internet---Vulnerability to Targeted Attacks
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Scale-free networks such as Internet are
vulnerable to attacks.
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If a malicious attack could simultaneously remove
5% of hubs (the highly connected nodes) the
network would disintegrate
Internet---Virus
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Scale-free networks like internet are
vulnerable to spreading viruses
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Hubs are passing them massively to the
connected multiple nodes.
This suggests immunizing hubs.
When to Distribute Computing
Responsibilities (1)
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The decision of distributing computing
responsibilities is rather managerial than
technical
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People deciding how their portion of business
operates should also decide how they use IT
When to Distribute Computing
Responsibilities (2)

Systems responsibilities can be distributed
unless the following are true:
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Are the operations interdependent?
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Are the businesses really homogenous?
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For interdependent, their planning, development, resources,
and operations must be centrally coordinated
Processing may be distributed, but planning and hardware
selection should be centralized
Does the corporate culture support decentralization?
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Corporate culture might centralize finance, HR, and systems
planning
An Organizational Framework
1
Business Ecosystem
2
Enterprise
3
Country or Region
4
Plant or Site
5
Department or Process
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Systems may be
needed for all 7 levels
Inter-organizational
links can occur at all
six internal levels
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The current hot levels
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6
Work Group or Team
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7
Individual
Level1: inter-enterprise
computing
Leve5: where business
processes reside
A Technical Framework (1)
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The SUMURU architecture developed in
1982, has stood the test of time.
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It provides a clear conceptual framework for
understanding various components of a
distributed architecture.
A Technical Framework (2)
A Technical Framework (3)
Processors
Services
Single-user systems (SU)
Terminal access
Multiple-user systems (MU)
File transfer
Remote utility systems (RU)
Computer mail
Networks
Standards
Local network (LN)
Operating system
Remote network (RN)
Communications protocols
Database systems