Steps in order to expedite the implementation of the IS plan

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. To be invited in a university to prepare an ISP is great opportunity and at the same time needs a thorough analysis to address the problem and to be fit in the institutions concerns. Preparing an Information Systems Plan for the university is a very challenging task because a lot of things are to be considered when we talk of Information System Planning. 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. It has emphasized the need for continuously updating and improving the strategic capabilities architecture. It has been discussed in various studies by most experts in the past years until now that strategic planning for the business operations of an organization is a very crucial part in targeting towards the success of the company. An information system contains so much of the essential data and gathered facts about the company that it is considered as a critical unit inside the company. That is why planning which is prepared primarily for the business operations and processes alone as most people perceive it to be, also has to be tactically deliberated for the information system (IS). Some characteristics of strategic IS planning are: • Main task: strategic/competitive advantage, linkage to business strategy. • Key objective: pursuing opportunities, integrating IS and business strategies • Direction from: executives/senior management and users, coalition of users/management and information systems. • Main approach: entrepreneurial (user innovation), multiple (bottom-up development, top down analysis, etc.) at the same time. Information System Plan An Information System Plan or ISP, on the other hand, is basically a plan concentrated on aligning the information systems of an organization to its business plan as a whole. An information system is comprised of the hardware, software and peopleware of an organization. Usually, the term information system is related to using technology as a crucial part of an organization. The term is also used to identify the computer-based system that an organization is using. 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. The information systems planning refers to the process of the translation of strategic and organizational goals into systems development plan and initiativesFor example, part of the information systems plan for a luxury car company might be to build a new product tracking system to meet the organizational goal of improving customer service. Proper information systems planning ensures that specific systems development objectives support organizational goals. One of the primary benefits of information systems planning is that it provides a long-range view of information technology use in the organization. The information systems plan provides guidance on how the information systems infrastructure of the organization should be developed over time. The plan serves as a road map indicating the direction and rationale of systems development. Another benefit of information systems planning is that it ensures better use of information systems resources, including funds, information systems personnel, and time for scheduling specific projects. Overall objectives of information systems are usually distilled from the relevant aspects of the organization's business strategic plan. Information systems projects can be identified either directly from the objectives determined in the first step or may be identified by others, such as managers within the various functional areas. Setting priorities and selecting projects typically requires the involvement and approval of senior management. Once specific projects have been selected within the overall context of a strategic plan for the business and the systems area, an information systems plan can be developed. The plan contains a statement of organizational goals, identifies the project objectives, and specifies how information technology supports the attainment of the organizational goals. When objectives are set, planners consider the resources necessary to complete the projects including equipment (computers, network servers, printers, and other equipment and devices), software, employees (systems analysts, programmers, users and others), expert advice (specialists and other consultants), and so on. The information systems plan lays out specific target dates and milestones that can be used later to monitor the plan’s progress in terms of how many objectives were actually attained in the time frame specified in the plan. The plan also includes the key management decisions concerning hardware acquisition; structure of authority, data, and hardware; telecommunications; and required organizational change. Organizational changes are usually described, including management and employee training requirements; recruiting efforts; changes in business processes; and changes in authority, structure, or management practice. As part of translating the corporate strategic plan into the information systems plan, many companies seek systems development project that will provide a competitive advantage. This usually requires creative and critical analysis. Creative analysis involves the investigation of new approaches to existing problems. By looking at problems in new or different ways and by introducing innovative methods to solve them, many firms have gained a competitive advantage. Typically, these new solutions are inspired by people and things not directly related to the problem. Critical analysis requires unbiased and careful questioning of whether system elements are related in the most effective or efficient ways. It involves considering the establishment of new or different relationships among system elements and perhaps introducing new elements into the system. The impact a particular system has on an organization's ability to meet its goals determines the true value of that system to the organization. While all systems should support business goals, some systems are more pivotal in continued operations and goal attainment than others. These systems are called mission-critical systems. An order processing TPS, for example, is usually considered mission-critical. Without it, few organizations could continue daily activities, and they clearly would not meet the goals. The goals defined for an organization will in turn define the objectives set for a system. A manufacturing plant, for example, might determine that minimizing the total cost of owning and operating its equipment is a critical success factor (CSF) in meeting a production volume and profit goals. This CSF would be converted into specific objectives for a proposed plant equipment maintenance system. One specific objective might be to alert maintenance planner when a piece of equipment is due for routine preventive maintenance (e.g., cleaning and lubrication). Another objective might be to alert the maintenance planners when the necessary cleaning materials, lubrication oils, or spare parts inventory levels are below specified limits. These objectives could be accomplished either through automatic stock replenishment via electronic data interchange or through the use of exception reports. Regardless of the particular system development effort, the development process should define a system with specific performance and cost objectives. The success or failure of the systems development effort will be measured against these objectives. Performance objectives measure the extent to which a system performs as desired. Is the system generating the right information for a value-added business process? Is the output generated in a form that is usable and easily understood? Is the system generating output in time to meet organizational goals and operational objectives? Cost objectives attempt to balance the benefits of achieving performance goals with all costs associated with the system. Balancing performance and cost objectives within the overall framework of organizational goals can be challenging. Systems development objectives are important, however, in that they allow an organization to effectively and efficiently allocate resources and measure the success of a systems development effort. In order to develop an effective information systems plan, the organization must have a clear understanding of both its long- and short-term information requirements. Two principal methodologies for establishing the essential information requirements of the organization as a whole are enterprise analysis and critical success factors. Enterprise analysis argues that the firm's information requirements can only be understood by looking at the entire organization in terms of organizational units, functions, processes, and data elements. Enterprise analysis can help identify the key entities and attributes of the organization's data. The central method used in the enterprise analysis approach is to take a large sample of managers and ask them how they use information, where they get the information, what their environments are like, what their objectives are, how they make decisions, and what their data needs are. The results of this large survey of managers are aggregated into subunits, functions, processes, and data matrices. Data elements are organized into logical application groups--groups of data elements that support related sets of organizational processes. The weakness of enterprise analysis is that it produces an enormous amount of data that is expensive to collect and difficult to analyze. Most of the interviews are conducted with senior or middle managers, but there is little effort to collect information from clerical workers and supervisory managers. Moreover, the questions frequently focus not on management's critical objectives and where information is needed but rather on what existing information is used. The result is a tendency to automate whatever exists. But in many instances, entirely new approaches to how business is conducted are needed, and these needs are not addressed. The strategic analysis or critical success factors approach argues that an organization's information requirements are determined by a small number of critical success factors (CSFs) of managers. If these goals can be attained, the firm's or organization's success is assured. CSFs are shaped by the industry, the firm, then manager, and the broader environment. An important premise of the strategic analysis approach is that there are a small number of objectives that managers can easily identify and on which information systems can focus. The strength of the CSF method is that it produces a smaller data set to analyze than does enterprise analysis. The CSF method takes into account the changing environment with which organizations and managers must deal. This method explicitly asks managers to look at the environment and consider how their analysis of it shapes their information needs. Unlike enterprise analysis, the CSF method focuses organizational attention on how information should be handled. The method's primary weakness is that the aggregation process and the analysis of the data are art forms. There is no particularly rigorous way in which individual CSFs can be aggregated into a clear company pattern. Second, there is often confusion among interviewees (and interviewers) between individual and organizational CSFs. They are not necessarily the same. What can be critical to a manager may not be important for the organization. Moreover, this method is clearly biased toward top managers because they are generally the only ones interviewed. WHAT IS SISP METHODOLOGY? Methodology is generally a guideline for solving a problem, with specific components such as phases, tasks, methods, techniques and tools. Methodology benefits managers by providing information to plan, review and control projects. Generally methodologies are comprised of the following four elements: providing an opinion of what needs to be solved, defining techniques on what has to be done and when to do it, advising on how to manage the quality of deliverables or products, as well as providing a toolkit to facilitate the process. An SISP methodology can be viewed as an abstract system design that functions to transform organizational inputs (such as business strategy, assessment of current IS environment, and organizational influence) into an IS Strategic Plan as an output. When executing the SISP process, the abstract system design is applied in the context of multiple human activity systems (HAS) involving the SISP stakeholders (developers and clients). SISP methodologies can be categorized into two categories; namely, general and specific-tocontext methodologies. Three contexts were analyzed in the latter category; namely, business context, government context and educational context. While there are numerous SISP methodologies, approaches and frameworks, the majority is oriented for commercial and production-based organizations, and is not suitable to guide SISP formulation in service-oriented industries and government. The business strategy model and a university strategy model are different in terms of time frame, consensus, value system, customers and context. Thus, business-context SISP methodologies are not suitable to guide SISP formulation in public educational institutions and government agencies because they focus primarily on the alignment of ICT strategies to the business objective of profits and competition. Government agencies and PIHLs focus on the formulation of ICT strategies to improve service delivery to the citizen and nation rather than profitability and competition. Although many SISP methodologies provide an overview of how to develop an SISP, the methods, techniques and tools to guide the SISP formulation process are not specified. The SISP initiation approach, the SISP team, and the set of tasks, activities and tools are not suited to the educational institution environment. Thus, the primary objective of the ISP-IPTA Methodology design was to document objectives and tasks in every phase, as well as the methods and techniques that can be used to implement the tasks. The methods and techniques are complimented by an automated toolkit that that can facilitate the SISP formulation process. Information systems are important tools for effectively meeting organizational objectives. Readily available, complete, and accurate information is essential for making informed and timely decisions. Being unable to obtain needed data, wading through unneeded data, or inefficiently processing needed data wastes resources. The organization must identify its information needs on the basis of a systematic identification and analysis of its mission and functions to be performed, who is to perform them, the information and supporting data needed to perform the functions, and the processes needed to most usefully structure the information. Successful information system development and acquisition must include a rigorous and disciplined process of data gathering, evaluation, and analysis prior to committing significant financial and human resources to any information system development. While implementing such an approach may not preclude all information system acquisition problems, it should produce detailed knowledge of organizational missions and operations, user information needs and alternatives to address those needs, and an open and flexible architecture that is expandable or that can be upgraded to meet future needs. The purpose and use of information system in the beginning was targeted towards reducing manual labor and increasing efficiency and thus reducing cost of doing business. Cost has thus been the ‘primal instinct’ justification for the usage of Information system in companies. Management seems to still use this justification even in today’s day and age because the IT salesman still thinks it’s the best and only way to get management buy-in. Moreover, as most other rationales used for IS have proved hard to sell, both the IT sales teams and their customers find a comfort zone in cost savings. This could also be because both sides (from all their previous experiences) are convinced of their failure before they even start out on a different track. The past experiences, in most cases were times they tried, half heartedly probably, without enough experience and failed. These failures have resulted in the baby being thrown out along with the dirty water. Systems are usually laid out at different levels. The lowest rung in the ladder is taken by the TRANSACTIONAL information system. These are ones like ‘Pont Of Sales’ systems used in the store counters, or book keeping systems mentioned earlier. These are systems targeting cost reduction, capturing repetitive activities and assisting the human using it to become more efficient in handling larger volumes of transactions. The OPERATIONAL or operation support systems are usually build combining several Transactional systems in a logical sequence so as to make the operation of any particular division/functional group more efficient. Classic example is the integration of Accounting, Payroll, HR, and Inventory, Production etc. to form a MRP or ERP system. Or POS, Customer Account Info, Accounting, etc. linked together to form a CRM system. A very critical component for operational systems is their reporting systems. They provide the reports that combine and merge the reports/information from several transactional systems to provide reports to help executives manage operations in a synchronized and optimized manner. Thus, they act as enablers and help managers to keep track of various parameters so as to keep the whole operation smooth and efficient. STRATEGIC systems are little more complicated. They cross the regular operational boundaries and become tools that form the basis for senior management to plan, execute and monitor the organization. They help in keeping track of the Key Performance Indicators by combining and logically sorting information from various Operational and Transactional systems all across the company and at times combining it with external information from sources like the stock market, industry sources, partners and even competitors. Designing STRATEGIC information system requires a thought process of a ‘good’ CEO with an understanding of the business from the top, various information sources present in the company and outside in platforms that need to be collated, combined and extracted into a tool to help run the company in a more informed and responsive manner. Characteristics of a Quality ISP A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are as follows. 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 should 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. Whenever a proposal for the development of an ISP is created it must be assessed against these five characteristics. If any fail or not addressed in an optimum way, the entire set of funds for the development of an ISP is risked. There are a number of important steps that have been identified which can maximize the chances of a smooth transition and implementation. 1. PROBLEM RECOGNITION Senior management must recognize that resistance to change is a potential problem. There needs to be an acceptance that some time, budget and internal resources should to be allocated to deal with this. 2. CLEAR OBJECTIVES Senior management must have a clearly defined statement of objectives for the system, detailing the expected benefits. Without this it will be impossible to determine whether the implementation is a success from a business perspective. 3. IMPLEMENTATION MANAGER An internal manager should be appointed to co-ordinate the implementation. This person should be given the necessary skills and authority to guide users through the new procedures and promote their adoption of the project portfolio management system. 4. REVIEW PROCEDURES Existing procedures must be understood by all system users and clearly documented. Any proposed changes to these procedures should be highlighted and the benefits detailed and communicated to all system users. 5. INVOLVE ‘EXPERTS’ Highly respected and influential individuals must be involved in the planning process and should be consulted early on in the process so that any valid points they may have can be factored into the final solution. 6. COMMUNICATION All staff and contractors whose work is affected by the new system should be briefed about the objectives of the system, the expected outcomes and the timeline for implementation. It should be made clear at this stage that old systems WILL be removed at a specific time in the future, thereby encouraging everyone to be involved. 7. TRAINING All staff and contractors involved in using the new project portfolio management system should be provided with appropriate training within the context of their roles. This training should also include any new procedures that are to be adopted. Training should not be a one-off event. Staff turnover and new project contractors often results in new users attempting to figure out how a system works and learn on the job. Inevitably some expertise is lost with a change of staff and over time this can degrade the performance of the team. In the long run it is simpler and more cost-effective to have new starters and contractors properly trained, possibly combining this with a refresher course for existing staff. 8. IMPLEMENTATION REVIEW TEAM An internal Implementation Review Team should be established comprising key personnel who will be involved with the new system e.g. project managers and resource/line managers. Weekly meetings, chaired by the Implementation Manager, should be held during the implementation process to highlight any perceived problems and discuss resolutions. 9. OLD SYSTEM SHUT-DOWN At a pre-designed date, that has been communicated to all staff and contractors, the old system should be shut down and removed from company hardware, after giving reminders in the run up to the date. 10. VENDOR CLINICS Building on the work done by the Implementation Review Team, a good system vendor will offer clinics to review and resolve teething issues and provide additional training if necessary. The major steps associated with implementation. Note that many of these activities need to be completed ahead of time. You cannot start planning for implementation while you are actually implementing. 1.Prepare the infrastructure. Many solutions are implemented into a production environment that is separate and distinct from where the solution was developed and tested. It is important that the characteristics of the production environment be accounted for. This strategy includes a review of hardware, software, communications, etc. In our example above, the potential desktop capacity problem would have been revealed if we had done an evaluation of the production (or real-world) environment. When you are ready for implementation, the production infrastructure needs to be in place. 2.Coordinate with the organizations involved in implementation. This may be as simple as communicating to your client community. However, few solutions today can be implemented without involving a number of organizations. For IT solutions, there are usually one or more operations and infrastructure groups that need to be communicated to ahead of time. Many of these groups might actually have a role in getting the solution successfully deployed. Part of the implementation work is to coordinate the work of any other groups that have a role to play. In some cases, developers simply failed to plan ahead and make sure the infrastructure groups were prepared to support the implementation. As a result, the infrastructure groups were forced to drop everything to make the implementation a success. 3.Implement training. Many solutions require users to attend training or more informal coaching sessions. This type of training could be completed in advance, but the further out the training is held, the less information will be retained when implementation rolls around. Training that takes place close to the time of implementation should be made part of the actual implementation plan. 4.Install the production solution. This is the piece everyone remembers. Your solution needs to be moved from development to test. If the solution is brand new, this might be finished in a leisurely and thoughtful manner over a period of time. If this project involves a major change to a current solution, you may have a lot less flexibility in terms of when the new solution moves to production, since the solution might need to be brought down for a period of time. You have to make sure all of your production components are implemented successfully, including new hardware, databases, and program code. 5.Convert the data. Data conversion, changing data from one format to another, needs to take place once the infrastructure and the solution are implemented. 6.Perform final verification in production. You should have prepared to test the production solution to ensure everything is working as you expect. This may involve a combination of development and client personnel. The first check is just to make sure everything is up and appears okay. The second check is to actually push data around in the solution, to make sure that the solution is operating as it should. Depending on the type of solution being implemented, this verification step could be extensive. 7.Implement new processes and procedures. Many IT solutions require changes to be made to business processes as well. These changes should be implemented at the same time that the actual solution is deployed. 8.Monitor the solution. Usually the project team will spend some period of time monitoring the implemented solution. If there are problems that come up immediately after implementation, the project team should address and fix them. Part I of this series pointed out the need for planning and communication to help ensure a successful implementation. In this column, we looked at the actual work typically performed in a complex implementation. However, your implementation may not be as complex, and you may not need to look at all of these areas. Nevertheless, there is usually a lot more involved than just throwing the final solution into the production environment. You need to account for the environment the solution will run in, as well as processes and training needs of the client community. If you think through implementation from a holistic approach and communicate well, there is a much greater likelihood that your project will end as a win. Here are some steps on how to implement an Information System: Preparation. Before you begin to implement the procedures described in this guide, you already should have prepared your institution for the analysis.1 As a result of your preparation, you should have clearly defined your goals and objectives for the new IS. Goals. Goal-setting ideally involves establishing specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time-targeted objectives. Work on the theory of goal-setting suggests that it can serve as an effective tool for making progress by ensuring that participants have a clear awareness of what they must do to achieve or help achieve an objective. On a personal level, the process of setting goals allows people to specify and then work towards their own objectives — most commonly financial or career-based goals. Goal-setting comprises a major component of Personal development. Personal goals. Individuals can set personal goals. A student may set a goal of a high mark in an exam. An athlete might walk five miles a day. A traveler might try to reach a destination-city within three hours. Financial goals are a common example, to save for retirement or to save for a purchase. Managing goals can give returns in all areas of personal life. Knowing precisely what one wants to achieve makes clear what to concentrate and improve on, and often subconsciously prioritizes that goal. Goal setting and planning ("goalwork") promotes long-term vision and short-term motivation. It focuses intention, desire, acquisition of knowledge, and helps to organize resources. Efficient goalwork includes recognizing and resolving any guilt, inner conflict or limiting belief that might cause one to sabotage one's efforts. By setting clearly-defined goals, one can subsequently measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. One can see progress in what might have seemed a long, perhaps impossible, grind. Goal management in organizations Organizationally, goal management consists of the process of recognizing or inferring goals of individual team-members, abandoning no longer relevant goals, identifying and resolving conflicts among goals, and prioritizing goals consistently for optimal team-collaboration and effective operations. For any successful commercial system, it means deriving profits by making the best quality of goods or the best quality of services available to the end-user (customer) at the best possible cost. Goal management includes: • Assessment and dissolution of non-rational blocks to success • Time management • Frequent reconsideration (consistency checks) • Feasibility checks • Adjusting milestones and main-goal targets Morten Lind and J.Rasmussen distinguish three fundamental categories of goals related to technological system management: 1. Production goal 2. Safety goal 3. Economy goal An organizational goal-management solution ensures that individual employee goals and objectives align with the vision and strategic goals of the entire organization. Goal-management provides organizations with a mechanism to effectively communicate corporate goals and strategic objectives to each person across the entire organization. The key consists of having it all emanate from a pivotal source and providing each person with a clear, consistent organizational-goal message. With goal-management, every employee understands how their efforts contribute to an enterprise's success. Having a strategic plan for an organization is a big help and very efficient in developing and implementing a project. There are steps to follow, things to remember and consider, discuss and analyze, evaluate and studied thoroughly. Implementing the proposed Information Systems Plan is a tough thing to do in Information Systems Planning. All the hard works starting from the identification of needs, then formalizing the objectives, priorities, and authorization for the information systems project, and all the necessary things needed to be done in planning information systems will not be appreciated if the said information systems plan will not be properly implemented or worst, will never be implemented because of some user resistance. Thus, in an information systems planning, steps for implementing the proposed information systems plan should be included. A well planned information system is no doubt can help an organization with, of course, the aid of the officials and staff. Proper implementation in the long run and with full grasp of everyone to hold on the new technology and embrace the changes for the betterment and improvement of the institution in terms of processes and business flow. wikipedia.com csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800-30/sp800-30.pdf en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Technology_Planning/Implementation_Plan dictionary.reference.com/browse/risk www.ncc.gov.ph/files/gisp.pdf