Q1: What Are the Basic Types of Processes?
Processes are divided into two broad categories. Structured processes are formally defined, standardized processes that involve day-to-day operations: accepting a return, placing an order, purchasing raw materials, and so forth. Dynamic processes are flexible, informal, and adaptive processes that normally involve strategic and less structured managerial decisions and activities such as deciding whether to open a new store location and how best to solve the problem of excessive product returns. Processes are used at three levels of organizational scope: workgroup, enterprise, and inter-enterprise. A workgroup process exists to enable workgroups to fulfill the charter, purpose, and goals of a particular group or department. Enterprise processes span an organization and support activities in multiple departments. Inter-enterprise information systems support one or more inter-enterprise processes.
Q2: How Can Information Systems Improve Process Quality?
The two dimensions of process quality are efficiency and effectiveness. Process efficiency is a measure of the ratio of process outputs to inputs. Process effectiveness is a measure of how well a process achieves organizational strategy. Organizations can improve the quality of a process in one of three ways: change the process structure, change the process resources, or change both process structure and resources. Information systems can be used to improve process quality by: performing an activity, augmenting a human who is performing an activity, or controlling data quality and process flow.
Q3: How Do Information Systems Eliminate the Problems of Information Silos?
An information silo is the condition that exists when data are isolated in separated information systems. It's completely natural for workgroups to develop information systems solely for their own needs, but over time, the existence of these separate systems will result in information silos that cause numerous problems. When an organization has inconsistent duplicated data, it's said to have a data integrity problem. Additionally, when applications are isolated, business processes are disjointed. A consequence of such disjointed activities is the lack of integrated enterprise information.
Q4: How Do CRM, ERP, and EAI Support Enterprise Processes?
Organizations realized that their existing business processes needed to change so businesses went through projects called business process reengineering which is the activity of altering existing and designing new business processes to take advantage of new information systems. Over time, three categories of enterprise applications emerged: customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and enterprise application integration. A customer relationship management (CRM) system is a suite of applications, a database, and a set of inherent processes for managing all the interactions with the customer, from lead generation to customer service. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a suite of applications called modules, a database, and a set of inherent processes for consolidating business operations into a single, consistent, computing platform. Enterprise application integration (EAI) is a suite of software applications that integrates existing systems by providing layers of software that connect applications together.
Q5: What Are the Elements of an ERP System?
For a product to be considered a true ERP product it must include applications that integrate: supply chain, manufacturing, CRM, human resources, and accounting. An ERP solution consists of application programs, databases, business process procedures, and training and consulting. ERP vendors design application programs to be configurable so that the development teams can alter them to meet an organization's requirements without changing program code. An ERP solution includes a database design as well as initial configuration data. It doesn't contain the company's operational data. Large organization databases contain two types of program code. The first, a trigger, is a computer program stored within the database that runs to keep the database consistent when certain conditions arise. The second, a stored procedure, is a computer program stored in the database that is used to enforce business rules.
Q6: What Are the Challenges of Implementing and Upgrading Enterprise Information Systems?
Implementing new enterprise systems is challenging, difficult, expensive, and risky. It's not unusual for enterprise system projects to be well over budget and a year or more late. In addition to new ERP implementations, numerous organizations now need to upgrade their ERP installation to meet new requirements. Whether from a new implementation or an upgrade, expense and risks arise from four primary factors: collaborative management, requirements gaps, transition problems, and employee resistance.
Q7: How Do Inter-enterprise IS Solve the Problems of Enterprise Silos?
Providers keep track of information in their system. At home, individuals generate data and that information is recorded in mobile devices. Systems like this are referred to as distributed systems because applications processing is distributed across multiple computing devices. Standards such as http, https, html5, css3, JavaScript, and SOA using Web services enable programs to receive data from and display data to a variety of mobile and desktop services.
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