A VALUE-CHAIN BASED MODEL FOR SUPPORTING INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY INVESTMENTS

Business organizations are thinking increasingly in terms of information technology solutions to business problems, as opposed to data processing for supporting the business. Information technology is now viewed as an important means for achieving competitive advantage. For firms in hardware/software business it is therefore becoming increasingly important to provide clients with the means to do an analysis of business needs and strategies and to think in terms of providing global IT solutions that address these needs. The value-chain model articulated by Porter (1985) attempts to link IT solutions to business strategy. It is based on a simple economic theory: a firm remains competitive by virtue of being a low cost producer or differentiating its products/services; accordingly its strategies must be based on countering forces (such as new entrants, substitute products, bargaining power of buyers and suppliers) that erode these advantages . Information technology is considered a key factor in being able to deal with these forces Accordingly, how much to spend and where to spend on information technology is determined by how well it enables the firm to deal with its dominant forces (threats). Porter's model has found widespread appeal among practitioners (notably information systems executives) due to its simplicity and intuitive appeal. Several methodologies have been designed around this model that encourage executives to "think through" this model in order to identify technologies that could provide competitive advantage. However, there are no existing formalizations of the value-chain model either by industry, market structure, or organizational structure. We have been developing such a model for a specific industry (insurance) with the objective of building an executive support tool that can show interactively, how a proposed technology or organizational change can impact specific metrics/values of interest of business processes defined at various levels of abstraction, and thereby the bottom line. By using such a model, an executive can also analyze technology and resource requirements required to transform one set of business processes into another, more desirable state.Information Systems Working Papers Serie

Comparative Study Of Implementing The On-Premises and Cloud Business Intelligence On Business Problems In a Multi-National Software Development Company

Internship Report presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceNowadays every enterprise wants to be competitive. In the last decade, the data volumes are increased dramatically. As each year data in the market increases, the ability to extract, analyze and manage the data become the backbone condition for the organization to be competitive. In this condition, organizations need to adapt their technologies to the new business reality in order to be competitive and provide new solutions that meet new requests. Business Intelligence by the main definition is the ability to extract analyze and manage the data through which an organization gain a competitive advantage. Before using this approach, it’s important to decide on which computing system it will base on, considering the volume of data, business context of the organization and technologies requirements of the market. In the last 10 years, the popularity of cloud computing increased and divided the computing Systems into On-Premises and cloud. The cloud benefits are based on providing scalability, availability and fewer costs. On another hand, traditional On-Premises provides independence of software configuration, control over data and high security. The final decision as to which computing paradigm to follow in the organization it’s not an easy task as well as depends on the business context of the organization, and the characteristics of the performance of the current On-Premises systems in business processes. In this case, Business Intelligence functions and requires in-depth analysis in order to understand if cloud computing technologies could better perform in those processes than traditional systems. The objective of this internship is to conduct a comparative study between 2 computing systems in Business Intelligence routine functions. The study will compare the On-Premises Business Intelligence Based on Oracle Architecture with Cloud Business Intelligence based on Google Cloud Services. A comparative study will be conducted through participation in activities and projects in the Business Intelligence department, of a company that develops software digital solutions to serve the telecommunications market for 12 months, as an internship student in the 2nd year of a master’s degree in Information Management, with a specialization in Knowledge Management and Business Intelligence at Nova Information Management School (NOVA IMS)

An Essay on How Data Science Can Strengthen Business

Data science combines several extensions, including, e.g., statistics, scientific methods, artificial intelligence (AI) and data analysis to extract value from raw data. Analytical applications and data scientists can then verify and defer the results to discover patterns and trends. In this way, they allow business leaders to gain enlightened knowledge about the market. Companies have kept a wealth of data with them. As modern technology allowed for the creation and storage of ever-increasing amounts of information, data volumes popped. The wealth of data collected and stored by these technologies can bring regenerative benefits to organizations and societies around the world, but only if they can interpret it. That's where data science comes in. So, the applied economics refers to the application of economic theory and analysis. In this article we intend to present several software that are available for the application of economic analysis. Analysis can be performed on any type of data and is a way of looking at raw data and find useful information. There are several technologies available for economic analysis, with more or less characteristics, some of which are not only intended for this single purpose, and cover a wider spectrum of functionalities. Some of the technologies we will use are, e.g., Rstudio, SPSS, Statis and SAS/Stata. These are very common technologies when talking about economic or business analysis. The intention is to demonstrate how each of these software analyse the data and subsequently the interpretations that we can draw from that scrutiny. Organizations are using data science teams to turn data into a competitive advantage by refining products and services and cost-effective solutions. We will use some different algorithms to verify how they are processed by the different technologies, namely we will use metrics such as maximum, minimum, covariance, standard deviation, average and multicollinearity and variance, even the use of types of regression models

Analyzing Project Management Maturity Level in Indonesia

Project management has been generally known and increasingly used by many organizations to gain competitive advantage. In this context, many studies have proposed maturity models to evaluate how project management knowledge has been deployed effectively and efficiently in organization. As a developing country, Indonesia needs many development projects managed by government and private companies in different industries. Here, a study to assess project management maturity level in Indonesian businesses may bring insight about current business practices, which is important to speed up country development and business sustainability.  Adapting the Project Management Maturity Model (ProMMM), a survey instrument has been developed and applied to professionals from Jakarta and surrounding area.  The result of analysis shows that construction and primary industry have a higher maturity level compare to manufacturing and services.  It is to be noted, however, that the level of project management understanding is low across industries.  This indicates that more quality project management training or certification is required to improve overall project management knowledge in Indonesia

Developing strategic learning alliances: partnerships for the provision of global education and training solutions

The paper describes a comprehensive model for the development of strategic alliances between education and corporate sectors, which is required to ensure effective provision of education and training programmes for a global market. Global economic forces, combined with recent advances in information and communication technologies, have provided unprecedented opportunities for education providers to broaden the provision of their programmes both on an international scale and across new sectors. Lifelong learning strategies are becoming increasingly recognized as an essential characteristic of a successful organization and therefore large organizations have shown a preparedness to invest in staff training and development. The demands for lifelong learning span a wide range of training and educational levels from school-level and vocational courses to graduate-level training for senior executive

SMEs COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE AND ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING IMPLEMENTATION: FINDING FROM CENTRAL JAVA

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is an integrated application software for widespread use in the organization. The aim of this study is to determine factors that affect the successful implementation of ERP in Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in Central Java in order to build competitive advantage. To test the hypothesis, this study utilized data from 107 SMEs in Central Java. The results revealed that variable Business Process Reengineering have the greatest influence toward the successful implementation in Small and Medium Enterprises. It is suggested that SMEs should gain knowledge and solidify its business process reengineering before implementing ERP

Intranet and Knowledge Management: Putting the Cart Before the Horse?

This paper explores the use of intranet-technology to support knowledge intensive decision-making in a technical service delivery process of a major oilfield services company. Our findings show that creating, mobilizing, and exchanging knowledge through an intranet-technology based system delivers forms of benefits to both the organization and its clients, and understanding what organizational knowledge is to be managed and the process of managing it define the role of technology that enables knowledge management