Management Information System Learning Experience Paper

-A course by

IT fails and may not increase firms productivity

These are not the words one expects to hear in the first session of a course which was

supposedly about IT. The instructor justified these words by giving a long two page list of

examples citing failed IT implementation projects in big multinational organizations which

have led to losses worth millions of dollars. He also showed us a graph correlating IT

expenditure with productivity increases in which it was clearly shown that big expenditure

in IT may not lead to big increase in productivity; in fact productivity may actually come

down after IT deployment due to organizational slack.

The instructor further challenged another common assumption by paraphrasing the

golden words of Nicholas Carr-IT is a commodity, it cant bring any competitive

advantage. This was mainly because the build-up phase of IT was almost over; now IT is

comparable to utilities like electricity and water. By end of first session, we all had more

questions than answers.

The objective of the course subsequently became clear. It was meant to instruct not

preach. To make us use our own judgment rather than following a bandwagon. IT was not

something magical anymore, but just another important part of day to day business

activities. Caution and Prudence are essential in making decisions related to IT. I realized

that Nic Carrs guidelines as mentioned below, was one to live by.

Spend less (IT is a commodity)

Follow dont lead (Reduce risk)

Focus on vulnerabilities (Cede control over IT and focus on resulting vulnerabilities)

All these does not mean that IT is worthless, but that IT should be used efficiently so as

to gain maximum return on ones investment. Cautiously justified spending in IT can lead

to a large increase in business value. The professor illustrated this by giving the example

of Zara, and the success it achieved in the fashion industry by leveraging technology.

In subsequent sessions the focus shifted from IT to IS. Information System is a sum total

of Hardware, Software, Data, Procedures, and People in an organization. By coordinating

organizations efforts in all these spheres, the overall productivity can be immensely

increased leading to substantial profits. We further learnt how we could leverage

information system in an organization to gain competitive advantage. The Porters five

force model given on the next page illustrates the means of creating competitive

advantage in an industry.

Figure 1 Porter's five force model

The above model shows how one could use IT to change the positioning of the business

in an industry. The model assists the management in taking strategic initiatives that will

make the organization more competitive.

Streamlining processes is a very important step in increasing productivity. Tough

problems can often be solved by simply optimizing the underlying process structure.

Professor Agrahari repeatedly asked us never to shoehorn IT into a process, but to first

analyze whether the problems could be solved without IT implementation. The benefits

must justify IT investments that went into optimization.

The course did indeed had some concepts which were familiar to students who had some

experience in the IT industry. I had no such prior experience; yet I never felt like a fish

out of water owing to the simplistic ways in which the professor taught them. By the end

of course we were all adept at making data flow, entity-relationship and star schema

diagrams which enabled us to analyze the relationship between actors and processes in

a very detailed way. The analyzing was followed by implementation.

The theoretical frameworks were complemented by case studies which enabled us to test

our knowledge in real world scenarios. The cases like CVS Pharmacies, Amazon Web

services, Facebook, Harrahs entertainment, etc. were enjoyable to read and solve. The

customized textbook and comprehensive polycopy articles served as an effective source

of knowledge.

And lets not forget the numerous guest lectures. It was always a memorable experience

when topics in course were taught by specialists in that field. Who better to talk about

ecommerce and revenue models than Mr. Mrugendra Shintre, the person managing

Amazons appstore content operations? And the data analytics sessions were highly

enriched by presence of Mr. Rajiv Pratap, the cofounder of Abzooba (and his stories about

his involvement with the NBA teams).

The course was successful in informing us about the

technologies like cloud and big data, which we had

heard about, but had no specific knowledge about

their relevance in the business world. The course also

made us aware of the ways in which current social

trends can be leveraged to obtain new customers

and increase profits. On the other hand, the session

on privacy made us aware about the impact on

business due to breach of privacy. Many more

concepts and theories were discussed in the class

aimed at making us better managers. After attending

30 hours of the course, I can safely say that the

course succeeded in its objective of preparing us to

be an effective exploiter of IT/IS for business value

and strategic benefits.

The course is excellent as it is; but if I had to make some recommendations I would

request the instructor to include more current content in course pertaining to topics like

Technology in mobile world (is mobile penetration changing businesses)

Machine to Machine (M2M)

IT/IS in the Indian context (differences and similarities)

Impact on environment, etc

As an after note, I would also like to request to make the midterm and end term exams a

mixture of case and theory questions so that a lot more concepts can be tested. Case

studies are often fun to solve but they are restrictive in the number of concepts being

tested at a time.

Overall, I would say that attending the course was a very enjoyable experience. It enabled

me, a student not having an IT background, to learn a lot about new trends in technology

and how they can be exploited in the business environment. I am sure that this course

will have a lot of relevance in my future endeavors in the business world.

-Anurag Lale

PGP29078, Section B