fast forward ..., you were hired and have been tasked to develop a strategic information systems plan for a company. The company officers have extended an invitation for you to meet with them to discuss the direction of the company. Before this meeting, they have asked that you provide a list of questions with some explanation about the "why" of the question so they can be prepared, thus maximizing the output from this meeting.
Develop a list of questions you would ask the officers of the company and give an explanation and justification for each question. (1000 words)
If I were hired and have been tasked to develop a strategic information systems plan for a company and have asked to formulate and provide a list of questions with some explanation about “WHY” of the questions I would definitely consider some problems and assumptions regarding strategic plan.
First question in the list is:
“WHY PLAN?”
For my own perspective, the most common reasons why companies need to formulate or to have a strategic plan for the better business structure are:
- To align the Information System with the business
- To identify needed applications
- To establish goals, schedules, and milestones in order to track progress
- To provide an opportunity for communication with top management and user management
Thus in order to attain certain goals in business, companies should formulate strategic plans or should I say, plan for its success. The company head should consider the external and internal part of the business and they should also consider the entire scope of it.
The next question I should include in the list is:
“WHAT ARE THE STEPS IN PLANNING?”
– Establish a mission statement
·>These are the services that you are responsible for; it is your place in the organization
·> It is not what you are supposed to achieve, it is who you areand what you do in the company
– Assess the environment
·>The capabilities of the IT department
·>The readiness of the company to use IT
·>The status of our customers, our industry
·>The status of the economy, government regulations, environment, society, etc.
·> Technology
Assessing the environment is somewhat similar to SWOT analysis (Strengths,Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats.)
– Set goals and objectives
– Derive strategies and policies
·>Strategies for:
*Technology focus
*Personnel and career development
*Aligning with the company
*Others . . .
·> Policies for:
*Funding criteria; how much to spend on IT?
*Allocation criteria; priority setting
*Organizational arrangements
*Use of outside IT services, outsourcing
*Selling IT services to outside organizations
*Others . . .
– Develop long-, medium-, and short-range plans
Short-, medium-, and long-range plans
*Short-range – the next year, the next budget period; developing and operating current systems
* Medium-range – committing to development efforts for applications that will take more than one year to complete; meeting management’s current information needs, projected into the future for as many years as needed to complete them. This is what most organizations call “Long-Range Planning.”
* Long-range planning – preparing for management’s future information needs. These are not application specific; they are
investments in infrastructure; it is creating an information architecture.
– Implement plans and monitor results
The next question in the list is:
WHO SHOULD BE INVOLVED?
Each organization must carefully decide who should be involved in strategic planning. There are several key roles to be played in a strategic planning process including:
* Planning Process Champion. This is usually a key member of the board of directors or the executive director. The person must be someone who believes in strategic planning and will help keep the process on track. This person does not have to be an expert in strategic planning, but s/he should be someone respected by board and staff members.
*Plan Writer. Someone must assemble the planning group\'s decisions into a cohesive document. This person takes notes during planning meetings and uses them to prepare a plan, often in the form of several drafts for review by the entire planning group. Writing the plan, however, is more than simply compiling a record of planning meetings. The plan writer must also insert options and next logical steps into the drafts at each stage of the planning process.
* Planning Process Facilitator. This person may be from outside the organization, though this role also can be played by a member of the board. The facilitator\'s main responsibility is to plan each meeting\'s agenda and to ensure the group stays on track.
* Planning Team. The planning team\'s members are those who are most directly involved in laying out the issues and options for the future of the organization. This might be the entire board of directors plus the executive director. It might also be a committee of the board plus the executive director. Key staff beyond the executive director may also be involved. It might also include one (or more) representatives of people served by the organization. What is important to remember is to ensure that the people who are fairly representative of and respected by the organization\'s leadership are included on the planning team
*Board of Directors. The board of directors will ultimately adopt the plan and will use it to guide its decisions and actions. If the entire board is not involved directly in the planning process, it must at least approve a planning process and be kept informed of its progress. The process of developing a strategic plan is a special opportunity to engage the board of directors in an active role in shaping the organization\'s future.
*Staff. Staff members, particularly the executive director, have expertise and information that should be tapped during the planning process. Since they will be the ones who will carry out the plan on a day-to-day basis, they should be informed and, to whatever extent is appropriate for the organization, involved. Larger organizations often rely on representation from staff, while smaller organizations may include only the executive director on the planning team.
* Clients. Those who benefit from the organization\'s services are sometimes involved in the planning process. Each organization makes its own choices about whether to include clients on the planning team or whether to consult them in some other way.
Next up is:
WHAT ARE SOME PREPARATIONS TO MAKE BEFORE CONDUCTING STRATEGIC PLANNING?
In preparing a strategic plan for businesses, there are a lot of things to be considered. There are steps and ways which can help the people involve in it.
* The real benefit of the strategic planning process is the process, not the plan document.
* There is no \"perfect\" plan. There\'s doing your best at strategic thinking and implementation, and learning from what you\'re doing to enhance what you\'re doing the next time around.
*The strategic planning process is usually not an \"aha!\" experience. It\'s like the management process itself -- it\'s a series of small moves that together keep the organization doing things right as it heads in the right direction.
* In planning, things usually aren\'t as bad as you fear nor as good as you\'d like.
* Start simple, but start!
Next question on the list is:
WHEN SHOULD STRATEGIC PLANNING BE DONE?
The scheduling for the strategic planning process depends on the nature and needs of the organization and the its immediate external environment. For example, planning should be carried out frequently in an organization whose products and services are in an industry that is changing rapidly . In this situation, planning might be carried out once or even twice a year and done in a very comprehensive and detailed fashion (that is, with attention to mission, vision, values, environmental scan, issues, goals, strategies, objectives, responsibilities, time lines, budgets, etc). On the other hand, if the organization has been around for many years and is in a fairly stable marketplace, then planning might be carried out once a year and only certain parts of the planning process, for example, action planning (objectives, responsibilities, time lines, budgets, etc) are updated each year. Consider the following guidelines:
1. Strategic planning should be done when an organization is just getting started. (The strategic plan is usually part of an overall business plan, along with a marketing plan, financial plan and operational/management plan.)
2. Strategic planning should also be done in preparation for a new major venture, for example, developing a new department, division, major new product or line of products, etc.
3. Strategic planning should also be conducted at least once a year in order to be ready for the coming fiscal year (the financial management of an organization is usually based on a year-to-year, or fiscal year, basis). In this case, strategic planning should be conducted in time to identify the organizational goals to be achieved at least over the coming fiscal year, resources needed to achieve those goals, and funded needed to obtain the resources. These funds are included in budget planning for the coming fiscal year. However, not all phases of strategic planning need be fully completed each year. The full strategic planning process should be conducted at least once every three years. As noted above, these activities should be conducted every year if the organization is experiencing tremendous change.
4. Each year, action plans should be updated.
5. Note that, during implementation of the plan, the progress of the implementation should be reviewed at least on a quarterly basis by the board. Again, the frequency of review depends on the extent of the rate of change in and around the organization.
And the last question on the list is:
HOW DO YOU ENSURE IMPLEMENTATION OF YOUR NEW PLAN?
A frequent complaint about the strategic planning process is that it produces a document that ends up collecting dust on a shelf -- the organization ignores the precious information depicted in the document.
The following guidelines will help ensure that the plan is implemented. (Note that reference to boards of directors is in regard to organizations that are corporations.
1. When conducting the planning process, involve the people who will be responsible for implementing the plan. Use a cross-functional team (representatives from each of the major organization’s products or service) to ensure the plan is realistic and collaborative.
2. Ensure the plan is realistic. Continue asking planning participants “Is this realistic? Can you really do this?”
3. Organize the overall strategic plan into smaller action plans, often including an action plan (or work plan) for each committee on the board.
4. In the overall planning document, specify who is doing what and by when (action plans are often referenced in the implementation section of the overall strategic plan). Some organizations may elect to include the action plans in a separate document from the strategic plan, which would include only the mission, vision, values, key issues and goals, and strategies. This approach carries some risk that the board will lose focus on the action plans.
5. In an implementation section in the plan, specify and clarify the plan’s implementation roles and responsibilities. Be sure to detail particularly the first 90 days of the implementation of the plan. Build in regular reviews of status of the implementation of the plan.
6. Translate the strategic plan’s actions into job descriptions and personnel performance reviews.
7. Communicate the role of follow-ups to the plan. If people know the action plans will be regularly reviewed, implementers tend to do their jobs before they’re checked on.
8. Be sure to document and distribute the plan, including inviting review input from all.
9. Be sure that one internal person has ultimate responsibility that the plan is enacted in a timely fashion.
10. The chief executive’s support of the plan is a major driver to the plan’s implementation. Integrate the plan’s goals and objectives into the chief executive’s performance reviews.
11. Place huge emphasis on feedback to the board’s executive committee from the planning participants. Consider all or some of the following to ensure the plan is implemented.
12. Have designated rotating “checkers” to verify, e.g., every quarter, if each implementer completed their assigned tasks.
13. Have pairs of people be responsible for tasks. Have each partner commit to helping the other to finish the other’s tasks on time.
REFERENCES:
http://www.managementhelp.org/plan_dec/str_plan/str_plan.htm#anchor4293651425
http://www.wmich.edu/nonprofit/Guide/guide7.htm
http://humanresources.about.com/od/strategicplanning1/Strategic_Planning_Resources.htm
Thursday, February 4, 2010
ASSIGNMENT #7
Google is a highly successful Internet business. Recently they have broadened their scope with a multitude of new tools. Research Google’s business model and answer the following questions below. You may add additional information not included in these questions.
Questions:
Questions :
Explain Google’s business model.
1. Who are their competitors?
2. How have they used information technology to their advantage?
3. How competitive are they in the market?
4. What new services do they offer?
5. What makes them so unique?
6. How competitive are they in the international market?
As we all know, Google is one of the famous search engines in the world. I guess everyone knows what google is right?! If you don't know then "GOOGLE IT"! .
Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31) the company had 19,786 full-time employees. It runs thousands of servers across the world, processing millions of search requests each day and about one petabyte of user-generated data each hour.
While the primary business interest is in the web content arena, Google has begun experimenting with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On 17 January 2006, Google announced the purchase of a radio advertising company "dMarc", which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.
Software
2. Pvt1 (MSN) – Privately held
3. AOL, Inc.
Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the agile process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues
improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads come in. It’s beautiful.
It’s also unlikely any other company is going to be able to pull this off. Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process.
Google's work force is not limited to their PhDs and 15,000 talented employees in Mountain View, New York and Dublin. SEOs from all around the world can be considered a free labor force for Google. In order to get their sites promoted on the world's number one search engine, SEOs optimize their sites according to Google's rules, register their sitemaps and ping Google's services whenever a new page is created. This gives Google a huge advantage over the other search engines, because other engines don't have the same level of feedback. Google caters to this crowd very well too, because it offers SEO friendly tools and advise.
> Extra data - Google Co-op, Image Labeler, etc
With its customized search service, Google Co-op, users don't only create vertical a search engine - they also give Google very valuable domain-specific information.
Also, by tagging images on Image Labeler and Picasa, you help perfect Google's Image Search.
>Google knows everything about your site
Today many sites use it to get a better understanding of their traffic. But a side effect of this tool is that it potentially gives Google access to important data about your site. Indeed if all sites had Urchin installed, Google would no longer need to compute
pageranks, as it would have the most accurate access to site popularity possible! Obviously not all sites use Google Analytics, but still it is not an insignificant amount that do.
The recently acquired FeedBurner also serves the same purpose. It's not only a great advertising channel for Google, but yet another way of measuring site popularity.
> Google knows a lot about you - Personalization
Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google Docs and others. They all give clues about your personality, your interests, likes and dislikes. Consequently, you end up with more personalized search results. For example: if you are the type of person who searches for programming info in Google Search, discuss KDE's latest bugs on GTalk and Gmail, visit Freshmeat and Sourceforge all day and long with your Google Toolbar-powered Firefox -- well then Google will not consider your Python, Tomcat, Apache queries as zoological, but programming related :-)
>Google offers UNIVERSAL search
Google does not only crawl the Web, blogosphere, press releases and books. It also crawls the real world with Google Earth. And Google Map's Street View lets you drive around big cities like New York and San Francisco, from your browser. Now with Universal Search, you can reach all of these services with a simple Google search.
> Google has psychological dominance
The fact that Google is such a widely discussed topic makes you think that it is indispensable. Psychologically, you feel that you lack it when you try other search engines. Especially if your query is indefinitely motivated - e.g your purpose is more about researching than finding - then you always want to try your search on Google as well, even if you were already satisfied with other results elsewhere.
> Google is everywhere
OK, let's say you decided to switch search engines. You still have obstacles, such as:
ü If you use one of the Google network services, like Gmail, you always have Google top of mind;
ü If you go to CNN.com, you have Google in the toolbar (on the US version at least); so why bother with entering a new URL for search?
ü If you use Firefox, Safari or Opera, then Google is your default search provider, home page and feed subscriber.
I could go on, but the point is - there's no escape from Google. This is not merely the success of algorithms, but also the success of Omid Kordestani and the whole business development team.
> Google has looooooots of ca$h
As of today, Google's market valuation is more than $150 Billion. They have lots of cash reserves (although not as much as Microsoft) and their profit margins are very high. In other words, Google is financially very healthy and they have the power to snap up any innovation developed externally. Just as they did with FeedBurner, Kaltix and Urchin.
Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB. (14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)
· Google Nexus One
Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones. Today, they are. The Nexus One smartphone has arrived and on sale at Google.com/phone. (January 5th 2010 by Michael Arrington)
· Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices
Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.” (Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)
· Google Goggles
A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on
that image. (December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)
· Free DNS Service
Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security. (December 5th 2009 by serverguy
Getting a website to attain a high ranking position in Google search engine means great success. The higher the Google ranking the more traffic it gives to the site thus making more money from advertisers.
Reaching a high rank is not easy and it requires time and effort. In addition to that, one needs to read the latest news and trends on Internet marketing especially new Google SEO techniques. Among the top three search engines, Google has a very unique algorithm meaning it can have its own SEO techniques. Because of this, one might actually conclude that it is an on-going Google SEO work. Everyday Google SEO trends change so it requires continuous research to keep up with it.
There are lots of factors to consider than just being a user friendly site. High PR rank links, good content and age of the site can definitely take you up there.
Backlinks are considered to be one of the most important factors to consider when doing Google SEO. Google's system has a way to determine if the link is more valuable than the others. How does one determine the value of the link? Take into consideration the link's age, location, anchor text, relevancy and page rank.
Another factor to consider is the age of a domain. The older the domain name is, the higher its value. Google gives importance to this because they consider an old site a legal and reputable one thus giving it a higher ranking.
Good content is definitely the best way to get your site to a high rank especially if one uses top ranking keywords. Aside from that, the content needs to be informative and relevant to visitors of the website. It should be well written and interesting so that it can generate a great amount of traffic.
Aside from these factors and as part of one's Google SEO efforts, one must view their site from the standpoint of their audience. It should be user friendly and can capture right away the visitor's attention. It pays to invest on a good designer and programmer to complement the Google SEO techniques. Remember that Google SEO techniques are unique thus it has a set of guidelines different from the rest. Remember these and the Google SEO plan will definitely pay off.
REFERENCES:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/competing_with_google_search.php
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ashow/129.html
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://tl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
Questions:
Questions :
Explain Google’s business model.
1. Who are their competitors?
2. How have they used information technology to their advantage?
3. How competitive are they in the market?
4. What new services do they offer?
5. What makes them so unique?
6. How competitive are they in the international market?
As we all know, Google is one of the famous search engines in the world. I guess everyone knows what google is right?! If you don't know then "GOOGLE IT"! .
Google Inc. is an American public corporation specializing in Internet search. It also generates profits from advertising bought on its similarly free-to-user e-mail, online mapping, office productivity, social networking and video-sharing services. Advert-free versions are available via paid subscription. Google has more recently developed an open source web browser and a mobile phone operating system. Its headquarters, often referred to as the Googleplex is located in Mountain View, California. As of March 31, 2009 (2009 -03-31) the company had 19,786 full-time employees. It runs thousands of servers across the world, processing millions of search requests each day and about one petabyte of user-generated data each hour.
While the primary business interest is in the web content arena, Google has begun experimenting with other markets, such as radio and print publications. On 17 January 2006, Google announced the purchase of a radio advertising company "dMarc", which provides an automated system that allows companies to advertise on the radio. This will allow Google to combine two niche advertising media—the Internet and radio—with Google's ability to laser-focus on the tastes of consumers. Google has also begun an experiment in selling advertisements from its advertisers in offline newspapers and magazines, with select advertisements in the Chicago Sun-Times. They have been filling unsold space in the newspaper that would have normally been used for in-house advertisements.
Software
The Google web search engine is the company's most popular service. According to market research published by comScore in November 2009, Google is the dominant search engine in the US market, with a market share of 65.6%. Google indexes billions of Web pages, so that users can search for the information they desire, through the use of keywords and operators, although at any given time it will only return a maximum of 1,000 results for any specific search query. Google has also employed the Web Search technology into other search services, including Image Search, Google News, the price comparison site Google Product Search, the interactive Usenet archive Google Groups, Google Maps,
Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly. Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.
Google has also developed several desktop applications, including Google Desktop, Picasa, SketchUp and Google Earth, an interactive mapping program powered by satellite and aerial imagery that covers the vast majority of the planet. Many major cities have such detailed images that one can zoom in close enough to see vehicles and pedestrians clearly. Consequently, there have been some concerns about national security implications; contention is that the software can be used to pinpoint with near-precision accuracy the physical location of critical infrastructure, commercial and residential buildings, bases, government agencies, and so on. However, the satellite images are not necessarily frequently updated, and all of them are available at no charge through other products and even government sources; the software simply makes accessing the information easier. A number of Indian state governments have raised concerns about the security risks posed by geographic details provided by Google Earth's satellite imaging.
- Google's Top Three Competitors :
2. Pvt1 (MSN) – Privately held
3. AOL, Inc.
- How have they used information technology to their advantage?
Google doesn’t answer to any external power. They don’t have anyone they have to deliver a product to. There is no contract with a deadline. Due to not having any external dependencies, Google can continuously iterate over a product until it reaches a state of near perfection. It can stay in internal testing as long as Google wants and no one is going to care. See Gmail, Google Maps, etc. This then allows Google to use the perfect form of the agile process. Continuous iterations and testing and development, continues
improvement. Then as Google sees fit, release the products. As they get better and better, more people use them and more money from ads come in. It’s beautiful.
It’s also unlikely any other company is going to be able to pull this off. Google hit on the formula for ads before anyone else. They now have such a commanding lead in that arena that to compete with them you need deep pockets of money of your own. That makes it difficult to launch a company and follow Google’s lead of avoiding external dependencies and having the near perfect product development process.
- Google's Competitive Advantages
Google's work force is not limited to their PhDs and 15,000 talented employees in Mountain View, New York and Dublin. SEOs from all around the world can be considered a free labor force for Google. In order to get their sites promoted on the world's number one search engine, SEOs optimize their sites according to Google's rules, register their sitemaps and ping Google's services whenever a new page is created. This gives Google a huge advantage over the other search engines, because other engines don't have the same level of feedback. Google caters to this crowd very well too, because it offers SEO friendly tools and advise.
> Extra data - Google Co-op, Image Labeler, etc
With its customized search service, Google Co-op, users don't only create vertical a search engine - they also give Google very valuable domain-specific information.
Also, by tagging images on Image Labeler and Picasa, you help perfect Google's Image Search.
>Google knows everything about your site
Today many sites use it to get a better understanding of their traffic. But a side effect of this tool is that it potentially gives Google access to important data about your site. Indeed if all sites had Urchin installed, Google would no longer need to compute
pageranks, as it would have the most accurate access to site popularity possible! Obviously not all sites use Google Analytics, but still it is not an insignificant amount that do.
The recently acquired FeedBurner also serves the same purpose. It's not only a great advertising channel for Google, but yet another way of measuring site popularity.
> Google knows a lot about you - Personalization
Gmail, Google Toolbar, Google Docs and others. They all give clues about your personality, your interests, likes and dislikes. Consequently, you end up with more personalized search results. For example: if you are the type of person who searches for programming info in Google Search, discuss KDE's latest bugs on GTalk and Gmail, visit Freshmeat and Sourceforge all day and long with your Google Toolbar-powered Firefox -- well then Google will not consider your Python, Tomcat, Apache queries as zoological, but programming related :-)
>Google offers UNIVERSAL search
Google does not only crawl the Web, blogosphere, press releases and books. It also crawls the real world with Google Earth. And Google Map's Street View lets you drive around big cities like New York and San Francisco, from your browser. Now with Universal Search, you can reach all of these services with a simple Google search.
> Google has psychological dominance
The fact that Google is such a widely discussed topic makes you think that it is indispensable. Psychologically, you feel that you lack it when you try other search engines. Especially if your query is indefinitely motivated - e.g your purpose is more about researching than finding - then you always want to try your search on Google as well, even if you were already satisfied with other results elsewhere.
> Google is everywhere
OK, let's say you decided to switch search engines. You still have obstacles, such as:
ü If you use one of the Google network services, like Gmail, you always have Google top of mind;
ü If you go to CNN.com, you have Google in the toolbar (on the US version at least); so why bother with entering a new URL for search?
ü If you use Firefox, Safari or Opera, then Google is your default search provider, home page and feed subscriber.
I could go on, but the point is - there's no escape from Google. This is not merely the success of algorithms, but also the success of Omid Kordestani and the whole business development team.
> Google has looooooots of ca$h
As of today, Google's market valuation is more than $150 Billion. They have lots of cash reserves (although not as much as Microsoft) and their profit margins are very high. In other words, Google is financially very healthy and they have the power to snap up any innovation developed externally. Just as they did with FeedBurner, Kaltix and Urchin.
- Google’s new services
Google Inc has announced its very own cloud-based online storage service which will allow Google Docs users to upload any type of file of up to 250 MB while they will have access to a total storage capacity of 1GB. (14 January, 2010, by Desire Athow)
· Google Nexus One
Yesterday Google wasn’t in the business of selling mobile phones. Today, they are. The Nexus One smartphone has arrived and on sale at Google.com/phone. (January 5th 2010 by Michael Arrington)
· Google Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices
Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.” (Jan 5, 2010 at 7:59am ET by Greg Sterling)
· Google Goggles
A new service that promises to make searching the internet as easy as taking a photo. The application, which will premier on Android devices, will let a user snap a photo of anything and then Google will deliver search results based on
that image. (December 7th, 2009 by Stefan Constantinescu)
· Free DNS Service
Google just released their newest service which is public DNS. DNS is one of the most important services when it comes to using the internet. The main reason to use the service is reliability, speed and increased security. Google has put in other measures to help with overall security. (December 5th 2009 by serverguy
- What makes them so unique?
Getting a website to attain a high ranking position in Google search engine means great success. The higher the Google ranking the more traffic it gives to the site thus making more money from advertisers.
Reaching a high rank is not easy and it requires time and effort. In addition to that, one needs to read the latest news and trends on Internet marketing especially new Google SEO techniques. Among the top three search engines, Google has a very unique algorithm meaning it can have its own SEO techniques. Because of this, one might actually conclude that it is an on-going Google SEO work. Everyday Google SEO trends change so it requires continuous research to keep up with it.
There are lots of factors to consider than just being a user friendly site. High PR rank links, good content and age of the site can definitely take you up there.
Backlinks are considered to be one of the most important factors to consider when doing Google SEO. Google's system has a way to determine if the link is more valuable than the others. How does one determine the value of the link? Take into consideration the link's age, location, anchor text, relevancy and page rank.
Another factor to consider is the age of a domain. The older the domain name is, the higher its value. Google gives importance to this because they consider an old site a legal and reputable one thus giving it a higher ranking.
Good content is definitely the best way to get your site to a high rank especially if one uses top ranking keywords. Aside from that, the content needs to be informative and relevant to visitors of the website. It should be well written and interesting so that it can generate a great amount of traffic.
Aside from these factors and as part of one's Google SEO efforts, one must view their site from the standpoint of their audience. It should be user friendly and can capture right away the visitor's attention. It pays to invest on a good designer and programmer to complement the Google SEO techniques. Remember that Google SEO techniques are unique thus it has a set of guidelines different from the rest. Remember these and the Google SEO plan will definitely pay off.
REFERENCES:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/competing_with_google_search.php
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ashow/129.html
http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/03/17/googles-unique-advantage/
http://tl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google
ASSIGNMENT #6
Identify and discuss the steps for "critical success factors" approach? (at least 1,500 words)
Identify and discuss the steps for "critical success factors" approach?
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
So many important matters can compete for your attention in business that it's often difficult to see the "wood for the trees". What's more, it can be extremely difficult to get everyone in the team pulling in the same direction and focusing on the true essentials.
That's where Critical Success Factors (CSFs) can help. CSFs are the essential areas of activity that must be performed well if you are to achieve the mission, objectives or goals for your business or project.
By identifying your Critical Success Factors, you can create a common point of reference to help you direct and measure the success of your business or project.
As a common point of reference, CSFs help everyone in the team to know exactly what's most important. And this helps people perform their own work in the right context and so pull together towards the same overall aims.
What is s Critical Success Factor(CSF)?Critical Success Factor
(CSF) is the term for an element that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission. It is a critical factor or activity required for ensuring the success of your business. The term was initially used in the world of data analysis,
and business analysis. For example, a CSF for a successful Information Technology (IT) project is user involvement.
Most smaller and more pragmatic businesses can still use CSF’s but we need to take a different, more pragmatic approach.
Critical Success Factors have been used significantly to present or identify a few key factors that organizations should focus on to be successful.
As a definition, critical success factors refer to "the limited number of areas in which satisfactory results will ensure successful competitive performance for the individual, department, or organization”.
As you read this and many other resources on the internet you will discover that there are potentially a confusing variety of definitions and uses of Critical Success Factors.
Before you start the journey looking at CSFs it is important to realise that the specific factors relevant for you will vary from business to business and industry to industry. The key to using CSFs effectively is to ensure that your definition of a factor of your organizations activity which is central to its future will always apply.
Therefore success in determining the CSFs for your organization is to determine what is central to its future and achievement of that future.
This page is primarily written for students of management and business, to keep things simple for application in smaller organizations remember to only have 5-7 critical factors for YOUR organization, and I am sure one of those will be cashflow!
History/Background
The idea of identifying critical success factors as a basis for determining the information needs of managers was proposed by Daniel (1961) but popularized by Rockart (1979). The idea is very simple: in any organization certain factors will be critical to the success of that organization, in the sense that, if objectives associated with the factors are not achieved, the organization will fail - perhaps catastrophically so. Rockart (1979: 85), by referring to Daniel (1961), gives the following as an example of the CSFs: new product development, good distribution, and effective advertising for the food processing industry - factors that remain relevant today for many firms.
As we start to discuss the Critical Success Factors, it is important to realize that the specific factors relevant for you will vary from business to business and industry to industry. The key to using Critical Success Factors effectively is to ensure that your definition of a factor of your organizations activity which is central to its future will always apply.
Therefore success in determining the Critical Success Factors for your organization is to determine what is central to its future and achievement of that future.
Industry CSFs:
Every organization inherits a particular set of operating conditions and challenges that are inherent to the industry (or segment of the industry) in which it chose to do business. This results in a unique set of CSFs that organizations in a particular industry must achieve to maintain or increase their competitive positions, achieve their goals, and accomplish their missions. For example, consider an organization in the airline industry. As a member of this industry, the organization inherits CSFs such as “deliver on-time service” or “move away from the hub-and-spoke system.” Failure to achieve these CSFs may render the organization unable to stay competitive in its industry and may ultimately result in its exit.
Strategic CSFs:
these factors result from the specific competitive strategy chosen by the organization. The way in which the company chooses to position themselves, market themselves, whether they are high volume low cost or low volume high cost producers, etc.
Environmental CSFs:
To be successful, an organization must be mindful of the macro environment in which it op-erates. A closed organization—one that does not fully interact with its external environ-ment—cannot survive in the long term. As a result, an organization must acknowledge the18 CMU/SEI-2004-TR-010environmental factors that can affect its ability to accomplish its mission. Environmental CSFs reflect the environmental factors over which the organization has very little control or ability to actively manage. By making these factors explicit, the organization can at least be mindful of them and actively monitor their performance relative to them.Environmental CSFs describe such conditions as current socio-political issues, the industry’s regulatory environment, and factors such as seasonality. For example, the airline industry has been dramatically affected by terrorist activities, which have forced changes in airport opera-tions and scheduling and have brought about new regulations with which airlines must com-ply. Unfortunately, airlines have very little control over this problem
Temporal CSFs
CSFs are tied to the long-term planning horizon of an organization. Over the strategic plan-ning period the organization’s CSFs may remain fairly constant, adjusted only when the or-ganization makes major changes, such as changing its mission or the industry in which it competes. However, at one time or another, every organization encounters temporary condi-tions or situations that must be managed for a specific period of time, while continuing to maintain its performance in all other areas. These temporary conditions or situations can re-sult in temporal CSFs—areas in which the organization must temporarily perform satisfacto-CMU/SEI-2004-TR-010 19 rily in order to ensure that its ability to accomplish its mission is not impeded.
Things that are measured get done more often than things that are not measured. Each CSF should be measurable and associated with a target goal. You don't need exact measures to manage. Primary measures that should be listed include critical success levels (such as number of transactions per month) or, in cases where specific measurements are more difficult, general goals should be specified (such as moving up in an industry customer service survey.
four steps of CSFs:
Industry CSF's follows from specific industry characteristics.
Different industries have different CSFs. Even within same industry CSFs are not identical from company to company. For example:
Objective: Achieve market share locally of 15%.
CSF: Increasing of customers quantity, increasing of competitiveness versus other local shops.
Strategy CSF's follows from the selected competitive strategy of the business.
It depends on how company positions itself on market, what is the strategy of business and development. Objective: Decrease time of client servicing to 50%. CSF: Install PC-based customer service system.
Environmental CSF's follows from economic or technological changes.
These factors represent environment in which company operates. They include things like the business climate, the economy, competitors, sociopolitical issues, technological improving and so on. Objective: Expand assortment of goods to attract more consumers. CSF: Discovery of new required local suppliers, arrangement of win-win relationship with them.
Temporal CSF's follows from internal organizational needs and changes.
These are temporary conditions or situations in which the organization must achieve success in order to ensure safety of successful accomplishment companies main goals.
A plan should be implemented that considers a platform for growth and profits as well as takes into consideration the following critical success factors:
• Money: positive cash flow, revenue growth, and profit margins.
• Your future: Acquiring new customers and/or distributors.
• Customer satisfaction: How happy they are.
• Quality: How good is your product and service?
• Product or service development: What's new that will increase business with existing customers and attract new ones?
• Intellectual capital: Increasing what you know is profitable.
• Strategic relationships: New sources of business, products and outside revenue.
• Employee attraction and retention: Your ability to extend your reach.
• Sustainability: Your personal ability to keep it all going.
CSFs are used by organisations to give focus on a number of factors that help define its success. They help the organisation and its
personnel to understand the key areas in which to invest their resources and time. Ideally, these CSFs are observable in terms of the impact on the organisation to allow it to have guidance and indications on its achievement of them.
CSFs can be utilised in both the organisation and the individual levels. Their identification is largely qualitative and can result in differing opinions in pinpointing them. Nevertheless, it is an approach that should be pursued as it provides value in giving due focus to a limited set of factors, which are deemed to be the most critical for an organisation or individual.
Thecompany should have a critical success factors in order to know the improvement made by the company from the past up to the present generation. This is possible to every organization even to a smaller unit of business to maintain its progress and limits its capacity. This would show that critical success factors indeed contribute a big help to individuals not only for a certain corporation but also to a person.
REFERENCES:
http://rapidbi.com/created/criticalsuccessfactors.html
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_80.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_success_factor
http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Critical_Success_Factors_of_KM.pdf
Identify and discuss the steps for "critical success factors" approach?
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
So many important matters can compete for your attention in business that it's often difficult to see the "wood for the trees". What's more, it can be extremely difficult to get everyone in the team pulling in the same direction and focusing on the true essentials.
That's where Critical Success Factors (CSFs) can help. CSFs are the essential areas of activity that must be performed well if you are to achieve the mission, objectives or goals for your business or project.
By identifying your Critical Success Factors, you can create a common point of reference to help you direct and measure the success of your business or project.
As a common point of reference, CSFs help everyone in the team to know exactly what's most important. And this helps people perform their own work in the right context and so pull together towards the same overall aims.
What is s Critical Success Factor(CSF)?Critical Success Factor
(CSF) is the term for an element that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission. It is a critical factor or activity required for ensuring the success of your business. The term was initially used in the world of data analysis,
and business analysis. For example, a CSF for a successful Information Technology (IT) project is user involvement.
Most smaller and more pragmatic businesses can still use CSF’s but we need to take a different, more pragmatic approach.
Critical Success Factors have been used significantly to present or identify a few key factors that organizations should focus on to be successful.
As a definition, critical success factors refer to "the limited number of areas in which satisfactory results will ensure successful competitive performance for the individual, department, or organization”.
As you read this and many other resources on the internet you will discover that there are potentially a confusing variety of definitions and uses of Critical Success Factors.
Before you start the journey looking at CSFs it is important to realise that the specific factors relevant for you will vary from business to business and industry to industry. The key to using CSFs effectively is to ensure that your definition of a factor of your organizations activity which is central to its future will always apply.
Therefore success in determining the CSFs for your organization is to determine what is central to its future and achievement of that future.
This page is primarily written for students of management and business, to keep things simple for application in smaller organizations remember to only have 5-7 critical factors for YOUR organization, and I am sure one of those will be cashflow!
History/Background
The idea of identifying critical success factors as a basis for determining the information needs of managers was proposed by Daniel (1961) but popularized by Rockart (1979). The idea is very simple: in any organization certain factors will be critical to the success of that organization, in the sense that, if objectives associated with the factors are not achieved, the organization will fail - perhaps catastrophically so. Rockart (1979: 85), by referring to Daniel (1961), gives the following as an example of the CSFs: new product development, good distribution, and effective advertising for the food processing industry - factors that remain relevant today for many firms.
As we start to discuss the Critical Success Factors, it is important to realize that the specific factors relevant for you will vary from business to business and industry to industry. The key to using Critical Success Factors effectively is to ensure that your definition of a factor of your organizations activity which is central to its future will always apply.
Therefore success in determining the Critical Success Factors for your organization is to determine what is central to its future and achievement of that future.
Industry CSFs:
Every organization inherits a particular set of operating conditions and challenges that are inherent to the industry (or segment of the industry) in which it chose to do business. This results in a unique set of CSFs that organizations in a particular industry must achieve to maintain or increase their competitive positions, achieve their goals, and accomplish their missions. For example, consider an organization in the airline industry. As a member of this industry, the organization inherits CSFs such as “deliver on-time service” or “move away from the hub-and-spoke system.” Failure to achieve these CSFs may render the organization unable to stay competitive in its industry and may ultimately result in its exit.
Strategic CSFs:
these factors result from the specific competitive strategy chosen by the organization. The way in which the company chooses to position themselves, market themselves, whether they are high volume low cost or low volume high cost producers, etc.
Environmental CSFs:
To be successful, an organization must be mindful of the macro environment in which it op-erates. A closed organization—one that does not fully interact with its external environ-ment—cannot survive in the long term. As a result, an organization must acknowledge the18 CMU/SEI-2004-TR-010environmental factors that can affect its ability to accomplish its mission. Environmental CSFs reflect the environmental factors over which the organization has very little control or ability to actively manage. By making these factors explicit, the organization can at least be mindful of them and actively monitor their performance relative to them.Environmental CSFs describe such conditions as current socio-political issues, the industry’s regulatory environment, and factors such as seasonality. For example, the airline industry has been dramatically affected by terrorist activities, which have forced changes in airport opera-tions and scheduling and have brought about new regulations with which airlines must com-ply. Unfortunately, airlines have very little control over this problem
Temporal CSFs
CSFs are tied to the long-term planning horizon of an organization. Over the strategic plan-ning period the organization’s CSFs may remain fairly constant, adjusted only when the or-ganization makes major changes, such as changing its mission or the industry in which it competes. However, at one time or another, every organization encounters temporary condi-tions or situations that must be managed for a specific period of time, while continuing to maintain its performance in all other areas. These temporary conditions or situations can re-sult in temporal CSFs—areas in which the organization must temporarily perform satisfacto-CMU/SEI-2004-TR-010 19 rily in order to ensure that its ability to accomplish its mission is not impeded.
Things that are measured get done more often than things that are not measured. Each CSF should be measurable and associated with a target goal. You don't need exact measures to manage. Primary measures that should be listed include critical success levels (such as number of transactions per month) or, in cases where specific measurements are more difficult, general goals should be specified (such as moving up in an industry customer service survey.
four steps of CSFs:
Industry CSF's follows from specific industry characteristics.
Different industries have different CSFs. Even within same industry CSFs are not identical from company to company. For example:
Objective: Achieve market share locally of 15%.
CSF: Increasing of customers quantity, increasing of competitiveness versus other local shops.
Strategy CSF's follows from the selected competitive strategy of the business.
It depends on how company positions itself on market, what is the strategy of business and development. Objective: Decrease time of client servicing to 50%. CSF: Install PC-based customer service system.
Environmental CSF's follows from economic or technological changes.
These factors represent environment in which company operates. They include things like the business climate, the economy, competitors, sociopolitical issues, technological improving and so on. Objective: Expand assortment of goods to attract more consumers. CSF: Discovery of new required local suppliers, arrangement of win-win relationship with them.
Temporal CSF's follows from internal organizational needs and changes.
These are temporary conditions or situations in which the organization must achieve success in order to ensure safety of successful accomplishment companies main goals.
A plan should be implemented that considers a platform for growth and profits as well as takes into consideration the following critical success factors:
• Money: positive cash flow, revenue growth, and profit margins.
• Your future: Acquiring new customers and/or distributors.
• Customer satisfaction: How happy they are.
• Quality: How good is your product and service?
• Product or service development: What's new that will increase business with existing customers and attract new ones?
• Intellectual capital: Increasing what you know is profitable.
• Strategic relationships: New sources of business, products and outside revenue.
• Employee attraction and retention: Your ability to extend your reach.
• Sustainability: Your personal ability to keep it all going.
CSFs are used by organisations to give focus on a number of factors that help define its success. They help the organisation and its
personnel to understand the key areas in which to invest their resources and time. Ideally, these CSFs are observable in terms of the impact on the organisation to allow it to have guidance and indications on its achievement of them.
CSFs can be utilised in both the organisation and the individual levels. Their identification is largely qualitative and can result in differing opinions in pinpointing them. Nevertheless, it is an approach that should be pursued as it provides value in giving due focus to a limited set of factors, which are deemed to be the most critical for an organisation or individual.
Thecompany should have a critical success factors in order to know the improvement made by the company from the past up to the present generation. This is possible to every organization even to a smaller unit of business to maintain its progress and limits its capacity. This would show that critical success factors indeed contribute a big help to individuals not only for a certain corporation but also to a person.
REFERENCES:
http://rapidbi.com/created/criticalsuccessfactors.html
http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newLDR_80.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_success_factor
http://www.providersedge.com/docs/km_articles/Critical_Success_Factors_of_KM.pdf
ASSIGNMENT #5
In the spectrum of organizational change, which is the most radical type of change: automation, rationalization of procedures, business reengineering, or paradigm shifts? (you are expected to read an article about this question) .. at least 3000 words
How organizational change occurs?
Significant organizational change occurs, for example, when an organization changes its overall strategy for success, adds or removes a major section or practice, and/or wants to change the very nature by which it operates. It also occurs when an organization evolves through various life cycles, just like people must successfully evolve through life cycles. For organizations to develop, they often must undergo significant change at various points in their development. That's why the topic of organizational change and development has become widespread in communications about business, organizations, leadership and management.
Causes of Organizational Structure.
In just a few months, the technology that an organization uses on an everyday basis may be outdated and replaced. That means an organization needs to be responsive to advances in the technological environment; its employees' work skills must evolve as technology evolves. Organizations that refuse to adapt are likely to be the ones that won't be around in a few short years. If an organization wants to survive and prosper, its managers must continually innovate and adapt to new situations.
Every organization goes through periods of transformation that can cause stress and uncertainty. To be successful, organizations must embrace many types of change. Businesses must develop improved production technologies, create new products desired in the marketplace, implement new administrative systems, and upgrade employees' skills. Organizations that adapt successfully are both profitable and admired.
Managers must contend with all factors that affect their organizations. The following lists internal and external environmental factors that can encourage organizational changes:
Generally:
• The external environment is affected by political, social, technological, and economic stimuli outside of the organization that cause changes.
• The internal environment is affected by the organization's management policies and styles, systems, and procedures, as well as employee attitudes.
Automation
Automation plays an increasingly important role in the global economy and in daily experience. Engineers strive to combine automated devices with mathematical and organizational tools to create complex systems for a rapidly expanding range of applications and human activities.
Many roles for humans in industrial processes presently lie beyond the scope of automation. Human-level pattern recognition, language recognition, and language production ability are well beyond the capabilities of modern mechanical and computer systems. Tasks requiring subjective assessment or synthesis of complex sensory data, such as scents and sounds, as well as high-level tasks such as strategic planning, currently require human expertise. In many cases, the use of humans is more cost-effective than mechanical approaches even where automation of industrial tasks is possible.
Rationalization of Procedures
Rationalization is the second stage of organizational change where the organization uses information technology to streamline a standard operating procedure. A database that holds information of available rooms is an example of this stage.
Refers to streamlining of standard operating procedures, eliminating obvious bottlenecks, so that automation makes operating procedures more efficient. improves efficiency and effectiveness. This range of organizational structure causes the organization to examine its standard operating procedures, eliminate those no longer needed, and make the organization more efficient. Both types of change cause some disruption, but it's usually manageable and relatively accepted by the people.
Business Reengineering
Business process reengineering (BPR) is, in computer science and management, an approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the business process that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a "clean slate" perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business. Business process reengineering is a more complicated and risky type of organizational change. Using the information technology the organization redesigns whole business processes in order to reduce waste and increase efficiency.
Radical redesign of processes to improve cost, quality, service; maximize benefits of technology.
BR on the other hand, can cause radical disruption. The mere mention of the term nowadays strikes fear in the hearts of workers and managers at all levels. Why? Because many companies use it as a guise for downsizing the organization and laying off workers. Business process reengineering causes planners to completely rethink the flow of work, how the work will be accomplished, and how costs can be reduced by eliminating unnecessary work and workers. In order to make BPR successful, you must first redesign the process, then apply computing power to the new processes. If problems existed in the process before the new system was installed and those problems aren't resolved, the new system could actually make them worse. Very few processes in business are as efficient as they can possibly be. It's a fact of life. The idea behind successful BPR is to find improvements or even new opportunities. For instance, Federal Express and UPS both have online package tracking systems. That simple process was never economically feasible before the Internet. They had to reengineer their business processes to incorporate this new paradigm shift.
1. Aims at
2. eliminating repetitive, paper-intensive, bureaucratic tasks
3. reducing costs significantly
4. improving product/service quality
Paradigm Shifts
The term paradigm shift, as a change in a fundamental model of events, has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well, even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." (The Essential Tension, 1977). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, "a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th-century theory of poetics, for instance.
Depending on the investment time horizon, the specific challenges and tools available may change, but the overall direction is unmistakable. The construction industry is about to experience a profound change: leaner organisations, more consistent and rigorous performance metrics, and relentless productivity improvements. The net result of these changes should also be increased profitability for those who are successful at mastering the new IT & technology tools with the promise to enable these changes.
REFERENCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
http://managementhelp.org/org_chng/org_chng.htm
In the spectrum of organizational change, which is the most radical type of change: automation, rationalization of procedures, business reengineering, or paradigm shifts? (you are expected to read an article about this question) .. at least 3000 words
Another question to answer for this yuletide season..
Merry Christmas! 
Another question to answer for this yuletide season..
Merry Christmas! The world is rapidly changing into something too hard to easily predict, with a hundred opportunities and pitfalls passing by every moment. Typically, the concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as adding a new person, modifying a program, etc. Examples of organization-wide change might include a change in mission, restructuring operations like for example, restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc., new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, "rightsizing", new programs such as Total Quality Management, re-engineering, etc. Some experts refer to organizational transformation. Often this term designates a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization operates.
Managing Organizational Change
[justify]It is important to have a change in the organization. In addition, such change should be successful and must contribute towards the success of the organization. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the prevalence of the change process in organizations and understand what occurs during organizational change and the forces responsible for unplanned organizational change. Organization change is a planned or unplanned transformation in an organization’s structure, technology, or people. However, there are internal as well as external factors forcing the change. Besides this, there are critical issues in the organizational development. One should be able to overcome such issues and led to effective change in the organization.
Typically, the concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as
adding a new person, modifying a program, etc. Examples of organization-wide change might include a change in mission,restructuring operations (e.g., restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc.), new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, "rightsizing", new programs such as Total Quality Management, re-engineering, etc. Some experts refer to organizational transformation. Often this term designates a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization operates.
What Provokes "Organizational Change"?
Change should not be done for the sake of change -- it's a strategyto accomplish some overall goal. Usually organizational change is provoked by some major outside driving force, e.g., substantial cuts in funding, address major new markets/clients, need for dramatic increases in productivity/services, etc. Typically, organizations must undertake organization-wide change to evolve to a different level in their life cycle, e.g., going from a highly reactive, entreprenueral organization to more stable and planned development. Transition to a new chief executive can provoke organization-wide change when his or her new and unique personality pervades the entire organization.
Why is Organization-Wide Change Difficult to Accomplish?
Typically there are strong resistances to change. People are afraid of the unknown. Many people think things are already just fine and don't understand the need for change. Many are inherently cynical about change, particularly from reading about the notion of "change" as if it's a mantra. Many doubt there are effective means to accomplish major organizational change. Often there are conflicting goals in the organization, e.g., to increase resources to accomplish the change yet concurrently cut costs to remain viable. Organization-wide change often goes against the very values held dear by members in the organization, that is, the change may go against how members believe things should be done. That's why much of organizational-change literature discusses needed changes in the culture of the organization, including changes in members' values and beliefs and in the way they enact these
values and beliefs.
How Is Organization-Wide Change Best Carried Out?
Successful change must involve top management, including the board and chief executive. Usually there's a champion who initially instigates the change by being visionary, persuasive and consistent. A change agent role is usually responsible to translate the vision to a realistic plan and carry out the plan.
Change is usually best carried out as a team-wide effort. Communications about the change should be frequent and with all organization members. To sustain change, the structures of the organization itself should be modified, including strategic plans, policies and procedures. This change in the structures of the organization typically involves an unfreezing, change and re-freezing process.
The best approaches to address resistances is through increased and sustained communications and education. For example, the leader should meet with all managers and staff to explain reasons for the change, how it generally will be carried out and where others can go for additional information. A plan should be developed and communicated. Plans do change. That's fine, but communicatethat the plan has changed and why. Forums should be held for organization members to express their ideas for the plan. They should be able to express their concerns and frustrations as well.
Some General Guidelines to Organization-Wide Change
In addition to the general guidelines listed above, there are a few other basic guidelines to keep in mind.
1. Consider using a consultant. Ensure the consultant is highly experienced in organization-wide change. Ask to see references and check the references.
2. Widely communicate the potential need for change. Communicate what you're doing about it. Communicate what was done and how
it worked out.
3. Get as much feedback as practical from employees, including what they think are the problems and what should be done to resolve
them. If possible, work with a team of employees to manage the change.
4. Don't get wrapped up in doing change for the sake of change. Know why you're making the change. What goal(s) do you hope to accomplish?
6. Plan the change. How do you plan to reach the goals, what will you need to reach the goals, how long might it take and how will you know when you've reached your goals or not? Focus on the coordination of the departments/programs in your organization, not on each part by itself. Have someone in charge of the plan.
7. End up having every employee ultimately reporting to one person, if possible, and they should know who that person is. Job descriptions are often complained about, but they are useful in specifying who reports to whom.
8. Delegate decisions to employees as much as possible. This includes granting them the authority and responsibility to get the job done. As much as possible, let them decide how to do the project.
9. The process won't be an "aha!" It will take longer than you think.
10. Keep perspective. Keep focused on meeting the needs of your customer or clients.
11. Take care of yourself first. Organization-wide change can be highly stressful.
12. Don't seek to control change, but rather to expect it, understand it and manage it.
13. Include closure in the plan. Acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments.
14. Read some resources about organizational change, including new forms and structures.
[/justify]Managing Organizational Change
[justify]It is important to have a change in the organization. In addition, such change should be successful and must contribute towards the success of the organization. The main objective of this paper is to characterize the prevalence of the change process in organizations and understand what occurs during organizational change and the forces responsible for unplanned organizational change. Organization change is a planned or unplanned transformation in an organization’s structure, technology, or people. However, there are internal as well as external factors forcing the change. Besides this, there are critical issues in the organizational development. One should be able to overcome such issues and led to effective change in the organization.
Typically, the concept of organizational change is in regard to organization-wide change, as opposed to smaller changes such as
adding a new person, modifying a program, etc. Examples of organization-wide change might include a change in mission,restructuring operations (e.g., restructuring to self-managed teams, layoffs, etc.), new technologies, mergers, major collaborations, "rightsizing", new programs such as Total Quality Management, re-engineering, etc. Some experts refer to organizational transformation. Often this term designates a fundamental and radical reorientation in the way the organization operates.
What Provokes "Organizational Change"?
Change should not be done for the sake of change -- it's a strategyto accomplish some overall goal. Usually organizational change is provoked by some major outside driving force, e.g., substantial cuts in funding, address major new markets/clients, need for dramatic increases in productivity/services, etc. Typically, organizations must undertake organization-wide change to evolve to a different level in their life cycle, e.g., going from a highly reactive, entreprenueral organization to more stable and planned development. Transition to a new chief executive can provoke organization-wide change when his or her new and unique personality pervades the entire organization.
Why is Organization-Wide Change Difficult to Accomplish?
Typically there are strong resistances to change. People are afraid of the unknown. Many people think things are already just fine and don't understand the need for change. Many are inherently cynical about change, particularly from reading about the notion of "change" as if it's a mantra. Many doubt there are effective means to accomplish major organizational change. Often there are conflicting goals in the organization, e.g., to increase resources to accomplish the change yet concurrently cut costs to remain viable. Organization-wide change often goes against the very values held dear by members in the organization, that is, the change may go against how members believe things should be done. That's why much of organizational-change literature discusses needed changes in the culture of the organization, including changes in members' values and beliefs and in the way they enact these
values and beliefs.
How Is Organization-Wide Change Best Carried Out?
Successful change must involve top management, including the board and chief executive. Usually there's a champion who initially instigates the change by being visionary, persuasive and consistent. A change agent role is usually responsible to translate the vision to a realistic plan and carry out the plan.
Change is usually best carried out as a team-wide effort. Communications about the change should be frequent and with all organization members. To sustain change, the structures of the organization itself should be modified, including strategic plans, policies and procedures. This change in the structures of the organization typically involves an unfreezing, change and re-freezing process.
The best approaches to address resistances is through increased and sustained communications and education. For example, the leader should meet with all managers and staff to explain reasons for the change, how it generally will be carried out and where others can go for additional information. A plan should be developed and communicated. Plans do change. That's fine, but communicatethat the plan has changed and why. Forums should be held for organization members to express their ideas for the plan. They should be able to express their concerns and frustrations as well.
Some General Guidelines to Organization-Wide Change
In addition to the general guidelines listed above, there are a few other basic guidelines to keep in mind.
1. Consider using a consultant. Ensure the consultant is highly experienced in organization-wide change. Ask to see references and check the references.
2. Widely communicate the potential need for change. Communicate what you're doing about it. Communicate what was done and how
it worked out.
3. Get as much feedback as practical from employees, including what they think are the problems and what should be done to resolve
them. If possible, work with a team of employees to manage the change.
4. Don't get wrapped up in doing change for the sake of change. Know why you're making the change. What goal(s) do you hope to accomplish?
6. Plan the change. How do you plan to reach the goals, what will you need to reach the goals, how long might it take and how will you know when you've reached your goals or not? Focus on the coordination of the departments/programs in your organization, not on each part by itself. Have someone in charge of the plan.
7. End up having every employee ultimately reporting to one person, if possible, and they should know who that person is. Job descriptions are often complained about, but they are useful in specifying who reports to whom.
8. Delegate decisions to employees as much as possible. This includes granting them the authority and responsibility to get the job done. As much as possible, let them decide how to do the project.
9. The process won't be an "aha!" It will take longer than you think.
10. Keep perspective. Keep focused on meeting the needs of your customer or clients.
11. Take care of yourself first. Organization-wide change can be highly stressful.
12. Don't seek to control change, but rather to expect it, understand it and manage it.
13. Include closure in the plan. Acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments.
14. Read some resources about organizational change, including new forms and structures.
How organizational change occurs?
Significant organizational change occurs, for example, when an organization changes its overall strategy for success, adds or removes a major section or practice, and/or wants to change the very nature by which it operates. It also occurs when an organization evolves through various life cycles, just like people must successfully evolve through life cycles. For organizations to develop, they often must undergo significant change at various points in their development. That's why the topic of organizational change and development has become widespread in communications about business, organizations, leadership and management.
Causes of Organizational Structure.
In just a few months, the technology that an organization uses on an everyday basis may be outdated and replaced. That means an organization needs to be responsive to advances in the technological environment; its employees' work skills must evolve as technology evolves. Organizations that refuse to adapt are likely to be the ones that won't be around in a few short years. If an organization wants to survive and prosper, its managers must continually innovate and adapt to new situations.
Every organization goes through periods of transformation that can cause stress and uncertainty. To be successful, organizations must embrace many types of change. Businesses must develop improved production technologies, create new products desired in the marketplace, implement new administrative systems, and upgrade employees' skills. Organizations that adapt successfully are both profitable and admired.
Managers must contend with all factors that affect their organizations. The following lists internal and external environmental factors that can encourage organizational changes:
Generally:
• The external environment is affected by political, social, technological, and economic stimuli outside of the organization that cause changes.
• The internal environment is affected by the organization's management policies and styles, systems, and procedures, as well as employee attitudes.
Automation
Automation plays an increasingly important role in the global economy and in daily experience. Engineers strive to combine automated devices with mathematical and organizational tools to create complex systems for a rapidly expanding range of applications and human activities.
Many roles for humans in industrial processes presently lie beyond the scope of automation. Human-level pattern recognition, language recognition, and language production ability are well beyond the capabilities of modern mechanical and computer systems. Tasks requiring subjective assessment or synthesis of complex sensory data, such as scents and sounds, as well as high-level tasks such as strategic planning, currently require human expertise. In many cases, the use of humans is more cost-effective than mechanical approaches even where automation of industrial tasks is possible.
Rationalization of Procedures
Rationalization is the second stage of organizational change where the organization uses information technology to streamline a standard operating procedure. A database that holds information of available rooms is an example of this stage.
Refers to streamlining of standard operating procedures, eliminating obvious bottlenecks, so that automation makes operating procedures more efficient. improves efficiency and effectiveness. This range of organizational structure causes the organization to examine its standard operating procedures, eliminate those no longer needed, and make the organization more efficient. Both types of change cause some disruption, but it's usually manageable and relatively accepted by the people.
Business Reengineering
Business process reengineering (BPR) is, in computer science and management, an approach aiming at improvements by means of elevating efficiency and effectiveness of the business process that exist within and across organizations. The key to BPR is for organizations to look at their business processes from a "clean slate" perspective and determine how they can best construct these processes to improve how they conduct business. Business process reengineering is a more complicated and risky type of organizational change. Using the information technology the organization redesigns whole business processes in order to reduce waste and increase efficiency.
Radical redesign of processes to improve cost, quality, service; maximize benefits of technology.
BR on the other hand, can cause radical disruption. The mere mention of the term nowadays strikes fear in the hearts of workers and managers at all levels. Why? Because many companies use it as a guise for downsizing the organization and laying off workers. Business process reengineering causes planners to completely rethink the flow of work, how the work will be accomplished, and how costs can be reduced by eliminating unnecessary work and workers. In order to make BPR successful, you must first redesign the process, then apply computing power to the new processes. If problems existed in the process before the new system was installed and those problems aren't resolved, the new system could actually make them worse. Very few processes in business are as efficient as they can possibly be. It's a fact of life. The idea behind successful BPR is to find improvements or even new opportunities. For instance, Federal Express and UPS both have online package tracking systems. That simple process was never economically feasible before the Internet. They had to reengineer their business processes to incorporate this new paradigm shift.
1. Aims at
2. eliminating repetitive, paper-intensive, bureaucratic tasks
3. reducing costs significantly
4. improving product/service quality
Paradigm Shifts
The term paradigm shift, as a change in a fundamental model of events, has since become widely applied to many other realms of human experience as well, even though Kuhn himself restricted the use of the term to the hard sciences. According to Kuhn, "A paradigm is what members of a scientific community, and they alone, share." (The Essential Tension, 1977). Unlike a normal scientist, Kuhn held, "a student in the humanities has constantly before him a number of competing and incommensurable solutions to these problems, solutions that he must ultimately examine for himself." (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). Once a paradigm shift is complete, a scientist cannot, for example, posit the possibility that miasma causes disease or that ether carries light. In contrast, a critic in the Humanities can choose to adopt a 19th-century theory of poetics, for instance.
Depending on the investment time horizon, the specific challenges and tools available may change, but the overall direction is unmistakable. The construction industry is about to experience a profound change: leaner organisations, more consistent and rigorous performance metrics, and relentless productivity improvements. The net result of these changes should also be increased profitability for those who are successful at mastering the new IT & technology tools with the promise to enable these changes.
REFERENCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_reengineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_shift
http://managementhelp.org/org_chng/org_chng.htm
ASSIGNMENT #4
You were invited by the university president to prepare an IS plan for the university, discuss what are the steps in order to expedite the implementation of the IS Plan. (at least 5000 words)
weew! another hard question..
It is very difficult to obtain consensus on a functional decomposition for any one application, much less across all the information systems within the entire corporation. That is because functional analysis requires identification and codification of how activities are performed. In short, the codification of style. This type of analysis leads to conflicts, power struggles, and endless nit-picking. In the end, nobody likes the results. Once, or if ever completed, both IBM and Martin use the resulting ISP as a foundation for identifying information systems. Building the ISP on top of such a foundation of discord cannot possibly result in stable, enduring information systems.
For a long time relationship between information system functions and corporate strategy was not of much interest to Top Management of firms. Information Systems were thought to be synonymous with corporate data processing and treated as some back-room operation in support of day-to-day mundane tasks (Rockart, 1979). In the 80’s and 90’s, however, there has been a growing realization of the need to make information systems of strategic importance to an
organization. Consequently, strategic information systems planning (SISP) is a critical issue. In many industry surveys, improved SISP is often mentioned as the most serious challenge facing IS managers (Pavri and Ang, 1995, Beath and Orlikowski, 1994; Martin, 1993; Porter and Miller, 1985). Planning for information systems, as for any other system, begins with the identification of needs. In order to be effective, development of any type of computer-based system should be a response to need--whether at the transaction processing level or at the more complex information and support systems levels. Such planning for information systems is much like strategic planning in management. Objectives, priorities, and authorization for information systems projects need to be formalized. The systems development plan should identify specific projects slated for the future, priorities for each project and for resources, general procedures, and constraints for each application area. The plan must be specific enough to enable understanding of each application and to know where it stands in the order of development. Also the plan should be flexible so that priorities can be adjusted if necessary. King (King, 1995) in his recent article has argued that a strategic capability architecture - a flexible and continuously improving infrastructure of organizational capabilities - is the primary basis for a company's sustainable competitive advantage. He has emphasized the need for continuously updating and improving the strategic capabilities architecture.
Characteristics of a Quality ISP
A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.
Characteristic ------- Description
Timely -------- The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.
Useable ------- The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
Maintainable ------- The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.
Quality -------- While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new
hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.
Reproducible -------- The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.
The ISP Steps
The information systems plan project determines the sequence for implementing specific information systems. The goal of the strategy is to deliver the most valuable business information at the earliest time possible in the most cost-effective manner.
The end product of the information systems project is an information systems plan (ISP). Once deployed, the information systems department can implement the plan with confidence that they are doing the correct information systems project at the right time and in the right sequence. The focus of the ISP is not one information system but
the entire suite of information systems for the enterprise. Once developed, each identified information system is seen in context with all other information systems within the enterprise.
Executive and Adjusting the ISP Through Time
IT projects are accomplished within distinct development environments. The two most common are: discrete project and release. The discrete project environment is typified by completely encapsulated projects accomplished through a water-fall methodology.
In release environments, there are a number of different projects underway by different organizations and staff of varying skill levels. Once a large number of projects are underway, the ability of the enterprise to know about and manage all the different projects degrades
rapidly. That is because the project management environment has been transformed from discrete encapsulated projects into a continuous flow process of product or functionality improvements that are released on a
set time schedule. Figure 3 illustrates the continuous flow process environment that supports releases. The continuous flow process environment is characterized by:
It is precisely because enterprises have transformed themselves from a project to a release environment that information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained on an enterprise-wide
basis are essential.
There are four major sets of activities within the continuous flow process environment. The user/client is represented at the top in the small rectangular box. Each of the ellipses represents an activity targeted to a specific need. The four basic needs are:
The second characteristic flows from the first. Because these four activities are independent one from the other, the enterprise evolves by means of releases rather than through whole systems. If it evolved through whole systems, then the four activities would be connected either in a waterfall or a spiral approach, and the enterprise would be
evolving through major upgrades to encapsulated functionality within specific business resources. In contrast, the release approach causes coordinated sets of changes to multiple business resources to be placed into production. This causes simultaneous, enterprise-wide capability upgrades across multiple business resources.
Through this continuous-flow process, several unique features are present:
Time allocation: Each task should be paired with an appropriate time frame for completion. You should be aggressive but reasonable with your time allocation in order to ensure not just completion but competent work. For assistance in framing this timescale, use a program such as Microsoft Project, or just create your own Gantt chart – a helpful tool that shows how long it will take to
complete different tasks and in what order the tasks should be finished. Progress: You or a member of your management team needs to be in charge of monitoring each task’s progress and the completion percentage of each objective. When delays occur, try to get to the root of the problem. Did the person responsible drop the ball? Did he or she have too many responsibilities to handle? Did a third party, such as a supplier or the bank, fail to hold up its end of a deal? Adjust your Gantt chart appropriately to account for the delay, and make a note of the previous deadline and the reason it was missed. While the above steps may seem like overkill, the early days of a startup are critically important; it’s a time when good management patterns are set and also probably a lean era when revenue has yet to start rolling in. The more efficiently you start implementing yourbusiness plan, the more likely it is that you will survive this early period.
REFERENCES:
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
http://www.netmba.com/strategy/process/
http://www.tn.gov/finance/oir/planning/ispprocess.pdf
weew! another hard question..
It is very difficult to obtain consensus on a functional decomposition for any one application, much less across all the information systems within the entire corporation. That is because functional analysis requires identification and codification of how activities are performed. In short, the codification of style. This type of analysis leads to conflicts, power struggles, and endless nit-picking. In the end, nobody likes the results. Once, or if ever completed, both IBM and Martin use the resulting ISP as a foundation for identifying information systems. Building the ISP on top of such a foundation of discord cannot possibly result in stable, enduring information systems.For a long time relationship between information system functions and corporate strategy was not of much interest to Top Management of firms. Information Systems were thought to be synonymous with corporate data processing and treated as some back-room operation in support of day-to-day mundane tasks (Rockart, 1979). In the 80’s and 90’s, however, there has been a growing realization of the need to make information systems of strategic importance to an
organization. Consequently, strategic information systems planning (SISP) is a critical issue. In many industry surveys, improved SISP is often mentioned as the most serious challenge facing IS managers (Pavri and Ang, 1995, Beath and Orlikowski, 1994; Martin, 1993; Porter and Miller, 1985). Planning for information systems, as for any other system, begins with the identification of needs. In order to be effective, development of any type of computer-based system should be a response to need--whether at the transaction processing level or at the more complex information and support systems levels. Such planning for information systems is much like strategic planning in management. Objectives, priorities, and authorization for information systems projects need to be formalized. The systems development plan should identify specific projects slated for the future, priorities for each project and for resources, general procedures, and constraints for each application area. The plan must be specific enough to enable understanding of each application and to know where it stands in the order of development. Also the plan should be flexible so that priorities can be adjusted if necessary. King (King, 1995) in his recent article has argued that a strategic capability architecture - a flexible and continuously improving infrastructure of organizational capabilities - is the primary basis for a company's sustainable competitive advantage. He has emphasized the need for continuously updating and improving the strategic capabilities architecture.
Characteristics of a Quality ISP
A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.
Characteristic ------- Description
Timely -------- The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.
Useable ------- The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
Maintainable ------- The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.
Quality -------- While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new
hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.
Reproducible -------- The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.
The ISP Steps
The information systems plan project determines the sequence for implementing specific information systems. The goal of the strategy is to deliver the most valuable business information at the earliest time possible in the most cost-effective manner.
The end product of the information systems project is an information systems plan (ISP). Once deployed, the information systems department can implement the plan with confidence that they are doing the correct information systems project at the right time and in the right sequence. The focus of the ISP is not one information system but
the entire suite of information systems for the enterprise. Once developed, each identified information system is seen in context with all other information systems within the enterprise.
Information Systems Plan Development Steps | ||
| Step | Name | Description |
| 1. | Create the mission model | The mission model, generally shorter than 30 pages presents end-result characterizations of the essential raison d=etre of the enterprise. Missions are strategic, long range, and a-political because they are stripped of the Awho@ and the Ahow.@ |
| 2. | Develop a high-level data model | The high-level data model is an Entity Relationship diagram created to meet the data needs of the mission descriptions. No attributes or keys are created. |
| 3. | Create the resource life cycles (RLC) and their nodes | Resources are drawn from both the mission descriptions and the high level data model. Resources and their life cycles are the names, descriptions and life cycles of the critical assets of the enterprise, which, when exercised achieve one or more aspect of the missions. Each enterprise resource Alives@ through its resource life cycle. |
| 4. | Allocate precedence vectors among RLC nodes | Tied together into a enablement network, the resulting resource life cycle network forms a framework of enterprise=s assets that represent an order and set of inter-resource relationships. The enterprise Alives@ through its resource life cycle network. |
| 5. | Allocate existing information systems and databases to the RLC nodes | The resource life cycle network presents a Alattice-work@onto which the Aas is@ business information systems and databases can be Aattached.@ See for example, the meta model in Figure 2. The Ato-be@ databases and information systems are similarly attached. ADifference projects@ between the Aas-is@ and the Ato-be@ are then formulated. Achievement of all the difference projects is the achievement of the Information Systems Plan. |
| 6. | Allocate standard work break down structures (WBS) to each RLC node | Detailed planning of the Adifference projects@ entails allocating the appropriate canned work breakdown structures and metrics. Employing WBS and metrics from a comprehensive methodology supports project management standardization, repeatability, and self-learning. |
| 7. | Load resources into each WBS node | Once the resources are determined, these are loaded into the project management meta entities of the meta data repository, that is, metrics, project, work plan and deliverables. The meta entities are those inferred by Figure 2. |
| 8. | Schedule the RLC nodes through a project management package facilities. | The entire suite of projects is then scheduled on an enterprise-wide basis. The PERT chart used by project management is the APERT@ chart represented by the Resource Life Cycle enablement network. |
| 9. | Produce and review of the ISP | The scheduled result is predicable: Too long, too costly, and too ambitious. At that point, the real work starts: paring down the suite of projects to a realistic set within time and budget. Because of the meta data environment (see Figure 1), the integrated project management meta data (see Figure 2), and because all projects are configured against fundamental business-rationale based designs, the results of the inevitable trade-offs can be set against business basics. Although the process is painful, the results can be justified and rationalized. |
| 10. | Execute and adjust the ISP through time. | As the ISP is set into execution, technology changes occur that affect resource loadings. In this case, only steps 6-9 need to be repeated. As work progresses, the underlying meta data built or used in steps 1-5 will also change. Because a quality ISP is Aautomated@ the recasting of the ISP should only take a week or less. |
Executive and Adjusting the ISP Through Time
IT projects are accomplished within distinct development environments. The two most common are: discrete project and release. The discrete project environment is typified by completely encapsulated projects accomplished through a water-fall methodology.
In release environments, there are a number of different projects underway by different organizations and staff of varying skill levels. Once a large number of projects are underway, the ability of the enterprise to know about and manage all the different projects degrades
rapidly. That is because the project management environment has been transformed from discrete encapsulated projects into a continuous flow process of product or functionality improvements that are released on a
set time schedule. Figure 3 illustrates the continuous flow process environment that supports releases. The continuous flow process environment is characterized by:
- Multiple, concurrent, but differently scheduled projects against the same enterprise resource
- Single projects that affect multiple enterprise resources
- Projects that develop completely new capabilities, or changes to existing capabilities within enterprise resources
It is precisely because enterprises have transformed themselves from a project to a release environment that information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained on an enterprise-wide
basis are essential.
There are four major sets of activities within the continuous flow process environment. The user/client is represented at the top in the small rectangular box. Each of the ellipses represents an activity targeted to a specific need. The four basic needs are:
- Need Identification
- Need Assessment
- Design
- Deployment
The second characteristic flows from the first. Because these four activities are independent one from the other, the enterprise evolves by means of releases rather than through whole systems. If it evolved through whole systems, then the four activities would be connected either in a waterfall or a spiral approach, and the enterprise would be
evolving through major upgrades to encapsulated functionality within specific business resources. In contrast, the release approach causes coordinated sets of changes to multiple business resources to be placed into production. This causes simultaneous, enterprise-wide capability upgrades across multiple business resources.
Through this continuous-flow process, several unique features are present:
- All four processes are concurrently executing.
- Changes to enterprise resources occur in unison, periodically, and in a very controlled manner.
- The
meta data repository is always contains all the enterprise resource
specifications: current or planned. Simply put, if an enterprise
resource semantic is not within the meta data repository, it is not
enterprise policy. - All changes are planned, scheduled, measured, and subject to auditing, accounting, and traceability.
- All documentation of all types is generated from the meta data repository.
Time allocation: Each task should be paired with an appropriate time frame for completion. You should be aggressive but reasonable with your time allocation in order to ensure not just completion but competent work. For assistance in framing this timescale, use a program such as Microsoft Project, or just create your own Gantt chart – a helpful tool that shows how long it will take to
complete different tasks and in what order the tasks should be finished. Progress: You or a member of your management team needs to be in charge of monitoring each task’s progress and the completion percentage of each objective. When delays occur, try to get to the root of the problem. Did the person responsible drop the ball? Did he or she have too many responsibilities to handle? Did a third party, such as a supplier or the bank, fail to hold up its end of a deal? Adjust your Gantt chart appropriately to account for the delay, and make a note of the previous deadline and the reason it was missed. While the above steps may seem like overkill, the early days of a startup are critically important; it’s a time when good management patterns are set and also probably a lean era when revenue has yet to start rolling in. The more efficiently you start implementing yourbusiness plan, the more likely it is that you will survive this early period.
REFERENCES:
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
http://www.netmba.com/strategy/process/
http://www.tn.gov/finance/oir/planning/ispprocess.pdf
Assignment #2
1.What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? (at least 2000 words)
Let me first define what business plan is based on my research.
A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.
Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to bemeasured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.
Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.
For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.
Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others.I t can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."
Next i will define what is Information System based on my references.
An information System plan is a a process for developing a strategy and plans for aligning information systems with the business
strategies of an organization. The systems planning function of the life cycle seeks to identify and prioritize those technologies and applications that will return the most value to the business. Synonyms include strategic systems planning and Information resource management. Study the Business Mission with Information System Although many businesses haven't formally documented their mission, they all have one. If information systems are to truly return value to the business, they need to directly address that mission. Thus, the first phase of systems planning is to study the business mission.
Some make a clear distinction between information systems, ICT and business processes. Information systems are distinct from information technology in that an information system is typically seen as having an ICT component. Information systems are also different from business processes. Information systems help to control the performance of business processes.
Alter argues for an information system as a special type of work system. A work system is a system in which humans and/or machines perform work using resources (including ICT) to produce specific products and/or services for customers. An information system is a work system whose activities are devoted to processing (capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating and displaying)information.
Part of the difficulty in defining the term information system is due to vagueness in the definition of related terms such as system and information. Beynon-Davies argues for a clearer terminology based in systemics and semiotics. He defines an information system as an example of a system concerned with the manipulation of signs. An information system is a type of socio-technical system. An information system is a mediating construct between actions and technology.
Information System Planning (ISP) is a structured approach developed by IBM to assist organizations in establishing a plan to satisfy
their short and long term information requirements. The ISP methodology was implemented at Tel-Aviv University. A comprehensive plan for the development of a Management Information System (MIS) was derived. This paper presents a review of the process by which the plan was obtained, a discussion of the methodology, and its ramifications. information system is frequently used to refer to the interaction between people, processes, data and technology. In this sense, the term is used to refer not only to the information and communication technology (ICT) an organization uses, but also to the way in which people interact with this technology in support of business processes .
REFERENCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
Let me first define what business plan is based on my research.
A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.
Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to bemeasured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.
Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.
For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.
Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others.I t can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."
Next i will define what is Information System based on my references.
An information System plan is a a process for developing a strategy and plans for aligning information systems with the business
strategies of an organization. The systems planning function of the life cycle seeks to identify and prioritize those technologies and applications that will return the most value to the business. Synonyms include strategic systems planning and Information resource management. Study the Business Mission with Information System Although many businesses haven't formally documented their mission, they all have one. If information systems are to truly return value to the business, they need to directly address that mission. Thus, the first phase of systems planning is to study the business mission.
Some make a clear distinction between information systems, ICT and business processes. Information systems are distinct from information technology in that an information system is typically seen as having an ICT component. Information systems are also different from business processes. Information systems help to control the performance of business processes.
Alter argues for an information system as a special type of work system. A work system is a system in which humans and/or machines perform work using resources (including ICT) to produce specific products and/or services for customers. An information system is a work system whose activities are devoted to processing (capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating and displaying)information.
Part of the difficulty in defining the term information system is due to vagueness in the definition of related terms such as system and information. Beynon-Davies argues for a clearer terminology based in systemics and semiotics. He defines an information system as an example of a system concerned with the manipulation of signs. An information system is a type of socio-technical system. An information system is a mediating construct between actions and technology.
Information System Planning (ISP) is a structured approach developed by IBM to assist organizations in establishing a plan to satisfy
their short and long term information requirements. The ISP methodology was implemented at Tel-Aviv University. A comprehensive plan for the development of a Management Information System (MIS) was derived. This paper presents a review of the process by which the plan was obtained, a discussion of the methodology, and its ramifications. information system is frequently used to refer to the interaction between people, processes, data and technology. In this sense, the term is used to refer not only to the information and communication technology (ICT) an organization uses, but also to the way in which people interact with this technology in support of business processes .
REFERENCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
Assignment #1
Think about yourself worthy to be called as IT professional, how do you see yourself 10 years from now, what are your strategies to get there? (at least 3000 words)
what a tough question! weew.
As i was thinking for the answer in this assignment, i suddenly pondered and asked myself lots of questions like \"nganong nag IT man ko na dili man ko hawud mu program?\", \" nganong kani man akong course?\", \"kanus-a pa kaya ko mu-graduate?\", .. sigh!
10 years from now, i will be called as an IT professional. I might be working as an IT consultant in the largest company in the Philippines, or i might be developing a system..sabi nga nila \" LIBRE ANG MANGARAP\".
To be able to achieve these goals i will surely undergo lots of burdens or should i say headaches??
Some basic and easy ways on how to become successful in your life or otherwise, ways for personal development are:
1. You need to relax
Relaxation exercises range from traditional forms of meditation that have theirroots in Eastern cultures to modern systematic relaxation exercisesthat have been scientifically developed and are more suited to the
western way of thinking. They help to reduce the intensity of stresssymptoms (headaches, migraines, anxiety, insomnia, etc.) but also inpreparing the individual to recognize the symptoms from their initialstages. Their common characteristic is that the person with constantpractice can acquire the habit of thinking and acting more calm and
functional. Acting more calm can help you think and concentrate betterand will help you to become successful in your life.
2. You need to use your time efficiently
People complain that they do not have enough time available. But more oftenthe problem is not the time in quantity but in the way we manage our time. Important elements in proper time management are the do-to lists, prioritization, and the ability to focus on one task at a time, the ability to recognise and set targets. With proper time management you
will have more time to think and plan how to become successful in your life.
3. Demanding Behaviour
Demand behaviour techniques aim to strengthen the capacity of individuals todefend their rights without denying the rights of others and without being aggressive or insulting. In this way you can face the appropriateinterpersonal relations and also to learn how to say "no" whereappropriate and when necessary, to express your feelings rather thanbeen passive and inactive. Learning to sometimes say no will help youdecide what is best for you and you can change your life by being
selective on what to do and on what no to do.
4. You need to learn how to solve your problems
Beingable to solve your problems is a major step on becoming successful.Problems are present in daily life and if you find ways to solve them then this will really change your life.
Some techniques for problem management are:
1) Definition of the problem
2) Alternative solutions to the problem
3) Choosing the right strategy to address the problem
4) Proper design of the selected strategy (where, when, how)
5) Implementation of the solution
6) Evaluation The problems never stop! The basic rule is
this: instead of facing problems «automatically» with our usual styleand approach, to begin to look reasonable and separately each problem,create alternatives and choose the best solution, according to the importance of the problem and our experience.
5. You need to be dynamic
In order to have a positive and dynamic presence you need to be able tofrankly and directly express your feelings and ideas, both negative and positive. To do this you must create a good contact with yourself and with your feelings!In conclusion, it must be noted that there are a lot of ways on how to become successful. This tips only server as
a quick guide to help you get started. The whole process is difficult and sometimes it takes time. This is not always something bad. Instead, it helps us be alert, can warn us against possible dangers and helps us
prepare better.
“Want to be successful?”
Most of us already have good character traits which we can develop over time. Have you ever wondered whether or not you have the character traits to become successful? We have read about people who became successful in different areas
in life but we are not aware on how to reach success as being a professional. Well, success takes hard work and people who are willing to do it.
Here are traits in order to become successful professionals:
·
They enjoytheir work. A sense of purpose is on them and acquiring time of their lives doing
their job.
·
Successfulpeople have a positive attitude and plenty of confidence. They never seem to doubt that they will attain andwhen they do, it contributes more strongly to their self-esteem.
They use negative occurrence to discover theirstrong point.
what a tough question! weew.
As i was thinking for the answer in this assignment, i suddenly pondered and asked myself lots of questions like \"nganong nag IT man ko na dili man ko hawud mu program?\", \" nganong kani man akong course?\", \"kanus-a pa kaya ko mu-graduate?\", .. sigh!
10 years from now, i will be called as an IT professional. I might be working as an IT consultant in the largest company in the Philippines, or i might be developing a system..sabi nga nila \" LIBRE ANG MANGARAP\".
To be able to achieve these goals i will surely undergo lots of burdens or should i say headaches??Some basic and easy ways on how to become successful in your life or otherwise, ways for personal development are:
1. You need to relax
Relaxation exercises range from traditional forms of meditation that have theirroots in Eastern cultures to modern systematic relaxation exercisesthat have been scientifically developed and are more suited to the
western way of thinking. They help to reduce the intensity of stresssymptoms (headaches, migraines, anxiety, insomnia, etc.) but also inpreparing the individual to recognize the symptoms from their initialstages. Their common characteristic is that the person with constantpractice can acquire the habit of thinking and acting more calm and
functional. Acting more calm can help you think and concentrate betterand will help you to become successful in your life.
2. You need to use your time efficiently
People complain that they do not have enough time available. But more oftenthe problem is not the time in quantity but in the way we manage our time. Important elements in proper time management are the do-to lists, prioritization, and the ability to focus on one task at a time, the ability to recognise and set targets. With proper time management you
will have more time to think and plan how to become successful in your life.
3. Demanding Behaviour
Demand behaviour techniques aim to strengthen the capacity of individuals todefend their rights without denying the rights of others and without being aggressive or insulting. In this way you can face the appropriateinterpersonal relations and also to learn how to say "no" whereappropriate and when necessary, to express your feelings rather thanbeen passive and inactive. Learning to sometimes say no will help youdecide what is best for you and you can change your life by being
selective on what to do and on what no to do.
4. You need to learn how to solve your problems
Beingable to solve your problems is a major step on becoming successful.Problems are present in daily life and if you find ways to solve them then this will really change your life.
Some techniques for problem management are:
1) Definition of the problem
2) Alternative solutions to the problem
3) Choosing the right strategy to address the problem
4) Proper design of the selected strategy (where, when, how)
5) Implementation of the solution
6) Evaluation The problems never stop! The basic rule is
this: instead of facing problems «automatically» with our usual styleand approach, to begin to look reasonable and separately each problem,create alternatives and choose the best solution, according to the importance of the problem and our experience.
5. You need to be dynamic
In order to have a positive and dynamic presence you need to be able tofrankly and directly express your feelings and ideas, both negative and positive. To do this you must create a good contact with yourself and with your feelings!In conclusion, it must be noted that there are a lot of ways on how to become successful. This tips only server as
a quick guide to help you get started. The whole process is difficult and sometimes it takes time. This is not always something bad. Instead, it helps us be alert, can warn us against possible dangers and helps us
prepare better.
“Want to be successful?”
Most of us already have good character traits which we can develop over time. Have you ever wondered whether or not you have the character traits to become successful? We have read about people who became successful in different areas
in life but we are not aware on how to reach success as being a professional. Well, success takes hard work and people who are willing to do it.
Here are traits in order to become successful professionals:
·
They enjoytheir work. A sense of purpose is on them and acquiring time of their lives doing
their job.
·
Successfulpeople have a positive attitude and plenty of confidence. They never seem to doubt that they will attain andwhen they do, it contributes more strongly to their self-esteem.
They use negative occurrence to discover theirstrong point.
·
They are influential,disciplined goal setters. Most hard workers have an apparent idea what they want out of life.
Integrity andthey help others succeed.
Integrity andthey help others succeed.
·
They are determined.They are persisted and kept improving until they got the money.
They take risks. Few people ever get to the top without sticking their necks out - and when successful people make mistakes, they shrug them off and go on with their lives.
They have good communication skills and problem solving skills. They actively seek suggestions from others although
they already come up an answer for a particular problem.
They take risks. Few people ever get to the top without sticking their necks out - and when successful people make mistakes, they shrug them off and go on with their lives.
They have good communication skills and problem solving skills. They actively seek suggestions from others although
they already come up an answer for a particular problem.
·
They surround themselves with capable, responsible and encouraging people. No matter how smart or creative a person might be, he must have others he can trust.
They are healthy, have high energy levels and schedule time to renew themselves.
In combination these traits work together and give a huge advantage to successful people. Because of this they can easily
and wisely respond to change. Because of strong personal relationships, goodwill and good advisers are present on them when there are things that are going bad. These traits can be learned and genetic.
The Importance of Planning
No one wants to think about a time when they might need long-term
care. So planning ahead for this possibility often gets put off. Most people first learn about long-term care when they or a loved one need care. Then their options are often limited by lack of information, the
immediate need for services, and insufficient resources to pay for preferred services. Planning ahead allows you to have more control over your future.
Why Plan Ahead for Long-Term Care?
Planning ahead for long-term care is important because there is a good chance you will need some long-term care services if you live beyond the age of 65. About 70 percent of people over age 65 require some services, and the likelihood of needing care increases as you age.
Planning ahead helps you understand what service options are available in your community, what special conditions may apply for
receiving services, for example, age or other eligibility criteria, what services cost, and what payment options – public and private –
apply. Having this information helps ensure you will have a range of options when you need long-term care, and makes it more likely that you will have more choice and control over where and how you receive
services.
Planning ahead is important because the cost of long-term care services often exceeds what the average person can pay from income and other resources. By planning ahead, you may be able to save your assets
and income for uses other than long-term care, including preserving the quality of life for your spouse or other loved ones. With planning, there is a greater likelihood of being able to leave an estate to your heirs, because you are less likely to use up your financial resources paying for care.
Planning ahead also means less emotional and financial stress on you and your family. It can provide a way to involve your family in
decisions without depending on them to bear the entire burden alone. Finally, for many people, one of the most important advantages of planning ahead is to ensure greater independence should you need care.
Your choices for receiving care outside of a facility and being able to stay at home or receive services in the community for as long as possible are greater if you have planned ahead.
Why People Don't Plan Ahead
There are many reasons why people don't plan ahead for long-term care. These include the natural tendency to avoid thinking about
becoming dependent on others for your care, misinformation about the risks of needing care, and lack of knowledge about the cost of care and payment options.
Most people don't like to think about getting older, developing a disability, becoming less independent, or needing help with personal
care. Many people don't realize that their chance of needing long-term care by the time they turn 65 is as high as 70 percent.
People commonly misunderstand how expensive long-term care is, and how it is paid for. Consumer surveys have shown that many individuals don't realize that health insurance, Medicare, and/or disability coverage do not pay for most long-term care services. Medicaid pays for some long-term care services, but only if you qualify for the program
because you have limited income and financial resources. Some people find it too difficult to raise these subjects with their
loved ones, making it difficult to explore and define their plans. Adult children often feel like they are patronizing their parents if
they raise the subject or they are afraid of giving the impression that they might not want to provide care if it is needed. Parents often don't want to make adult children uncomfortable or to discuss details
of their finances with them. Finally, some people realize it is important to plan, but don't know
how to go about it. The best way to begin is with small and easy steps.
Even just talking with your loved ones is a great first-step!
You can start planning by reviewing the information on this website and using the resources supplied, including the
Own Your Future Planning Kit.
What exactly do we mean when we say “planning?” Below are some examples of how people might plan for long-term care before they need care. While these are fictional illustrations, they represent a variety
of real-life situations. of people who planned ahead for their long-term care needs. Each person
talks about a different planning option and the reasons for making that choice. Listening to their considerations and decisions can help you think through what might be best for you. If you are unable to listen
to these stories it may be because your computer does not have the necessary components that allow the audio to work. You can get these stories when you order the Own Your Future Long-Term Care Planning Kit
that includes a CD with the real-life planning stories. The people described here are composites drawn from a variety of
real-life scenarios; they illustrate the range of personal circumstances people might find themselves in and the different forms
that “long-term care planning” might take. There is no “one-size-fits-all” plan. As you read these examples, think about your
own circumstances and the types of options you might want to consider.
More information about Private Financing Options is available in the Paying for Long-Term Care section of this web site.
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory
factors), and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).
Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:
- "What do we do?"
- "For whom do we do it?"
- "How do we excel?"
In business strategic planning, the third question is better phrased "How can we beat or avoid competition?".
In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more -typically 3 to 5 years, although some extend their vision to 20 years.
In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic
plan." It is also true that strategic planning may be a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company; however, strategic
planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order to plan your organizational strategy. Therefore, strategic innovation and tinkering with the 'strategic plan' have to be a cornerstone strategy for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.
Vision: Defines the desired or intended future state of an organization or enterprise in terms of its fundamental objective and/or strategic direction. Vision is a long term view, sometimes describing a view of how the organization would like the world in which it operates to be. For example a charity working with the poor might have a vision statement which read "A world without poverty" Mission: Defines the fundamental purpose of an organization or an enterprise, basically describing why it exists and what it does to
achieve its Vision. A corporate Mission can last for many years, or for the life of the organization. It is not an objective with a timeline, but rather the overall goal that is accomplished over the years as objectives are achieved that are aligned with the corporate mission. Values: Beliefs that are shared among the stakeholders of an organization. Values drive an organization's culture and priorities.
Organizations sometimes summarize goals and objectives into a mission statement and/or a vision statement Others begin with a vision and mission and use them to formulate goals and objectives. While the existence of a shared mission is extremely useful, many strategy specialists question the requirement for a written mission statement. However, there are many models of strategic planning that start with mission statements, so it is useful to examine them here.
- A Mission statement tells you the fundamental purpose
of the organization. It defines the customer and the critical
processes. It informs you of the desired level of performance.
- A Vision statement outlines what the organization
wants to be, or how it wants the world in which it operates to be. It
concentrates on the future. It is a source of inspiration. It provides
clear decision-making criteria.
managers, employees and sometimes even customers. Statements create a sense of direction and opportunity. They both are an essential part of the strategy-making process.
Many people mistake vision statement for mission statement, and sometimes one is simply used as a longer term version of the other. The Vision should describe why it is important to achieve the Mission. A Vision statement defines the purpose or broader goal for being in existence or in the business and can remain the same for decades if crafted well. A Mission statement is more specific to what the enterprise can achieve itself. Vision should describe what will be achieved in the wider sphere if the organization and others are successful in achieving their individual missions. A mission statement can resemble a vision statement in a few
companies, but that can be a grave mistake. It can confuse people. The mission statement can galvanize the people to achieve defined objectives, even if they are stretch objectives, provided it can be
elucidated in SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound) terms. A mission statement provides a path to realize the vision in line with its values. These statements have a direct bearing on the bottom line and success of the organization.
Which comes first? The mission statement or the vision statement? That depends. If you have a new start up business, new program or plan to re engineer your current services, then the vision will guide the mission statement and the rest of the strategic plan. If you have an established business where the mission is established, then many times, the mission guides the vision statement and the rest of the strategic plan. Either way, you need to know your fundamental purpose - the mission, your current situation in terms of internal resources and capabilities (strengths and/or weaknesses) and external conditions (opportunities and/or threats), and where you want to go - the vision for the future. It's important that you keep the end or desired result in sight from the start.
Features of an effective vision statement include:
- Clarity and lack of ambiguity
- Vivid and clear picture
- Description of a bright future
- Memorable and engaging wording
- Realistic aspirations
- Alignment with organizational values and culture
members inside the organization interpret their mission statement. The external assessment — which includes all of the businesses stakeholders — is valuable since it offers a different perspective. These discrepancies between these two assessments can give insight on the organization's mission statement effectiveness. Another approach to defining Vision and Mission is to pose two questions. Firstly, "What aspirations does the organization have for the world in which it operates and has some influence over?", and following on from this, "What can (and /or does) the organization do or contribute to fulfill those aspirations?". The succinct answer to the first question provides the basis of the Vision Statement. The answer to the second question determines the Mission Statement.
REFERENCES:
http://www.longtermcare.gov/LTC/Main_Site/Planning_LTC/Importance/index.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning
http://hubpages.com/hub/aaaaaaaaaaaaaa
http://ezinearticles.com/?5-Ways-on-How-to-Become-Successful-in-Your-Life&id=2022098
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