Modular Learning Objectives

We started our review of management information and information technology by looking at the problems posed for organizations by an ever-increasing flood of information of debatable relevance enabled by the ever increasing sophistication of the Internet. Since then, we've seen our organizations bounced around by dubious business intelligence strategies, sandbagged by social media, and whipsawed between divergent views of the future of computing. Despite all these problems, however, it's appropriate to end on a somewhat higher note suggesting the possibility if not the inevitability of a proactive and positive role for organizational management in information technology and systems evolution. We've seen numerous instances where the Internet and the capacities it brings with it can reduce coordination and effectiveness at the overall level even as it may increase them at subunit levels.  But as the title of this module suggests, the Internet can also mobilize and deploy information at the enterprise level such that integration is increased and the parts of the organization are brought together with a sort of socio-technical "glue" provided by intelligent systems planning and decision-making. Notice that we say "can", not "will"; these things don't happen casually or without a high degree of conscious awareness of the kind of system issues we have discussed in this course.

At this point, we are moving into the domain of organizational strategy, the conscious choices by organizations as to where they want to be going and how they plan to get there. Analysts sometimes differentiate between overall organizational strategy and some lower level referred to as "information management strategy" or the like.  But in today's Internet enriched organizations, this differentiation is not merely unnecessary; it can also be fundamentally misleading. There is no such thing as organizational strategy apart from the organization's strategies for acquiring, using, and deploying information, and those in turn are integrally bound up with choices about information technologies and socio-technical adaptation. The days when IT decisions were left to the technical personnel (and nobody ever got fired for recommending IBM as a supplier) are long gone. The increasing rates of information flows and the decreasing cycle times for feedback make it abundantly clear that business strategy is information strategy, and vice versa. All parts of the modern organization are strategically important.

Consider the organizational function of customer relations management -- the whole set of procedures, activities, tools, personnel, and other things involved in the fine art of keeping one's customers and clients as satisfied participants in the firm. If we don't maintain our customers, our organizations generally don't last. Some organizations have an easier time of it than others; governments for example generally don't have a lot of competitors, and it's hard to find a replacement supplier. On the other hand, there are an awful lot of grocery stores out there, and it's pretty easy to walk from Ralph's to Von's if you don't like the service. Guess which industry tends to worry more about customer relations management -- government or grocery stores? Are you likely to find more caring and concern about your needs and requirements at your local Winn-Dixie or at the field office of the Internal Revenue Service? The point of such largely rhetorical questions is not to criticize government employees or exalt grocery baggers -- simply to observe that members of organizations tend to reflect in their actions and behavior the institutional requirements of their employers, and some organizations have to pay much more attention to CRM than others. It is no coincidence, therefore, that CRM is one of the hottest areas for the development of new information technologies – and also one of the areas where technology deployments can produce fairly immediate and visible returns.

The danger, if there is one, is that strategies that result in immediate and effective consequences may be preferred over strategies where the potential payoffs are further down the road and/or are less evidently consequential for those reasons alone. With information technology generations increasingly approximating those of the fruit fly rather than those of humans, managers can perhaps be forgiven for an increasingly short-term focus, since it's not clear that there even will be a long-term, let alone what technologies might shape it. But what cannot be forgiven is a decoupling of information management and the rest of the management process. Now, more than ever, what we need is seriously effective socio-technical systems design.  What appears today to be an Internet whirlwind may well be seen as a gentle spring breeze in comparison to what will be wrought by the information environments of the coming decades.

In this module, we examine some of the reasons why enterprise-level information decisions are so complicated and yet so necessary. This is where managers being trained today will spend a substantial chunk of their future careers. If you've been paying attention throughout this course, you've got a good leg up on your potential colleagues who still see management information as something placed on their desks in big binders by the nerds from the basement. At the least you'll understand that it's a really good idea to have the nerds on your side, since in the long run they are the ones who'll determine who's left standing!  Speaking enough of the language of information management may turn out to be the fundamental survival skill of the 21st century manager!