Introduction to information systems - Fifteenth ed

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INTRODUCTION TO

INFORMATION

SYSTEMS

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INTRODUCTION TO

INFORMATION

SYSTEMS

Fifteenth Edition

James A. O’Brien

College of Business Administration

Northern Arizona University

George M. Marakas

KU School of Business

University of Kansas

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INTRODUCTION TO INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Published by McGraw-Hill/Irwin, a business unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., 1221 Avenue

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

O’Brien, James A., 1936–2007

Introduction to information systems / James A. O’Brien, George M. Marakas.—Fifteenth ed.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978–0-07–337677-6 (alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0–07-337677–9 (alk. paper)

1. Business—Data processing. 2. Management—Data processing.

3. Management information systems. 4. Electronic commerce.

I. Marakas, George M. II. Title.

HF5548.2.O23 2010

658.4’038—dc22

2009036062

www.mhhe.com

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To your love, happiness, and success.

The world of information systems presents new

and exciting challenges each and every day. Creating a

textbook to capture this world is a formidable task, to be

sure. This, the 15th edition of Introduction to Information

Systems , represents the best we have to offer. We take

pride in delivering this new edition to you and we thank

all of you for your loyalty to the book and the input you

provided that was instrumental in its development. Your

continued support fi lls us with joy and a sense of both

accomplishment and contribution.

We are also pleased and excited to welcome a new

member to our writing family. Miguel Aguirre-Urreta

has joined us in the creation of the materials contained

herein. His work and effort on the Real World Cases and

blue boxes will be apparent as we bring you new cases

in every chapter of the book. Please join us in welcoming

Miguel to our family.

On behalf of Jim, Miguel, and myself, please accept

our sincere appreciation for your support and loyalty. As

always, we hope you enjoy and benefi t from this book.

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A b o u t t h e A u t h o r s

ames A. O’Brien was an adjunct professor of Computer Information Systems in

the College of Business Administration at Northern Arizona University. He

completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Hawaii and Gonzaga

University and earned an MS and PhD in Business Administration from the

University of Oregon. He has been professor and coordinator of the CIS area at

Northern Arizona University, professor of Finance and Management Information

Systems and chairman of the Department of Management at Eastern Washington

University, and a visiting professor at the University of Alberta, the University of

Hawaii, and Central Washington University.

Dr. O’Brien’s business experience includes working in the Marketing Manage￾ment Program of the IBM Corporation, as well as serving as a fi nancial analyst for

the General Electric Company. He is a graduate of General Electric’s Financial

Management Program. He also has served as an information systems consultant to

several banks and computer services fi rms.

Jim’s research interests lie in developing and testing basic conceptual frameworks

used in information systems development and management. He has written eight

books, including several that have been published in multiple editions, as well as in

Chinese, Dutch, French, Japanese, and Spanish translations. He has also contributed

to the fi eld of information systems through the publication of many articles in busi￾ness and academic journals, as well as through his participation in academic and

industry associations in the fi eld of information systems.

eorge M. Marakas is a professor of Information Systems at the School of

Business at the University of Kansas. His teaching expertise includes Sys￾tems Analysis and Design, Technology-Assisted Decision Making, Elec￾tronic Commerce, Management of IS Resources, Behavioral IS Research

Methods, and Data Visualization and Decision Support. In addition, George is

an active researcher in the area of Systems Analysis Methods, Data Mining and

Visualization, Creativity Enhancement, Conceptual Data Modeling, and Computer

Self-Effi cacy.

George received his PhD in Information Systems from Florida International

University in Miami and his MBA from Colorado State University. Prior to his po￾sition at the University of Kansas, he was a member of the faculties at the University

of Maryland, Indiana University, and Helsinki School of Economics. Preceding his

academic career, he enjoyed a highly successful career in the banking and real estate

industries. His corporate experience includes senior management positions with

Continental Illinois National Bank and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corpora￾tion. In addition, George served as president and CEO for CMC Group Inc., a ma￾jor RTC management contractor in Miami, Florida, for three years. Throughout

his academic career, George has distinguished himself both through his research

and in the classroom. He has received numerous national teaching awards, and his

research has appeared in the top journals in his fi eld. In addition to this text, he is

J

G

vi

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About the Authors ● vii

the author of three best-selling textbooks on information systems: Decision Support

Systems for the 21st Century, Systems Analysis and Design: An Active Approach, and Data

Warehousing, Mining, and Visualization: Core Concepts.

Beyond his academic endeavors, George is also an active consultant and has

served as an advisor to a number of organizations, including the Central Intel￾ligence Agency, Brown & Williamson, the Department of the Treasury, the De￾partment of Defense, Xavier University, Citibank Asia-Pacifi c, Nokia Corporation,

Professional Records Storage Inc., and United Information Systems. His consulting

activities are concentrated primarily on electronic commerce strategy, the design

and deployment of global IT strategy, workfl ow reengineering, e-business strategy,

and ERP and CASE tool integration.

George is also an active member of a number of professional IS organizations

and an avid golfer, second-degree Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do, a PADI master scuba

diver trainer and IDC staff instructor, and a member of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity.

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The O’Brien and

Marakas Approach

The first thing you probably noticed about this new edition is the new, loose-leaf for￾mat. The 15th edition was produced this way in order to deliver a couple of important

benefits for instructors and students.

• Lower cost to students—the loose-leaf format allows us to substantially lower the

price that your campus bookstore pays for each copy, which should translate to a

substantially lower price for each student.

• Less frequent course prep for faculty—We expect that, by providing students with this

cost-competitive alternative to a used book, we won’t need to revise the book as fre￾quently. So instructors will get additional semesters out of their prep with this edition.

• Improved portability—Students and instructors need only carry the chapter re￾quired for today’s lecture, leaving the rest in a three ring binder.

If for any reason you need a bound book for your class, simply contact your

McGraw-Hill representative. They will arrange to have bound copies of Introduction

to Information Systems, 15th edition produced for your adoption.

A Business and Managerial Perspective

The Fifteenth Edition is designed for business students who are or who will soon become

business professionals in the fast-changing business world of today. The goal of this text

is to help business students learn how to use and manage information technologies to

revitalize business processes, improve business decision making, and gain competitive ad￾vantage. Thus, it places a major emphasis on up-to-date coverage of the essential role of

Internet technologies in providing a platform for business, commerce, and collaboration

processes among all business stakeholders in today’s networked enterprises and global

markets. This is the business and managerial perspective that this text brings to the study

of information systems. Of course, as in all O’Brien texts, this edition:

• Loads the text with Real World Cases, in-depth examples (Blue Boxes) , and

opportunities to learn about real people and companies in the business world

(Real World Activities, Case Study Questions, Discussion Questions, and

Analysis Exercises) .

• Organizes the text around a simple Five-Area Information Systems Framework

that emphasizes the IS knowledge a business professional needs to know.

• Places a major emphasis on the strategic role of information technology in

providing business professionals with tools and resources for managing business

operations, supporting decision making, enabling enterprise collaboration, and

gaining competitive advantage.

Modular Structure of the Text

The text is organized into

modules that reflect the

five major areas of the

framework for informa￾tion systems knowledge.

Each chapter is then or￾ganized into two or more

distinct sections to provide

the best possible concep￾tual organization of the

text and each chapter. This

organization increases in￾structor flexibility in as￾signing course material because it structures the text into modular levels (i.e., modules,

chapters, and sections) while reducing the number of chapters that need to be covered.

viii

MODULE V

Management

Challenges

Chapters 11, 12

MODULE II

Information

Technologies

Chapters 3, 4, 5, 6

MODULE IV

Development

Processes

Chapter 10

MODULE III

Business

Applications

Chapters 7, 8, 9

MODULE I

Foundation

Concepts

Chapters 1, 2

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Management

Challenges

Business

Applications

Information

Technologies

Foundation

Concepts

Development

Processes

Information

Systems

An Information

Systems Framework

ix

Information

Technologies

Includes major concepts, develop￾ments, and managerial issues in￾volved in computer hardware,

software, telecommunications net￾works, data resource management

technologies, and other technolo￾gies (Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6).

Management Challenges

The challenges of business/IT technologies

and strategies, including security and ethi￾cal challenges and global IT management

(Chapters 11 and 12).

Foundation Concepts

Fundamental business information systems

concepts, including trends, components,

and roles of information systems (Chapter 1)

and competitive advantage concepts and

applications (Chapter 2). Selective coverage

of relevant behavioral, managerial, and

technical concepts.

Development Processes

Developing and implementing business/IT

strategies and systems using several strategic

planning and application development

approaches (Chapter 10).

Business Applications

How businesses use the Internet and other

information technologies to support

their business processes, e-business and

e-commerce initiatives, and business

decision making (Chapters 7, 8, and 9).

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Real World Examples

x

measured in minutes.” Merged and acquired infrastructure

“has to be available right away,” says Ryan Osborn of AFCOM,

a data center industry group.

Observers agree that the key to M&A success from a

data center perspective is to focus on virtualization, docu￾mentation, and logistics. Osborn says these three areas will

help companies get ahead of the game and turn a time of

crisis into one of opportunity. “You won’t spend your time

just moving infrastructure from one data center to another.

You can actually do a technology refresh, get newer equip￾ment and come out ahead,” he says.

For John Musilli, data center operations manager at Intel

in Santa Clara, California, the most critical piece is knowing

about basic logistics. “I don’t always have to know what a

server does, but I do have to know how to keep it alive,” he

says. “It’s getting something moved from Point A to Point B

and it doesn’t matter whether the logistics deals with putting

servers on a truck or transferring data over a line.”

Musilli has been through a handful of acquisitions in his

eight years at Intel, and he says that he has it down to a sci￾ence. “As part of the acquiring company, it’s my job to pro￾vide the skeletal environment to accept any company’s assets

that come to us,” he says. As such, he keeps a healthy amount

of generic racking, generic cabling, extra bandwidth on the

network, and generic power. “I go generic because I proba￾bly won’t know what servers, how many slots, or what type

of power we’ll need beforehand. With generic, I can config￾ure whatever I need in minutes,” he says.

For instance, he uses a universal busway for power so

that he doesn’t have to be concerned about the particular

electrical needs of the acquired equipment. “We acquired a

company and needed to integrate them in a short period of

time because their building lease was up and they had to get

out of there,” Musilli says. One team was sent ahead of time

and spent a year trying to identify each server on 30–40 racks.

“None of their applications matched our operating systems,”

he says. As time dwindled, Musilli told them to pack up all

the servers and send them to him. “In the end, it took two

man-days to move them intact and get them up and running

in our data center,” he says.

As companies begin to contemplate future mergers or

acquisitions, they must look inward at their own processes

and procedures. “Just as important as technology is docu￾mentation of processes—you have to know what people are

doing with the systems,” says EMA’s Mann. He warns that

one of the first obstacles to having a successful merger or

acquisition is the reliance on what he refers to as tribal knowl￾edge. Companies that have data centers where the employees

hold all the knowledge suffer greatly when, after a merger or

acquisition, those people are let go.

“You have to document the knowledge from those peo￾ple and figure out how to make the processes work with

only a handful of employees,” he says. Mann recommends

When Cogent Communications eyes a company

to acquire, it goes into battle mode. Two miles

north of the Pentagon, across the Potomac in

Washington, Cogent sets up what it calls the War Room,

where it marshals eight top executives to evaluate the target

company. Among those on the due diligence squad are the

IS director and IT infrastructure manager.

Cogent, a midsize Internet service provider, understands

what far too many companies don’t: Its ability to integrate

and, in some cases, adopt an acquired company’s IT systems

and operations can determine whether a merger flourishes

or founders. For one thing, unanticipated IT integration

costs can offset merger savings. Imagine the business lost

when orders vanish, accounts payable go uncollected, and

customer information goes AWOL because the acquiring

company gave short shrift to the IT challenge ahead.

As 2006 came to a close, it broke records for the number

of mergers and acquisitions, but now IT managers have to

step up and make sure their data centers can help make those

deals a reality. “A well-run data center with reduced com￾plexity makes mergers and acquisitions much easier,” says

Andi Mann, senior analyst at Enterprise Management Asso￾ciates (EMA).

More than 11,700 deals were done. As the dust clears,

experts and IT managers agree that companies will feel the

full impact of this merger and acquisition (M&A) frenzy di￾rectly in their data centers. So they advise organizations to

prep now or risk experiencing downtime if they have to

merge mission-critical assets. “Today, the most downtime

companies can afford for critical data center infrastructure is

Cogent Communications, Intel, and

Others: Mergers Go More Smoothly

When Your Data Are Ready

REAL WORLD

CASE 1

Source: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc./John Flournoy, photographer.

FIGURE 5.1

IT integration and adoption issues can make or

break merger and acquisition activities.

Chapter 5 / Data Resource Management ● 171

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Real World Cases

Each chapter provides three Real World Cases—in-depth

examples that illustrate how prominent businesses and

organizations have attempted to implement the theoretical

concepts students have just learned.

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xi

Real Life Lessons

creating a workflow chart that outlines who’s responsible for

each part of the data center. He suggests considering who

handles network management, systems management, appli￾cation management, and storage. “This will also help you

spot redundancies in skill sets or areas where you are lacking

in the event of a merger,” he says. John Burke, senior analyst

at Nemertes Research in Minneapolis, says that in addition

to knowing who is responsible, IT groups must know which

systems perform which processes.

“You have to have really good information about what

goes on in your data center in terms of systems and how they

interact with each other and how they interface with the

business. You should always know what services you offer

and how much it costs to offer them,” Burke says. As part of

this effort, many organizations employ a configuration man￾agement database and asset management tool to help track

elements within the data center. “You need a clear and con￾cise view of the data flow within the data center. If you don’t

know what has to move together, you might disrupt business

during a merger or acquisition,” he says.

Companies must also develop guidelines for governance

to be referenced during a merger. For instance, if two law

firms are merging and have competing clients, then IT

groups must ensure that data are protected and there is suf￾ficient access control. AFCOM’s Osborn says that good doc￾umentation helps the discovery process that companies go

through before a merger or acquisition. “If the company you

are acquiring has good documentation and good processes in

place, the acquisition goes much more smoothly,” he says.

“In some cases, you might be able to lower your software

costs if you use a more robust server with fewer processors,

but if the application license doesn’t allow for that, then you

can’t,” Osborn says, and adds: “How much money you’re

going to have to spend to merge technology can weigh heavily

on the decision to acquire a company.” Nemertes’ Burke

suggests that one major step to M&A success is to make sure

your data center has virtualization tools running on both

servers and storage.

Virtualization is important not only for scaling the data

center but also for creating a standardized execution environ￾ment. “With a well-virtualized data center, you can hide the

fact that things are moving around multiple servers and stor￾age devices,” Burke says. Rob Laurie, CEO at virtualization￾software provider Dunes Technologies in Stamford,

Connecticutt, says that virtualization is useful for companies

that want to test application and infrastructure integration be￾fore they put their merged or acquired assets into production.

It’s also helpful for companies that must integrate assets that

can’t be physically moved, he says. He warns, however, that for

virtualization to be most effective, merging companies must

decide on a uniform platform for their virtual environment.

“That way, whatever is virtualized in one company could run

in the other company’s data center without problems,” he says.

If they don’t have the same environment, they must at least

have a compatible data format to gain any benefit.

Intel’s Musilli suggests that IT’s natural attention to de￾tail can sometimes overcomplicate matters. “Mergers and

acquisitions aren’t always as difficult as people make them.

They’re simply about the ability to assimilate any two envi￾ronments,” he says. M&As create stress for both acquirer

and acquiree, but early involvement by IT can minimize the

trauma. Otherwise, you’ll need to do too much in too little

time. As software engineering guru Frederick Brooks once

said, “You can’t make a baby in a month using nine women.

Plan ahead.”

Source: Adapted from Sandra Gittien, “Mergers Go Smoother with a Well￾Prepped Data Center,” Computerworld, July 28, 2007, and Eric Chabrow, “IT

Plays Linchpin Role in High-Stake M&As,” InformationWeek, June 26, 2006.

1. Place yourself in the role of a manager at a company

undergoing a merger or acquisition. What would be

the most important things customers would expect

from you while still in that process? What role would

IT play in meeting those expectations? Provide at least

three examples.

2. Focus on what Andi Mann in the case calls “tribal

knowledge.” What do you think he means by that, and

why is it so important to this process? What strategies

would you suggest for companies that are faced with the

extensive presence of this issue in an acquired organiza￾tion? Develop some specific recommendations.

3. Most of the discussion on the case focused on hardware

and software issues. However, these are essentially ena￾blers for underlying business processes developed by

each of the companies involved. What different alterna￾tives do companies have for merging their business

processes, and what role would IT play in supporting

those activities? Pay particular attention to data man￾agement and governance issues.

1. The case extensively discusses the idea of “virtualiza￾tion” and the role it plays in the merger process. Go

online to research this concept and prepare a report

about what it entails, how it works, what are its

advantages and disadvantages, and other applications

in addition to those noted in the case.

2. Search the Internet for reports of merger and acquisi￾tion cases where IT issues played an important role,

either positive or negative. How did different organiza￾tions handle IT-related matters in the situations you

found? What was the ultimate outcome of the process?

Prepare a presentation to share your findings with

the class.

CASE STUDY QUESTIONS REAL WORLD ACTIVITIES

172 ● Module II / Information Technologies

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Use Your Hands

The Real World Activities

section offers possibilities

for hands-on exploration

and learning.

Use Your Brain

Traditional case study questions promote and

provide opportunity for critical thinking and

classroom discussion.

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Strategy, Ethics . . .

xii

Chapter Highlights

Section I

Fundamentals of Strategic Advantage

Strategic IT

Competitive Strategy Concepts

Real World Case: IT Leaders: Reinventing IT as a

Strategic Business Partner

Strategic Uses of Information Technology

Building a Customer-Focused Business

The Value Chain and Strategic IS

Section II

Using Information Technology for Strategic

Advantage

Strategic Uses of IT

Reengineering Business Processes

Real World Case: For Companies Both Big and Small:

Running a Business on Smartphones

Becoming an Agile Company

Creating a Virtual Company

Building a Knowledge-Creating Company

Real World Case: Wachovia and Others: Trading

Securities at the Speed of Light

Learning Objectives

1. Identify several basic competitive strategies and

explain how they use information technologies

to confront the competitive forces faced by a

business.

2. Identify several strategic uses of Internet tech￾nologies and give examples of how they can help

a business gain competitive advantages.

3. Give examples of how business process reengi￾neering frequently involves the strategic use of

Internet technologies.

4. Identify the business value of using Internet tech￾nologies to become an agile competitor or form

a virtual company.

5. Explain how knowledge management systems can

help a business gain strategic advantages.

43

CHAPTER 2

COMPETING WITH

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Module

I

Business

Applications

Information

Technologies

Development

Processes

Management

Challenges

Foundation

Concepts

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44 ● Module I / Foundation Concept

SECTION I Fundamentals of Strategic

Advantage

Technology is no longer an afterthought in forming business strategy, but the actual cause

and driver .

This chapter will show you that it is important to view information systems as

more than a set of technologies that support efficient business operations, workgroup

and enterprise collaboration, or effective business decision making. Information tech￾nology can change the way businesses compete. You should also view information

systems strategically, that is, as vital competitive networks, as a means of organiza￾tional renewal, and as a necessary investment in technologies; such technologies help

a company adopt strategies and business processes that enable it to reengineer or rein￾vent itself to survive and succeed in today’s dynamic business environment.

Section I of this chapter introduces fundamental competitive strategy concepts that

underlie the strategic use of information systems. Section II then discusses several ma￾jor strategic applications of information technology used by many companies today.

Read the Real World Case regarding the competitive advantages of IT. We can

learn a lot about the strategic business uses of information technologies from this case.

See Figure 2.1 .

Competitive

Strategy

Concepts

In Chapter 1, we emphasized that a major role of information systems applications in

business is to provide effective support of a company’s strategies for gaining competi￾tive advantage. This strategic role of information systems involves using information

technology to develop products, services, and capabilities that give a company major

advantages over the competitive forces it faces in the global marketplace.

This role is accomplished through a strategic information architecture: the collec￾Strategic IT

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Chapter 11 / Security and Ethical Challenges ● 455

Ethics, Moral Dilemmas, and Tough

Decisions: The Many Challenges of

Working in IT

and professional, throughout the company, and they have the

technical prowess to manipulate that information. That gives

them both the power and responsibility to monitor and re￾port employees who break company rules. IT professionals

may also uncover evidence that a coworker is, say, embez￾zling funds, or they could be tempted to peek at private salary

information or personal e-mails. There’s little guidance,

however, on what to do in these uncomfortable situations.

In the case of the porn-viewing executive, Bryan didn’t get

into trouble, but neither did the executive, who came up with

“a pretty outlandish explanation” that the company accepted,

Bryan says. He considered going to the FBI, but the Internet

bubble had just burst, and jobs were hard to come by. “It was a

tough choice,” Bryan says. “But I had a family to feed.”

Perhaps it would ease Bryan’s conscience to know that

he did just what labor attorney Linn Hynds, a senior partner

at Honigman Miller Schwartz and Cohn LLP, would have

advised in his case. “Let the company handle it,” she says.

“Make sure you report violations to the right person in your

company, and show them the evidence. After that, leave it to

the people who are supposed to be making that decision.”

Ideally, corporate policy takes over where the law stops, gov￾erning workplace ethics to clear up gray areas and remove

personal judgment from the equation as much as possible.

“If you don’t set out your policy and your guidelines, if

you don’t make sure that people know what they are and

understand them, you’re in no position to hold workers ac￾countable ” says John Reece a former CIO at the Internal

What Bryan found on an executive’s computer

six years ago still weighs heavily on his mind.

He’s particularly troubled that the man he

discovered using a company PC to view pornography of

Asian women and of children was subsequently promoted

and moved to China to run a manufacturing plant. “To this

day, I regret not taking that stuff to the FBI.” It happened

when Bryan, who asked that his last name not be published,

was IT director at the U.S. division of a $500 million multi￾national corporation based in Germany.

The company’s Internet usage policy, which Bryan

helped develop with input from senior management, prohib￾ited the use of company computers to access pornographic

or adult-content Web sites. One of Bryan’s duties was to use

products from SurfControl PLC to monitor employee Web

surfing and to report any violations to management.

Bryan knew that the executive, who was a level above him in

another department, was popular within both the U.S. division

and the German parent. Yet when the tools turned up dozens of

pornographic Web sites visited by the exec’s computer, Bryan

followed the policy. “That’s what it’s there for. I wasn’t going to

get into trouble for following the policy,” he reasoned.

Bryan’s case is a good example of the ethical dilemmas

that IT workers may encounter on the job. IT employees

have privileged access to digital information, both personal

REAL WORLD

CASE 1

FIGURE 11.1

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454 ● Module V / Management Challenges

SECTION I Security, Ethical, and Societal

Challenges of IT

There is no question that the use of information technology in business presents major

security challenges, poses serious ethical questions, and affects society in significant

ways. Therefore, in this section, we explore the threats to businesses and individuals as

a result of many types of computer crime and unethical behavior. In Section II, we will

examine a variety of methods that companies use to manage the security and integrity

of their business systems. Now let’s look at a real-world example.

Read the Real World Case on the next page. We can learn a lot from this case

about the security and ethical issues that result from the pervasive use of IT in or￾ganizations and society today. See Figure 11.1 .

The use of information technologies in business has had a major impact on society and

thus raises ethical issues in the areas of crime, privacy, individuality, employment,

health, and working conditions. See Figure 11.2 .

It is important to understand that information technology has had beneficial re￾sults, as well as detrimental effects, on society and people in each of these areas. For

example, computerizing a manufacturing process may have the beneficial result of

improving working conditions and producing products of higher quality at lower cost,

but it also has the adverse effect of eliminating people’s jobs. So your job as a manager

or business professional should involve managing your work activities and those of

others to minimize the detrimental effects of business applications of information

technology and optimize their beneficial effects. That would represent an ethically

responsible use of information technology.

Introduction

Business/IT Security,

Ethics, and Society

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you don’t make sure that pe

understand them, you’re in n

countable,” says John Reece

Revenue Service and Time W

guidelines also lets employe

the person they discover br

someone who reports to them

Reece, who is now head of co

Associates LLC. Organizatio

often focus on areas where t

emphasize whatever they ar

Reece was at the IRS, for exa

on protecting the confidentia

At the U.S. Department o

phasize procurement rules, n

dent of the SANS Technolo

Ethics Handbook: Right and W

to the complexity, an organi

skilled workers might be m

worked in IT security at the

in Virginia, it was a rarefied

after PhDs. “I was told pretty

lot of PhDs very unhappy so

wouldn’t need me anymore,”

Of course, that wasn’t w

Northcutt had to read betwe

preted it was: Child pornogra

if the leading mathematician

tures of naked girls, they didn

Northcutt says that he did

and that both events led to pr

The pervasive use of information technology in

organizations and society presents individuals with

new ethical challenges and dilemmas.

FIGURE 11.1

Source: ©Courtesy of Punchstock.

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Ethics & Security

Chapter 11 discusses the issues

surrounding these topics and

the challenges IT faces.

Competitive Advantage

Chapter 2 focuses on the use of IT as a way to

surpass your competitor’s performance.

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. . . and Beyond

xiii

522 ● Module V / Management Challenges

Managing Global IT

Whether they are in Berlin or Bombay, Kuala Lumpur or Kansas, San Francisco or

Seoul, companies around the globe are developing new models to operate competitively

in a digital economy. These models are structured, yet agile; global, yet local; and

they concentrate on maximizing the risk-adjusted return from both knowledge and

technology assets.

International dimensions have become a vital part of managing a business enter￾prise in the internetworked global economies and markets of today. Whether you be￾come a manager in a large corporation or the owner of a small business, you will be

affected by international business developments and deal in some way with people,

products, or services whose origin is not your home country.

Read the Real World Case on the next page. We can learn a lot about approaches

to successfully develop and roll out worldwide system implementations from this

case. See Figure 12.11 .

Figure 12.12illustrates the major dimensions of the job of managing global informa￾tion technology that we cover in this section. Notice that all global IT activities must

be adjusted to take into account the cultural, political, and geoeconomic challenges

that exist in the international business community. Developing appropriate business

and IT strategies for the global marketplace should be the first step in global informa￾tion technology management. Once that is done, end users and IS managers can move

on to developing the portfolio of business applications needed to support business/IT

strategies; the hardware, software, and Internet-based technology platforms to sup￾port those applications; the data resource management methods to provide necessary

databases; and finally the systems development projects that will produce the global

information systems required.

The

International

Dimension

Global IT

Management

SECTION II

We seem to have reached a point where virtually every CIO is a global CIO—a

leader whose sphere of influence (and headaches) spans continents. The global CIO’s

most common challenge, according to CIO Executive Council members, is manag￾ing global virtual teams. In an ideal world, HR policies across the global IT team

should be consistent, fair, and responsive. Titles and reporting structures (if not

compensation) should be equalized.

The council’s European members, representing Royal Dutch Shell, Galderma,

Olympus, and others, commissioned a globalization playbook that collects and codi￾fies best practices in this and other globalization challenges.

Obtain local HR expertise. Companies must have a local HR person in each

country to deal with local laws. “Hiring, firing, and training obligations must be

managed very differently in each location, and you need someone with local exper￾tise on the laws and processes,” says Michael Pilkington, former CIO of Euroclear, the

Brussels-based provider of domestic and cross-border settlement for bond, equity,

and fund transactions.

Create job grade consistency across regions. Euroclear is moving toward a

job evaluation methodology that organizes job types into vertical categories, such as

managing people/process, product development, business support, and project man￾agement. This provides a basis for comparing and managing roles and people across

locations. Grade level is not the same thing as a title; people’s titles are much more

subject to local conventions.

Global Teams: It’s

Still a Small World

(text continues on page 525)

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Source: Getty Images.

Consistency across the different business functions,

countries, languages, and processes involved in world￾wide implementations is one of the most important

challenges faced by global organizations today.

FIGURE 12.11

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Go Global with IT

This text closes with Chapter 12, an in-depth

look at IT across borders.

Since Colorcon Inc. consolidated all of its global offices and seven manufacturing

sites onto one ERP system in 2001, the benefits have been indisputable. The spe￾cialty chemicals manufacturer has increased its annual inventory turns by 40 percent,

closes its books each quarter more than 50 percent faster than it once did, and has

improved its production lead times. “It was a significant improvement,” says CIO

Perry Cozzone.

Yet getting to a single, global instance has also been fraught with challenges for

the West Point, Pennsylvania–based company. Those included cleansing and verify￾ing data from legacy systems, standardizing business processes globally, and getting

buy-in from business leaders in locales as disparate as Brazil, Singapore, and the

United Kingdom.

“It was hard work,” says Cozzone, who oversaw the final stages of the system

implementation. Transitioning to a single, global instance of an ERP system is a

heady challenge for large and midsize multinationals alike. For many organizations,

the toughest challenge in moving to one ERP system is change management. “It’s a

real struggle for many companies to have consistency around their business proc￾esses” because of differences in regional business requirements, says Rob Karel, an

analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Still, companies that have achieved a single instance say it’s worth the struggle to

streamline financial reporting and increase the visibility of operations around the

world because doing so allows executives to make decisions faster.

The most common technical challenge that project teams face is verifying the

integrity of legacy data and moving it to the ERP environment. “One of the lessons

learned is that you can never spend enough time on ensuring data quality,” says

Cozzone. Early in Colorcon’s project, when there were questions about the quality

of a set of data, team members and executives didn’t always agree on what needed to

be done. “There was inconsistency about how to measure quality and manage it,”

says Cozzone.

So the project team developed a data-quality dashboard to illustrate to busi￾ness leaders why compromised data needed to be fixed before being entered into

the new environment. The dashboard demonstrates, for instance, how poor￾quality customer contact information could lead to an increase in erroneous orders.

The dashboard includes steps that business users can take to correct faulty data,

and it quantifies monthly business improvements achieved by reducing bad data.

They also had to work through minor issues in retiring legacy systems and so￾called ghost systems—those used in various business units but unknown to corpo￾rate IT.

“We’re not a multibillion-dollar company, but we still had ghost systems,” says

Cozzone. “We made these a high priority and got rid of them quickly.”

Colorcon Inc.:

Benefits and

Challenges of

Global ERPs

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Database Pioneer

Rethinks the Best

Way to Organize

Data

Is there a better way to build a data warehouse? For years, relational databases, which

organize data in tables composed of vertical columns and horizontal rows, have

served as the foundation of data warehouses. Now database pioneer Michael Stone￾braker is promoting a different way of organizing them, promising much faster

response times. As a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley in the 1970s,

Stonebraker was one of the original architects of the Ingres relational database,

which spawned several commercial variants. A row-based system like Ingres is great

for executing transactions, but a column-oriented system is a more natural fit for

data warehouses, Stonebraker now says.

SQL Server, Sybase, and Teradata all have rows as their central design point. Yet in

data warehousing, faster performance may be gained through a column layout. Stone￾braker says all types of queries on “most data warehouses” will run up to 50 times faster

in a column database. The bigger the data warehouse, the greater the performance gain.

Why? Data warehouses frequently store transactional data, and each transaction

has many parts. Columns cut across transactions and store an element of information

that is standard to each transaction, such as customer name, address, or purchase

amount. A row, by comparison, may hold 20–200 different elements of a transaction.

A standard relational database would retrieve all the rows that reflect, say, sales for a

month, load the data into system memory, and then find all sales records and gener￾ate an average from them. The ability to focus on just the “sales” column leads to

improved query performance.

There is a second performance benefit in the column approach Because columns

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Once upon a time, companies boasted of having offices in Manhattan, Munich, Madrid,

Mumbai, and Manila. Each office managed its set of customers and suppliers, with

a lot of “good advice” coming in from the head office. There was precious little

governance or standardization. Paradoxically, the use of third-party service providers

has catalyzed better governance and standards in captive or shared-services centers

scattered in distant parts of the world.

Boston-based Fidelity, the world’s largest mutual fund company, for example, has

subsidiary offices in most countries, which service local markets; has captive centers

in India to service its global operations; has outsourced to almost half a dozen third￾party IT service providers; and itself functions as a human resources and benefits

administration provider to companies such as General Motors and Novartis.

There are multiple ways to implement the concept of a worldwide campus. Re￾gardless of the company having globally dispersed teams working on disparate pieces

of work, what binds these offices together is a defined, common architecture and a

shared-enterprise objective.

Such complexity in operations is nothing new; it has been happening in other

industries for decades. In manufacturing, for instance, components may be produced

in China and Taiwan, assembled in Malaysia, and packaged in and shipped from

China. All of these activities may be coordinated from the United States. “The serv￾ices industry, and business process outsourcing (BPO) in general, is just starting to

catch up with its manufacturing brethren,” says Brian Maloney, recently appointed as

president of the newly formed Unisys Global Industries. Maloney has been CEO of

AT&T Solutions and COO of Perot Systems.

Fidelity and

Unisys: Working

in a Worldwide

Campus

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Expand Your Knowledge

Blue boxes in each chapter provide

brief, in-depth examples of how

corporations apply IS concepts and

theories.

Since Colorcon Inc. consolidated all of its global offices and seven manufacturing

sites onto one ERP system in 2001, the benefits have been indisputable. The spe￾cialty chemicals manufacturer has increased its annual inventory turns by 40 percent,

closes its books each quarter more than 50 percent faster than it once did, and has

improved its production lead times. “It was a significant improvement,” says CIO

Perry Cozzone.

Yet getting to a single, global instance has also been fraught with challenges for

the West Point, Pennsylvania–based company. Those included cleansing and verify￾ing data from legacy systems, standardizing business processes globally, and getting

buy-in from business leaders in locales as disparate as Brazil, Singapore, and the

United Kingdom.

“It was hard work,” says Cozzone, who oversaw the final stages of the system

implementation. Transitioning to a single, global instance of an ERP system is a

heady challenge for large and midsize multinationals alike. For many organizations,

the toughest challenge in moving to one ERP system is change management. “It’s a

real struggle for many companies to have consistency around their business proc￾esses” because of differences in regional business requirements, says Rob Karel, an

analyst at Forrester Research Inc.

Colorcon Inc.:

Benefits and

Challenges of

Global ERPs

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Expand Your Horizons

Globe icons indicate examples with

an international focus so that your

knowledge makes you truly worldly.

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