Management and Measurement Systems
Management and Measurement Systems
Brief Overview of Organizational Strategies Organizational strategy includes the organization’s design as well as the choices it makes to define, set up, coor- dinate, and control its work processes. How a manager designs the organization impacts every aspect of opera- tions from dealing with innovation to relationships with customers, suppliers, and employees. The organizational strategy is a plan that answers the question: “How will the company organize to achieve its goals and implement its business strategy?”
A useful framework for organizational design can be found in the book Building the Information Age Orga- nization by Cash, Eccles, Nohria, and Nolan.16 This framework (Figure 1.5) suggests that the successful execu- tion of a company’s organizational strategy comprises the best combination of organizational, control, and cultural variables. Organizational variables include decision rights, business processes, formal reporting relationships, and informal networks. Control variables include the availability of data, nature and quality of planning, effectiveness of performance measurement and evaluation systems, and incentives to do good work. Cultural variables comprise the values of the organization. These organizational, control, and cultural variables are managerial levers used by decision makers to effect changes in their organizations. These managerial levers are discussed in detail in Chapter 3.
FIGURE 1.4 Summary of strategic approaches and IT applications.
Strategic Approach Key Idea Application to Information Systems
Porter’s generic strategies Firms achieve competitive advantage through cost leadership, differentiation, or focus.
Understanding which strategy is chosen by a firm is critical to choosing IS to complement the strategy.
Dynamic environment strategies Speed, agility, and aggressive moves and countermoves by a firm create competitive advantage.
The speed of change is too fast for manual response, making IS critical to achieving business goals.
16 James I. Cash, Robert G. Eccles, Nitin Nohria, and Richard L. Nolan, Building the Information Age Organization (Homewood, IL: Richard D. Irwin, 1994).
c01.indd 25 11/26/2015 6:19:40 PM
26 The Information Systems Strategy Triangle
Our objective is to give the manager a framework to use in evaluating various aspects of organizational design. In this way, the manager can review the current organization and assess which components may be missing and what future options are available. Understanding organizational design means answering the following questions:
1. What are the important structures and reporting relationships within the organization?
2. Who holds the decision rights to critical decisions?
3. What are the important people‐based networks (social and informational), and how can we use them to get work done better?
4. What are the characteristics, experiences, and skill levels of the people within the organization?
5. What are the key business processes?
6. What control systems (management and measurement systems) are in place?
7. What are the culture, values, and beliefs of the organization?
You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.
Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.
Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.
The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.
