Impact of information system to business managerial roles

Discuss about the Business process supply chain management systems.

21^st century is the era of information technology (IT) and ever evolving business environment around the world making it essential for every organisation to adhere information technology into their organisational framework. With rise in the importance of technological advancement into the organisational framework information and data has become two key assets associated with the business administration (Laudon and Laudon 2016). Interdependence among the organisations are increasing day by day, which is making it essential for the brands to share vast amount of data and manipulate them properly to roll out market penetrating strategies. Under this scenario information system (IS) and data administration gaining paramount importance because it can single handedly retrieve, process and produce outcome from vast data sets related to the organisation (Carayanni et al. 2015). This report is aimed to discuss the importance of information system into the managerial role of business and trace their impact on business process engineering. In order to test the impact of information technology on the business management, this report will consider the CGI as the chosen industry. The report will perform assessment of organisational strength and limitation through analysing the global perspective of strategy of the firm. Next to this, the report will opt for ethical and social consideration for strategic solution and through contesting the various other managerial aspects, will portray policies to provide sustainability to the firm in front of threat utilising the information technology.

Long are those days gone when business can be classified by the sector of operation and depending upon the same, identical scenario regarding the assets, business framework, employment status, profit scenario and other information can easily be perceived. In 21^st century, business environment has become highly complex, where intra-industry trade enjoys most of the operation and business framework has been evolved to become sophisticated enough to reveal business details simply through its mode of operation (Hoekman and Nelson 2018). At present day, no one asks about the business sector, rather focus has been shifted to business model, where people categories the organisation through mode of operation. For instance it may be Business-to-Consumer or Consumer-to-Business; or even it can be Bricks and mortar to classify the business model (Business 2016). Whatever mode of business is, one this that has changed the business model is the presence of information technology and information system in the framework of the firms. Facilities that the information technology provides to an organisation can be summarised in two broad categories, which are communication and collaboration (Azhar, Khalfan and Maqsood 2015). Information technology has not only brought enhancement in bridging the gap in communication, besides this, it has aided the collaboration among the firms to make the whole world market work as united front in presence of ever soaring magnitude of threats. Table below shows the summarised facilities that information technology provides to these two drivers:

Communication enhancement through IT	Collaboration enhancement through IT Save Time On Research and Writing Hire a Pro to Write You a 100% Plagiarism-Free Paper. Get My Paper
Email – one of the best facilities that IT has provided to business. Utilising this facility can not only connects with the fellow employee of his or her organisation, moreover connects with anyone in the world if the business deems so.	Social networking – whether it is ecommerce service provider or capital goods producer, social networking is one of the best resource for every organisation to promote the business. Though utilising the social networking brands can enhance collaboration between them and can provide business environment a new look (Järvelä 2015).
Intranet – providing limited access and controlling the information resource availability to the employees was never easy before. However, IT brought in intranet, which aids the firms to perform the task easily.	Blogs – another useful platform to enhance the web presence of every business. It aids to share information, collect information and build knowledge pool for rolling out strategic plans for the firm.
VOIP – connecting with the employees and directors were never as easy as it now through the use of VOIP. It provides essential communication enhancement to the business houses and let them mitigate the communication gap (Layman and Alexander 2016).	Groupware – 21st century is world of intra-industry trade, where labours are not restricted to the geographical boundaries. Firms can employ and let the employee work from anywhere in the world. Features like groupware provide essential collaborative features to enhance the growth of the firm. Utilising tools like this, employees can access the core information system of the firm and provide necessary input to provide it sustainability (Natek and Zwilling 2016).
Videoconferencing – another boon of IT to the business administration. Utilising this managers can easily connect with employees and stakeholders easily to enhance cooperation (Larsen 2015)	Virtual world – a place, where firms can promote itself and ask for collaboration to have mutual benefit. Utilising the virtual world, firms can make money online and provide competitive advantage over its rivals.
File transfer – one of the key factors that have made the business administration easy. Through file transferring technology, firms can now share and avail large amount of data from anywhere in the world and can analyse it to avail strategic plans.	Wikis – utilising this firms can access essential information of the market and rivals to implement strategic plans for future growth.

Analysis of MIS and its impact on business process engineering

Table 1: facilities that information technology provides

Source: (Created by Author)

With ever evolving magnitude of risk in the organisation framework and rise in collaboration between the firms, it has become hard for the mangers to keep an account on the available information (Christopher 2016). Analysing the raw data to bring out market penetrating strategic plan for the organisation and lead the firm to have better growth prospect, has become a strenuous task for the managers. Under this situation, management Information System also acknowledged as MIS is one of the best tools to the managers for determining strategies of the organisation (Pearlson et al. 2016). Utilising this tool, managers can produce effective marketing strategies, fruitful management report and enhance the productivity through proper allocation of the resources and distributing the tasks efficiently (Galliers and Leidner 2014). Compared to the regular information system, MIS not only retrieve data from various sources, rather test it with the ‘What if’ scenario. On the other hand MIS is potent to bring out data that are useful to build strategic planning for the firm and aid the managers to screen transactional data (Soundararajan and Singh 2016). Utilising the decision support feature, MIS can assess corporate strategic at executive level and mould it to bring in fruitful outcomes for the managers.

Under the advanced information technology of today development of MIS aids the firms to streamline the process of company’s current need of information objectives through bringing in new procedure to make the strategic planning of the firm more efficient (Kotler 2015). Development of MIS has aided the firms to introduce Enterprise Resource Planning system that can run an entire organisation single handedly (Mo and He 2015). With availability of centralised data, ERP can store and analyse the available data and make essential strategic decision for the firm to have better profitability and higher growth. However, there are shortcomings too in case of ERP software. It has been argued that ERP commoditize the business process and thereby lose uniqueness (Osei 2017). With the higher level of interdependence among the firms, available data varies a little. Thus strategies generated by the ERP seem to be overlapping in nature with the firms and it leads to precarious situation in the market.

Other than ERP, it Business Process managementor BPM is another sophisticated outcome of the MIS. With support of the information technology and information system, BPM can be acknowledged as intentional effort of the firms to plan, implement and issue strategies for the firm (Harmon 2014). It is an automated process that makes the MIS system more efficient in nature that aids the firms in many ways. For instance, it can be seen that utilising the BPM system, firms cam empower their employees and enforce best practise in the firm (Chang 2016). In addition to this, enforcing consistency and built-in reporting feature aids the firm to keep up dated metrics of their key process elements. BPM allows to both way flow of data, which entails both the managers and employees can share data with each other regarding the operations of the firm and ensure equal participation by the hierarchy and lowererchy in growth of the firm (Marrella et al. 2015). However, in there is limitation too; it cannot be used to provide competitive advantage to the firms. Owing to cross feeding of data, BPM cannot generate automatic data regarding strategic programs of the firms and even if it does, then they will not be effective enough

Next to this, comes the Business process reengineering or BPR, which is one of the management strategies, introduced during early 1990 and aimed to aid the organisations to improve their customer service (Iqbal, Nadeem and Zaheer 2015). Under the complex market scenario of 21^st century, customer satisfaction plays a vital role in case of sustainability of a firm. Utilising the MIS under the framework of the BPR organisations are looking forward to provide a new horizon to the business world. Information system plays a vital role in case of BPR and the implication of MIS is wide spread in case of business process reengineering. With the help of the BPR, firms now can treat geographically dispread resources utilising the modern mechanism of the information technology and aids the firm to shelf their production cost (Wisner 2016). In addition to this, BPR fast data capturing feature with single entry technology, BPR aids the firm to reduce search time effectively and generate automated report regarding the strategic planning of the firm. However, many organisations used BPR as cost cutting tool for lying off part of the available workforce. It caused a bad name for the BPR and let it termed as the cost cutting measurement of the organisation.

MIS has vast effect on the business process engineering. In order to analyse the implication of the information system on the BPR, there are various models (Hong et al. 2016); however, among them total expenditure on IS and System Resource Approach are the best suited under the present complex market situation. Contesting the traditional approach under the MIS framework, it can be seen that right combination of debt ad equity ratio in case of capital structure enhances the growth of the firm.

As highlighted by the figure 1, it can be seen that as the financial leverage of a company increases, cost of capital falls, leading to better economic status of the firm. Now, the catch in this scenario is that MIS stores data centrally and allocate available resource optimally through generating strategic plans for the firms (Kaushik and Raman 2014). It helps the firm to reduce its cost of operation and generate higher revenue for the firm, leading to better economic status of the organisation.

According to the System Resource Approach, MIS enhance the organisational effectiveness and lead to better future prospect for the firm (Sekaran and Bougie 2016). System Resource Approach argues that firms has predetermined goals and them aims to achieve all of them through logical planning. MIS in this regard helps the firm to collect and analyse essential data from the market and produce fruitful strategies to make the firm enhance its operation through achieving higher level in customer satisfaction.

Now, moving forward, this report will focus on the selected organisation, which is CGI to determine the information vision and information strategy for its growth.

CGI company group, popularly known as the CGI is a Canadian IT firm, which is well acknowledged for their quality service. Since introduction in 1976, the firm is aimed to provide quality service to their customers and vast experience of business over the last 40 years has made the firm potent enough to gain competitive advantage in the world market (CGI 2018). According to the CGI, they are always aimed to fulfil the customer demand, and strive to recognise their clients, members and shareholders. The brand has earned 10.7 billion dollar of revenue during the last four quarters making it one of the profit making organisation in Canada (Schindler 2018). Being served around more than 400 locations around the world, CGI is truly a multinational company that has not only make it one of a renowned brand, moreover it has transformed itself largely to become where it is now with the use of informational technology and suitable information system (CGI 2018).

Initially CGI was an IT consulting firm, however, over the time through proper strategic planning and managing information system, the firm started to indulge itself in other business too. For instance, CGI started to outsource its IT consulting service, then slowly introduced new wings for software development, system integration and various other industries. According to the Schindler et al. (2018), astonishing improvement of the firm has been mainly achieved through the proper implementation of the strategies and ability to adhering with the information system.

From figure 3, it can be seen that there is rise in business during 2017 compared to the situation of the 2016. However, information technology services of the firm have faced a reduction during the last year.

The firms has 71,000 employees

According to figure 4, the firm operates in US largely and presence in Asia Pacific region is lowest.

Since the introduction of CGI back in 1987, the brand has evolved largely to become where it is now today. According to the fiscal highlights of 2017, it can be found that the brand has net earnings of $1 billion and total revenue was $10.8 billion (CGI 2018). In addition to this, annual report highlights that, due to high growth rate in business, it has attracted $11.3 billion of foreign direct investment and cash flow from operation was as high as $1.4 billion. Owing to the large amount of the investment, the firm has gained maturity during last decade and now it enjoys comparative advantage in producing IT services. Compared to its rivals, the brand has grown at a faster rate leading to enhance its business to more than 43 countries around the world. Through analysing the share price of the firm, it can be seen that it has rose from $0.27 in 987 to $64.70 during 2017 (CGI 2018).  Besides, this with a stern focus on customer satisfaction, the CGI group has enabled itself to attract large number of investors. As the method of internationalisation, the firm depends upon the comparative advantage doctrine, which entails lower opportunity cost is better for higher export of a good, in which a country attains efficiency. Through the large experience of 40 years in the IT consultancy sector, CGI has attained comparative advantage and it helps the firm to introduce its business t new countries. Wing to large scale of operation the firm has enough capital stock and liquidity, that it can easily surpass the local IT service provider of both the developed and developing nation. Thus depending upon the comparative advantage and high amount of investment, the firm efficiently directs its business to new markets. Now, considering this enormous growth, the firm highlights that one of the key instrument that has aided it to evolve it into a large IT service provider is the ability to adhere with information technology and information system. The firm has incorporated advanced ERP system in its business framework since last two decade that has aided it to have fruitful market strategies.

In order to assess the organisational strength and limitation SWOT analysis is performed for the CGI. Details of the analysis are as follows:

From the SWOT analysis it has been clear that the firm has various strength and opportunities, which will aid the firm to grow in future. One of the major points to notice in this regard is that, SWOT analysis has highlighted, the firm can enhance its business opportunities through indulging itself into strategic partnership and incorporating MIS into its system (O’Connor 2017). It will not only aid the firm to have better growth in future, besides this, it will aid the CGI to withstand the challenging environment of business in 21^st century. Threat factors highlighted in the table 2 points that the firm need to consider growing competition as deciding factor of its existence.

In order to understanding the working environment of the CGI, it is important to perform PEST analysis of the CGI group. Details regarding the PEST analysis of CGI group are as follows:

Incorporating the PEST analysis for the CGI highlights various political, economic, social and technological factors that the firm need to consider before initiating any business in new place. Combining the finding of SWOT and PEST analysis, it can be stated that CGI is performing its business well, however, there is scope of higher growth, if it considers the information system and information technology in its structure. Lack of transparency in employee policy is hampering the internal business of the firm and it need to be gauged with immediate effect.

CGI is one of the largest IT service providers that deals with vast amount of raw data generated through data mining. Utilising this data, the firm states its market strategies and thus it the firm has well developed programs to secure and maintain ethical and social parameters. Through maintaining proper ERP program, firm restricts the employee to avail core data that ensure data privacy of the firm (Arachchi et al. 2015). When it comes to social consideration, then vast experience of operation in the IT sector has enabled the firm to know how to deal with various business environments.

Recommendation for policy of the CGI group is as follows:

One of the major threats of the CGI group is lack of transparency. Thus it would be better for the firm to bring in MIS system rather than depending upon the existing ERP. It will provide two way data flow and ensure that both the employee and employer are seamlessly transferring valuable data with each other.

Lack of open ended information system management makes it hard for the managers to keep account of every employee. Thus it would be better for the firm to introduce employee code according to the internal strategy provided by the information system management tool.

Conclusion:

Through this analysis it has been found that information technology has provided much resource to the managers to deal with ever changing business scenario. There are drawbacks in available management tools that use information system positively, thus it is better for the firm to move forward to the newer open ended tools that can provide better strategic implementation option to the mangers. Considering the case of CGI it can be seen that the firm has an existing ERP system, however, lack of data flow from both way has constrained the transparency in the employee policy. To conclude it can be said that, if the firm opts for recommended strategies, then it would help the firm in long run to have better growth.

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