Role of Information Systems in Organizations What

Role of Information Systems in Organizations

What unifies all businesses is their continual need for accurate, timely information to base decisions on and continually guide their strategies to achievement. Information is the new oil; it is what enables complex processes to be simplified and integrated into the broader infrastructure of an enterprise. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate how every organization must make the most of its information systems if it is to stay competitive over time and gain new customers. One of the most critical success factors for the profitability of any business is its ability to unify and strengthen its business model based on its intelligent use of information systems (Kroenke, 2013).

How Information Systems Create Competitive Advantage

Across the many types of businesses and the industries they compete in, all shares a common need to synchronize their supply chains, create profitable products and services, manage costs, ensure a high level of collaboration and communication, and stay connected to customers. All enterprises share the need for a centralized system that can coordinate these many diverse tasks, and in many industries the reliance on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems is commonplace specifically for this purpose (Kroenke, 2013). What drives the adoption of these systems is the need inside companies for a common system of record that tracks all transactions, costs, pricing, supplier management and coordination, and service lifecycle management (Kroenke, 2013) The entire value chain of a business requires an intensive level of information to continually function, and the greater the quality of the data shared the higher the probability of success for the business. In conjunction with ERP systems there is also a rapid adoption of analytics applications that can quickly interpret and classify raw data into dashboards, reports and scorecards.

Advanced quality management and business process re-engineering (BPR) strategies are predicated on having accurate, recent data on business unit performance so adjustments and continual improvements can be made (Kroenke, 2013). In addition to the needs of every organization to understand its financial position and understand how its revenues are trending relative to expenses, all organizations also must have a view into their overarching performance from a process perspective as well (Kroenke, 2013). From the foundational aspects of management including using information systems to support the planning, leading, organizing and controlling aspects of managing a business to the use of analytics to plan new ventures (Kroenke, 2013) information systems are indispensable to the functioning of a business.