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Management Information System

Learning Experience Paper


-A course by

IT fails and may not increase firms productivity
These are not the words one expects to hear in the first session of a course which was
supposedly about IT. The instructor justified these words by giving a long two page list of
examples citing failed IT implementation projects in big multinational organizations which
have led to losses worth millions of dollars. He also showed us a graph correlating IT
expenditure with productivity increases in which it was clearly shown that big expenditure
in IT may not lead to big increase in productivity; in fact productivity may actually come
down after IT deployment due to organizational slack.
The instructor further challenged another common assumption by paraphrasing the
golden words of Nicholas Carr-IT is a commodity, it cant bring any competitive
advantage. This was mainly because the build-up phase of IT was almost over; now IT is
comparable to utilities like electricity and water. By end of first session, we all had more
questions than answers.
The objective of the course subsequently became clear. It was meant to instruct not
preach. To make us use our own judgment rather than following a bandwagon. IT was not
something magical anymore, but just another important part of day to day business
activities. Caution and Prudence are essential in making decisions related to IT. I realized
that Nic Carrs guidelines as mentioned below, was one to live by.
Spend less (IT is a commodity)
Follow dont lead (Reduce risk)
Focus on vulnerabilities (Cede control over IT and focus on resulting vulnerabilities)
All these does not mean that IT is worthless, but that IT should be used efficiently so as
to gain maximum return on ones investment. Cautiously justified spending in IT can lead
to a large increase in business value. The professor illustrated this by giving the example
of Zara, and the success it achieved in the fashion industry by leveraging technology.
In subsequent sessions the focus shifted from IT to IS. Information System is a sum total
of Hardware, Software, Data, Procedures, and People in an organization. By coordinating
organizations efforts in all these spheres, the overall productivity can be immensely
increased leading to substantial profits. We further learnt how we could leverage
information system in an organization to gain competitive advantage. The Porters five
force model given on the next page illustrates the means of creating competitive
advantage in an industry.


Figure 1 Porter's five force model
The above model shows how one could use IT to change the positioning of the business
in an industry. The model assists the management in taking strategic initiatives that will
make the organization more competitive.
Streamlining processes is a very important step in increasing productivity. Tough
problems can often be solved by simply optimizing the underlying process structure.
Professor Agrahari repeatedly asked us never to shoehorn IT into a process, but to first
analyze whether the problems could be solved without IT implementation. The benefits
must justify IT investments that went into optimization.
The course did indeed had some concepts which were familiar to students who had some
experience in the IT industry. I had no such prior experience; yet I never felt like a fish
out of water owing to the simplistic ways in which the professor taught them. By the end
of course we were all adept at making data flow, entity-relationship and star schema
diagrams which enabled us to analyze the relationship between actors and processes in
a very detailed way. The analyzing was followed by implementation.
The theoretical frameworks were complemented by case studies which enabled us to test
our knowledge in real world scenarios. The cases like CVS Pharmacies, Amazon Web
services, Facebook, Harrahs entertainment, etc. were enjoyable to read and solve. The
customized textbook and comprehensive polycopy articles served as an effective source
of knowledge.
And lets not forget the numerous guest lectures. It was always a memorable experience
when topics in course were taught by specialists in that field. Who better to talk about
ecommerce and revenue models than Mr. Mrugendra Shintre, the person managing
Amazons appstore content operations? And the data analytics sessions were highly
enriched by presence of Mr. Rajiv Pratap, the cofounder of Abzooba (and his stories about
his involvement with the NBA teams).

The course was successful in informing us about the
technologies like cloud and big data, which we had
heard about, but had no specific knowledge about
their relevance in the business world. The course also
made us aware of the ways in which current social
trends can be leveraged to obtain new customers
and increase profits. On the other hand, the session
on privacy made us aware about the impact on
business due to breach of privacy. Many more
concepts and theories were discussed in the class
aimed at making us better managers. After attending
30 hours of the course, I can safely say that the
course succeeded in its objective of preparing us to
be an effective exploiter of IT/IS for business value
and strategic benefits.

The course is excellent as it is; but if I had to make some recommendations I would
request the instructor to include more current content in course pertaining to topics like
Technology in mobile world (is mobile penetration changing businesses)
Machine to Machine (M2M)
IT/IS in the Indian context (differences and similarities)
Impact on environment, etc
As an after note, I would also like to request to make the midterm and end term exams a
mixture of case and theory questions so that a lot more concepts can be tested. Case
studies are often fun to solve but they are restrictive in the number of concepts being
tested at a time.
Overall, I would say that attending the course was a very enjoyable experience. It enabled
me, a student not having an IT background, to learn a lot about new trends in technology
and how they can be exploited in the business environment. I am sure that this course
will have a lot of relevance in my future endeavors in the business world.
-Anurag Lale
PGP29078, Section B

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