Case study questions

MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit II Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

3. Explain how information technology systems influence organizational strategies. 3.1 Explain an organization’s ability to use information technology to achieve strategic goals.

4. Evaluate the prevailing ethical issues of information systems.

4.1 Describe how new technology trends may cause ethical dilemmas.

Course/Unit Learning Outcomes

Learning Activity

3.1 Unit Lesson Chapter 3, pp. 78–111, 116–118 Unit II Case Study

4.1

Unit Lesson Video: How Does Internet Surveillance Program PRISM Work? Video: FBI Director, Apple CEO Talk Privacy and Security Chapter 4, pp. 120–152, 157–159 Unit II Case Study

Required Unit Resources Chapter 3: Information Systems, Organizations, and Strategy, pp. 78–111, 116–118 Chapter 4: Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems, pp. 120–152, 157–159 In order to access the following resources, click the links below. CBS Evening News. (2016, February 17). FBI director, Apple CEO talk privacy and security [Video file].

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhaRR22s-bY Transcript for FBI Director, Apple CEO Talk Privacy and Security video CBS News. (2013, June 7). How Does Internet Surveillance Program PRISM Work? [Video file]. Retrieved

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JR6YyYdF8ho Transcript for How Does Internet Surveillance Program PRISM Work? video

Unit Lesson Information Systems: What This Means to Your Organization For most of us, it is not that difficult to understand certain information technology (IT) concepts. Most of us use our hardware and equipment fairly well. We know how to download apps on our smartphones. We know about the systems and applications that we use at work. We may not know all of the details or inner workings of what information flows where, but we have a good idea of how things work. If we were clueless, we would not be of much value to our organizations, would we?

UNIT II STUDY GUIDE

Organizations, Strategy, Ethics, and Social Issues in Information Systems

MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 2

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

Organizations and Strategy Let’s take this to a more abstract level. How would you answer this question: How is IT used toward the success of your organization? You might rattle off some reasons relating to the availability of the Internet, which allows e-mails to flow so that there is connectivity between customers and service representatives. You might say that your organization has several servers and databases that house data and a security team with security tools that ensure the safety of the data. You might mention that all the applications allow you to service your customers in faster, more efficient ways. If you are a little more tech savvy at your organization, you might even bring up more advanced topics or newer innovations, such as the ones listed below:

 e-commerce;

 supply chain management systems (SCM);

 customer relation management systems (CRM);

 SharePoint;

 cloud collaboration;

 enterprise resource planning (ERP);

 Systems, Applications, and Products (SAP);

 big data;

 data mining; or

 expert systems. Are the items described here IT tools? Yes, they are used to help make everyone’s lives and jobs easier, faster, more efficient, and more effective, but let’s ask the question again: How is IT used toward the success of your organization? Organizations must deal with a lot of information about every aspect of the business—from customers to vendors, employees, invoices, payments, inventory, and services. Our information systems make it possible to organize this information and keep up with it all. Business processes deal with the work that is performed in our organizations so that we can produce something of value. The performance of our business depends on how well our business processes work. Our business processes can add extreme value to our organization because they can be a competitive strength. They can also drag our value down if they are not working well for the organization. Thus, IT can work in many ways to improve our business processes by introducing better, faster, and more efficient methods of performing tasks in our business processes. Imagine how much time and money is saved if a thousand invoices are e-mailed to customers rather than being mailed via the postal mail. How much time does it take a person to stuff and stamp 1,000 envelopes? Now, if you look at how technology supports not only business processes but also management groups and functional groups, you can start to see that they link together in a way that serves to improve organizational performance. Value in improved performance: Organizations search every day for ways to improve their performance, production output, and transaction processing. In recent years, technology has advanced to the point that it supports enterprise-level systems, applications, networks, collaboration, and so on. There are even enterprise social networking tools now. Influence of IT on business-level strategy: Basically, a strategy addresses what needs to be accomplished. With any organization, the strategic objectives will be similar. The organizational leaders will want to be number one in their market, increase sales revenue, decrease costs, or strengthen their customer base. It is certainly not a stretch to understand that a business wants to be the best, the fastest, the most profitable, the most efficient, the most customer-friendly, and so on. You must also have a good understanding of what influences organizations. Organizations have a culture. They have politics, social structure, rules, values, norms, and people. The reality is that technology affects all aspects of organizations. For example, information systems can have a huge economic impact on an organization. IT is very costly, but the benefits can influence big increases in revenue or substantial decreases in costs.

MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 3

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

IT can have cultural and social impacts on organizations as well. A large technology implementation can mean a change in the mindset for many employees who are resistant to change. Imagine that you know technology implementation will increase the efficiency of operations by 50%, but this may also mean that fewer employees will be needed. Imagine that you are one of the employees whose job is at risk due to a new automation. This realization may cause a lot of doubt, uncertainty, and anxiety for employees. All of these factors play an important part in understanding the role that IT plays in organizations. For IT to be beneficial and for organizations to be successful, organizations have to have clear strategies. Organizations have to take full advantage of any competitive advantages and understand models such as Porter’s competitive forces model. Once organizational leaders understand where the business needs to be, they can set clear, actionable steps to get there. Those steps will involve technology because organizations need to have IT resources and IT capabilities. It will also involve an organization’s ability to utilize its IT resources and create value in conjunction with its other assets and resources. Finally, it is important to note that organizations have to be able to align their technologies with their business strategies and goals. It does the organization no good to have a well-defined strategy if it does not have the IT resources and capabilities to meet its goals. On the other hand, if the organization does not have a well- defined strategy that is appropriate for the business, IT tools will be of little help to reach meaningless goals. The following videos display the challenges to individual privacy. View the video How Does Internet Surveillance Program PRISM Work? (Transcript for How Does Internet Surveillance Program PRISM Work? video). View the video FBI Director, Apple CEO Talk Privacy and Security (Transcript for FBI Director, Apple CEO Talk Privacy and Security video). Ethical and Social Issues in Information Systems As Laudon and Laudon (2020) note, “ethics refers to the principles of right and wrong that individuals, acting as free moral agents, use to make choices to guide their behavior” (p. 124). The fact is that information systems open the door for many opportunities to make ethical choices—probably as many, if not more, than any other area in business. Why is this statement true? Think about it. IT professionals will likely have access to information more than anyone else in the organization. Information such as employee information, customer information, and sales transactions are stored in database tables. A human resources (HR) representative will have access to employee information. A salesperson or customer service representative will have access to sales information or basic customer information. An accounts receivable person will have access to customers’ financial information. Some IT professionals will have access to all information. Additionally, many organizations have personal usage rules regarding the personal use of company website, Internet, and e-mail assets. This usually means that organizations will have applications that log usage into databases. Most of the time, employees’ actual e- mail text is stored as well. Managers can request reports if they feel an employee is abusing the usage rules, but who has access to the data at any given time? Some IT professionals will. Who should have access to this information? Can you imagine what would happen if anyone could access all of this information? Imagine the unethical, disgruntled employee who was passed over for a promotion accessing the web logs and seeing that the newly promoted coworker who is married has been researching dating websites. There is a lot of trust placed in IT professionals to house and manage all kinds of sensitive information and not abuse it themselves. This is where the basics of ethics for IT professionals starts. Even within IT, there are access controls that limit what can be done to the data. In other words, most IT professionals could not delete their web logs. This is all a part of having good security policies, which we will discuss later.

MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 4

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

Even if you, as an IT professional, accidentally view confidential or sensitive information, you have to know what your ethical responsibility is with regard to that information. Should you inform management that you saw that information? Another example might be knowing the company’s financial information. It is unethical and potentially illegal to use that information for your own financial gain. Ethical Challenges Let’s examine how technology has advantages and disadvantages by examining the opening case in Chapter 4, “Are Cars Becoming Big Brother on Wheels?”. Technology can create new opportunities to enhance people’s lives, but it can also be a detriment to improving lives. Technology, such as the Internet, has challenged our understanding of ethical and privacy issues. Improvements in communications technology, such as high-speed broadband and globalization, have brought the topic of ethics and privacy to the forefront. As the scenario demonstrates, data collected by smart cars can be used by auto insurance companies to monitor the insured’s driving habits and use the data to justify increasing insurance rates. This software can monitor driver activities such as texting while driving, traveling speeds, alertness, and other driving patterns. This information can then be used by law enforcement against offenders to support traffic violation charges, especially if the driver was involved in an accident. Your driving habits can become a valuable commodity, just like your individual shopping profile is on your favorite online shopping website. Your trips to a theater, grocery store, or shopping center reveal your shopping habits and associations that are valuable to corporations, government agencies, or other entities that use the data to advertise. For example, frequent visits to a movie theater reveal information about your entertainment habits. However, frequent visits to a hospital or care facility would also reveal information about private medical data that you would not want to share with the rest of the world. Summary This unit does a great job of covering many of the ethical considerations that you may face at home and in the workplace. In the workplace, there is always more to consider, so most organizations have ethics training for this purpose. At home, individuals will need to be knowledgeable about how information is gathered and to whom that information is given.

Reference Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. L. (2020). Management information systems: Managing the digital firm (16th ed.).

Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Suggested Unit Resources In order to access the following resources, click the links below. To reinforce the concepts from this unit, view the Chapter 3 Presentation (PDF for Chapter 3 Presentation). To reinforce the concepts from this unit, view the Chapter 4 Presentation (PDF for Chapter 4 Presentation). The following article brings some interesting reading about ethical issues in information systems, which correlates to issues discussed in the textbook and the unit lesson. Mason, R. O. (1986). Four ethical issues of the information age. MIS Quarterly, 10(1), 5–12. Retrieved from

https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direc t=true&db=bsu&AN=4679471&site=ehost-live&scope=site

MBA 5401, Management Information Systems 5

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE

Title

The following article also brings some interesting reading about how organizational value is created through IT governance mechanisms. Wu, S. P.-J., Straub, D. W., & Liang, T.-P. (2015). How information technology governance mechanisms and

strategic alignment influence organizational performance: Insights from a matched survey of business and IT managers. MIS Quarterly, 39(2), 497–519. Retrieved from https://libraryresources.columbiasouthern.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direc t=true&db=bsu&AN=102375761&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Your textbook has video cases that correlate with the information being presented in the assigned chapter readings. You are encouraged to review the video cases relating to Chapter 3 below. Akamai Technologies. (2012, November 16). Akamai customer testimonial: NBA [Video file]. Retrieved from

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZkyz-gChnI Transcript for Akamai Customer Testimonial: NBA video CNET. (2015, February 25). What the FCC net neutrality rules will mean for Internet users [Video file].

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84r3qd19tZU Transcript for What the FCC Net Neutrality Rules Will Mean for Internet Users video Vox. (2015, February 26). The FCC’s new net neutrality rules, explained in 172 seconds [Video file].

Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBKPacCuXsw Transcript for The FCC’s New Net Neutrality Rules, Explained in 172 Seconds video You are encouraged to review the video cases relating to Chapter 4 below Consumer Reports. (2013, June 6). Setting Facebook privacy controls [Video file]. Retrieved from

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWlyut4zsko Transcript for Setting Facebook Privacy Controls video Wall Street Journal. (2012, January 25). Google, privacy and what it means for you [Video file]. Retrieved

from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7M_FOhXXKM Transcript for Google, Privacy and What It Means for You video