Assignment 2: The Presentation

Any information system is designed with a number of goals in mind. These include goals such as taking care of the routine process of an organization, for instance, documenting and storing the data relating to these processes such as sales and revenue, in a centralized location which can easily be accessed when needed. Another is that an information system makes communication easier between different departments of an organization and also between the organization and its clients. All communication is saved and can also be retrieved if required. An information’s system also has repositories of the organization’s sales and revenue statistics, its annual reports, employee-related data, data pertaining to clients and their annual purchases from the organization, and other related information. All this data and information stored in the information system can help an organization make better decisions and improve the effectiveness of its employees. Any information system can also take care of future happenings in an organization as it has features that help it manage with new events as and when they take place. If that were not to be the case then the subject information system would involve poor planning that would last for only a couple of years and would tender the information system practically obsolete after that. So that is not the case because information systems are designed with future events in mind.

My chosen organization would be a retail company and speaking of changes, there may be any kind of change that this organization makes such as introducing new products as part of its strategy of selling all under the same roof. This may involve the organization selling things such as motorbikes or even automobiles to the public in its retail stores. This may be keeping in view the trust that many of its loyal customers place in it. The organization may decide to offer some discount to these loyal customers when they purchase vehicles from its stores. The customers would then have some kind of benefit of buying them from the retail store instead of from the automobile market. The benefits of this change might be higher profits for the subject organization as well as diversification of its portfolio to include products such as bikes and vehicles. Other benefits might be the organization giving a tough time to its competitors and speeding ahead of them in terms of its customer base.

The idea is that a new information system can take care of a lot of things of an organization relating to many different activities. These would include sales, such as the process of selling bikes or automobiles, each of which may involve a certain strategy of positioning the product into the market. An information system is adaptive in nature which means that it would not only cater to the current product line-up that the company has to showcase but that it would also be able to accommodate for future products that the company may launch, such as bikes or cars, which might possibly involve a different selling strategy. So an information system basically has the agility and that it can adapt itself to a new kind of process that an organization would like it to undertake as part of its working. It is not that an information system is rigid and would be unable to take up new tasks from what it has already been assigned. There are many technical aspects of an information system that are meant to help it last into the future and to account for new events and changes that would take place. In the worst-case scenario, if there are still any kind of issues, then the developers of the system can be contacted and updates made to the system so that it can easily manage the new product offerings of a company into its workflow.

I think that there should be an allowance for new product offerings in the design of the initial information system. This is because the environment in which any organization operates is continuously open to change. Change is the permanent feature under all circumstances. This means that it would be a wise approach to make allowance for changes into the information system so that it can easily adapt to new product offerings made by an organization. This would be easier because the changes would have to be incorporated anyways and making an allowance for them in the initial design would only make the task easier, it is anticipated. Therefore, incorporating new changes in the initial information system design would make it easier for the information system to accept the change and to enlist new product offerings as part of the processes. The system would therefore swiftly be able to make the changes without any hassle that may bring about delays in the listings of the new products and subsequently in their sales. So, this kind of proposition may help an organization prevent delays in listing new products each time and selling them to prospective customers to earn profit from them.