Think of any organization in your life that you feel familiar with. Imagine wanting to help them create an MIS that would help them manage

1 – Organizational Perspectives

Peppard and Ward offer several perspectives or rationales (citing Michael Earl’s work) for working on organizational maturity, including technology, methodology, administration, business, and organization. These perspectives will generally lead to differences in both the process of developing strategies and to the actual resulting strategies. While these perspectives apply to different organizations in different ways, virtually all organizations will be impacted by each at some point, and so these factors need to be considered when implementing MIS systems within the organization.

Think of any organization in your life that you feel familiar with. Imagine wanting to help them create an MIS that would help them manage and control the organization better, in ways that would allow many organizational stakeholders to interact with it to perform their roles better. Discuss some examples of ways that one or more of these organizational perspectives might affect what that system change might be expected to look like and what it might help people do. Are any of these perspectives more useful than others? Are there any that you think don’t apply?

Response Guideline

Post your response of 1-3 paragraphs (about 200-300 words) early in the week, and then reply to at least two initial responses of your peers, particularly focusing on responses that might differ from your own. Also respond appropriately to anyone who posts questions against your own postings.

2 – Changing Maturity Stages

Consider the five stages of strategic development evolution described by Peppard and Ward (p. 89-91). These stages result in constraints on both how we go about developing MIS strategy as well as what those ultimate strategies become. As an industrial engineer, you will be involved in both aspects over time. Because industrial engineers take such a broad view of the organization, we can often help with both of these aspects. In particular, we might be chartered to specific work to move the organization from one maturity level to the next higher level.

Imagine that you work in an organization at one of the lower four stages: pick Stage 1, 2, 3 or 4. Discuss what you would expect to see around you in that kind of organization with respect to IS/IT technologies, business strategies, and overlapping MIS management, planning, and control objectives. Discuss things you might do to clarify requirements, engage management, and identify opportunities that would help the organization move up to the next maturity stage. Make sure your discussion is consistent with the way Peppard and Ward describe your chosen stage.

Response Guideline

3 – Economic Choices and IT

Organizations make decisions to implement certain information technology solutions while choosing to forego other implementation options. They are making economic choices. Use the principles of transaction cost theory or agency theory described in the assigned Bahili (2003) article to discuss at least two of the perspectives that these organizations are likely to be considering when making such choices. How might these choices tend to impact future organizational scale or behaviors?

Response Guideline

Try to respond to this topic without giving explicit examples of particular companies or systems investments. If you have particular examples that come to mind, ask yourself why those examples come to mind and then focus your response on those reasons rather than the examples themselves.

4 – Basic Formal Ontology (BFO)

Our assigned Chapter 3 reading in Biehl (2016) introduces the use of ontology in the definition and analysis of the domain for any system. The examples in the reading are specific to healthcare, but the use of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) can be applied to the definition and development of every information system (IS) or management information system (MIS). The BFO provides a universal framework for discussing system requirements through its distinction between continuants and occurrents. Continuants provide the nouns in our systems, while occurrents provide the verbs. A chain emerges when you consider that for any continuant to exhibit change, an occurrent must exist between them before and after versions of the continuant. Likewise, for an occurrent to add value, there must be continuants as both inputs and outputs. This creates a systemic chain of occurrent-continuant-occurrent-continuant-occurrent-continuant- … etc. that can be used to specify any information or management information system.

Name and discuss some examples of things in an organization (it helps to be thinking of the organization you picked for your semester project, but that’s not absolutely required here) that can be described as instances of the constructs defined in the BFO. Try to get detailed by using the lower tiers of Figures 3.2 and 3.3 rather than just sticking to the upper levels. Include enough detail to imply at least one chain cycle of continuant-occurrent-continuant in your example and discussion. What implications does this type of analysis offer for your MIS engineering?

Response Guideline

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