STRATEGIC BUSINESS PLANNING Aligning Business Goals with Technology

Abstract

For strategic business planning to be successful in the prevailing competitive business environment, current and future technology needs must be considered. In many organizations, it is the responsibility of the IS manager to ensure that the information systems support these business needs. The IS manager must have a clear understanding of the organization's strategic business plan and must tailor IS projects to meet that plan's objectives. Enterprisewide information management and enterprise analysis can help the IS manager understand the business strategy and predict the effects of technology on that strategy.     

STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS PLANNING

Organizations are increasingly seeking information systems to help them execute successful business strategies. They are also seeking to define the steps required to integrate those strategic information systems into their current repertoire of hardware, software, and data bases. Strategic information planning is the means of accomplishing these two goals. This article describes a planning approach that is based on one popular information planning methodology.     

STRATEGIC PLANNING CREATING INTERNAL MARKETS

As companies find that outsourcing may not be nirvana, they will inevitably seek new paradigms for productivity. Many firms will want to carefully consider insourcing,— the creation of internal markets     

THE REAL MEANING OF STRATEGIC PLANNING

The strategic part of strategic planning often allows for a variety of interpretations of its true meaning. When preparing IS strategic plans, it is especially important for IS and senior managers to have the same, clear definition of the word so that their strategic plan is indeed just that.     

THE PAYOFF FROM IS STRATEGIC PLANNING

An empirical study at last proves that IS strategic planning is inherently valuable to organizations. This column suggests IS planning elements worth considering, as well as techniques that are best avoided.     

STRATEGIC PLANNING The MIS Strategic Planning Process

Abstract

A large portion of the literature about business and information systems is written at the grand, strategic level. That is certainly the case for the first two books reviewed in this column. One deals with the broad implications of the shift of routine IT work to Asia and the potential for this shift to expand into development and concepts. The other presents a framework for ameliorating IT risk. The third book is concerned with the nitty gritty of the little decisions, made over and over, in day-to-day operations. The focus is on ways of improving and automating these decisions to gain strategic advantage. And, as you would expect, this third book is much longer and much more detailed than the first two.     

USING CASE TOOLS IN STRATEGIC IS PLANNING

Lack of computer support contributes to the dismal record of strategic IS planning efforts. Integrating a CASE tool with a planning methodology facilitates the storage and access of the vast amounts of information produced by the planning process and increases the chances of a successful planning effort.     

Aligning Business and It: The Process-Driven Architecture Model

Due to the fact that the corporate IT function is tightly coupled to enterprise processes and the organization's information needs, today's IT investments and processes are driven by the same dynamics as the enterprise itself. This article describes a model of a four-layer process-driven architecture (PDA) that can be used as a framework for addressing the alignment of business and IT.     

Aligning Collaborative Business Processes—An Organization-Oriented Perspective

Business collaboration encompasses the coordination of information flows among organizations as well as the composition of their business processes toward mutual benefits. While integrating business processes of different organizations seamlessly, it brings great challenges to keep participating organizations as autonomous entities. To address this issue, we propose a new perspective on modeling collaborative business processes with a novel concept called relative workflow (RWF). With its visibility control mechanism, the RWF model defines what a participating organization can perceive in collaboration and thereby allows each organization to customize its own collaboration process and behaviors. In this paper, we present a formal definition of RWFs and related algorithms for generating RWFs. A prototype is implemented on the Web service platform for the proof-of-concept purpose.     

Aligning Business and It: The Process-Driven Architecture Model

Abstract

Due to the fact that the corporate IT function is tightly coupled to enterprise processes and the organization's information needs, today's IT investments and processes are driven by the same dynamics as the enterprise itself. This article describes a model of a four-layer process-driven architecture (PDA) that can be used as a framework for addressing the alignment of business and IT.     

Aligning IS with User Expectations

Keeping up with the changing needs of users is a challenging task for the IS department. However, the IS department must do so in order to continue contributing to the organization' s growth by helping it maintain its competitive potential. This column describes a plan used by one IS director to realign his department with user expectations and, at the same time, reorient his management support system to support this new direction.     

Aligning Erp Systems with International Strategies

With the globalization of trade and economics, large multinational enterprises are turning to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to meet their international information management needs. However, misalignments between the firm's ERP system and its international strategy can often result in unsuccessful ERP implementations and sub-optimal business performance. Building on prior research, this article presents a systematic logic that can be used by business executives to address the alignment challenges. in particular, it provides details on three ERP systems issues that should be addressed: (1) systems configuration, (2) information architecture, and (3) systems rollout to reap the benefits of ERP system alignment.     

Aligning RFID applications with supply chain strategies

Many large retailers decided to adopt RFID as their new supply chain technology, but RFID adoption by all industries did not spread as rapidly as initially expected. We believe that its benefits constituted the major barrier to its adoption, and argued that a major contributor to the delay has been its inappropriate implementation. Our study reports the result of six in-depth case studies, which, together with case content analysis of 88 reported RFID applications, provided us with a clear view of the RFID implementation landscape, suggesting that organizations often mindlessly adopted RFID applications that were misaligned with their supply chain strategies, leading to unsatisfactory benefits. Insights into how organizations should adopt RFID were developed from our results and were discussed.     

Aligning ontology-based development with service oriented systems

This paper argues for placing ontologies at the centre of the software development life cycle for distributed component-based systems and, in particular, for service-oriented systems. It presents an ontology-based development process which relies on three levels of abstraction using ontologies: architecture layer, application layer and domain layer. The paper discusses the key roles of ontologies with respect to the various abstraction layers and their corresponding impact on the concomitant workproducts. In addition, a peer-to-peer-based service selecting and composing tool is suggested as a way of supporting the process. The paper presents the architecture of the proposed tool and illustrates the whole process in the development of a mobile banking application based on dynamic Web services.     

Aligning Text and Phonemes for Speech Technology Applications Using an EM-Like Algorithm

A common requirement in speech technology is to align two different symbolic representations of the same linguistic ‘message’. For instance, we often need to align letters of words listed in a dictionary with the corresponding phonemes specifying their pronunciation. As dictionaries become ever bigger, manual alignment becomes less and less tenable yet automatic alignment is a hard problem for a language like English. In this paper, we describe the use of a form of the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm to learn alignments of English text and phonemes, starting from a variety of initializations. We use the British English Example Pronunciation (BEEP) dictionary of almost 200,000 words in this work. The quality of alignment is difficult to determine quantitatively since no ‘gold standard’ correct alignment exists. We evaluate the success of our algorithm indirectly from the performance of a pronunciation by analogy system using the aligned dictionary data as a knowledge base for inferring pronunciations. We find excellent performance—the best so far reported in the literature. There is very little dependence on the start point for alignment, indicating that the EM search space is strongly convex. Since the aligned BEEP dictionary is a potentially valuable resource, it is made freely available for research use.     

运用信息技术提高企业工艺数据装备

该系统通过应用计算机技术、信息处理技术实现相关数据的提取、处理分析，达到资源共享、降低消耗、自动化智能控制的目标，具备先进性、实用性、可扩充性、可维护性、安全可靠等特点。有良好的推广前景。     

Aligning Education with Vision 2030 Using Augmented Reality

Vision 2030 requires a new generation of people with a wide variety of abilities, talents, and skills. The adoption of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality is one possible way to align education with Vision 2030. Immersive technologies like AR are rapidly becoming powerful and versatile enough to be adopted in education to achieve this goal. Technologies such as AR could be beneficial tools to enhance maintainable growth in education. We reviewed the most recent studies in augmented reality to check its appropriateness in aligning with the educational goals of Vision 2030. First, the various definitions, terminologies, and technologies of AR are described briefly. Then, the specific characteristics and benefits of AR systems are determined. There may be a significance of the pedagogical method used by adapting the AR scheme and the consistency of the equipment and learning experiences. Therefore, three kinds of instructional methods that stress roles, location, and tasks were evaluated. The kind of learning that is offered by the distinct kinds of AR approaches is elaborated upon. The technological, pedagogical, learning problems experienced with AR are described. The potential solutions for a few of the issues experienced and the topics for subsequent research are presented in this article.     

Aligning Semantic Web applications with network access controls

Access controls for Semantic Web applications are commonly considered at the level of the application-domain and do not necessarily consider the security controls of the underlying infrastructure to any great extent. Low-level network access controls such as firewalls and proxies are considered part of providing a generic network infrastructure that hosts a variety of Semantic Web applications and is independent of the application-level access control services. For example, it is unusual to include firewall policy rules in an application policy that constrain the kinds of application information different principals may access. As a consequence, an improperly configured infrastructure may unintentionally hinder the normal operation of a Semantic Web application. Simply opening a firewall for HTTP and HTTPS services does not necessarily result in a proper configuration. Taking an ontology-based approach, this paper considers how a firewall configuration should be analyzed with respect to the Semantic Web application(s) that it hosts.