Week 5 - Final Paper Strategic Information Technology Plan

Running head: MANAGING GLOBAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS 1

MANAGING GLOBAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS 4

Managing Global Information Systems

By: Alejandra Berry

MGT497: Strategic Technology Planning for Organizations

Instructor: Armon Kanooni

June 17, 2019

Managing Global Information Systems

Company Overview

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta is one of the leading financial institutions in the United States. The organization is involved in the provision of financial services to customers based in Atlanta and other parts of the United States. Other services that the company offers include loans, banking services, as well as community development and grants. Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, the company has expanded its operations to national levels. The Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta uses information systems to support almost all its functions, ranging from customer care and support to logistics, supply chain management, as well as tracking of sales, revenues, and profitability. Information systems are also utilized to speed up business transactions with customers and other stakeholders, thereby resulting in improved operational efficiency. While the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta still operates within the confines of the American boundaries, it is planning to expand its operations to overseas markets. Therefore, there are various potential challenges that the company is likely to encounter in its management of global information systems.

Potential Challenges and Why they are Important

Although the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta is still a local organization, it is planning to embark on a globalization program shortly. The company’s planned expansion to both developing and industrialized nations will likely encounter several global information systems management challenges. The main problems that the company will encounter include technological challenges and cultural and language barriers. Technological challenges are especially more pronounced in developing nations (Oz, 2014). Not all nations are endowed with sufficient technological infrastructures to enable resident firms to establish their global information systems. Global information systems, particularly those that heavily rely on the Web, typically include graphics to relay technical or business information.

In some cases, such applications, including interactive software, need increasingly fast (broadband) communication networks and lines. The bandwidth provided in some developing countries is too narrow for high-volume transmissions of graphically and animation-rich web contents (Oz, 2014). As such, companies may have to offer two versions of their sites-one for narrow bandwidths and another for wide bandwidths.

Technological challenges also manifest in the form of language issues. Machine languages may only be compatible with the English language. For instance, characters are often represented by bytes in computer systems. Such setups are okay for languages with up to 256 (28) characters, such as English and other languages whose alphabetic roots are from Latin (Oz, 2014). Other languages whose characters reflect individual phonemes as opposed to words, such as Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic, may also be compatible. However, eight-bit bytes may not be sufficient for languages that are comprised of a more significant number of characters, such as Chinese, in which characters reflect whole words. In cases where servers have been programmed to accommodate Unicode, whereas other systems only work with single-byte characters, then the back-end systems can only record and display contents that do not communicate. Therefore, entire systems must be programmed to accommodate special conversion software.

Cultural and language barriers also pose obstructions to the successful management of global information systems. For instance, in order for a business organization to use information systems to support international communication, the parties must reach an agreement on a common language, a situation that breeds many barriers (Oz, 2014). For instance, data may not be transmitted globally in real-time because the information must first be translated, usually through human beings. While some computer applications have the capability of translating such data on time, they are not often perfect. Furthermore, national laws the host country may prohibit businesses from running accounting and other systems using foreign languages, thereby compelling the communicating parties to incur extra costs associated with running the financial information systems in two languages.

Moreover, since the Federal Home Loan Bank of Atlanta is a technologically advanced company, it might translate its web-based e-commerce system or original website into local languages. However, site localization can be challenging. For example, the Taiwanese use a traditional set of Chinese characters, but the Chinese prefer the simplified character set.

Possible Solutions

There are various interventions that the company can explore to address these challenges. For instance, cultural barriers can be overcome by using models that support cultural sense-making of IT innovations (Lawrence & Oivo, 2012). Boundary-spanning programs can be launched in order to understand the peripheral information accurately that internal, and external to the organization. The goal of cultural sense-making should be to achieve mutual agreements and shared understanding across communicating parties from different cultures. Individuals and group members from different cultures can be encouraged to form collaborative groups that are aimed at establishing assumptions and beliefs based on their experiences. Artifacts to be interpreted should be constructed, and such artifacts interpreted into meanings (Lawrence & Oivo, 2012). Global IS innovators should interpret the discourses of IT in order to understand their use contexts. It is through knowledge drawn from experiences that the problems can be framed and addressed.

While not all technological barriers can be addressed, there are practical and workable solutions. For instance, the organization can standardize its databases and knowledge bases to conform to different global environments and languages. Also, optimization modeling can be done during information systems design and implementation. Rather than merely showing tradeoffs between the design parameters input by users, modeling strategies are needed that can suggest modifications to optimize information systems design needs for both users and the entire organization.

References

Lawrence, C., & Oivo, M. (2012). Cultural challenges in information systems innovation: The

need for differentiation studies. In Shaping the Future of ICT Research. Methods and

Approaches (pp. 177-192). Berlin: Springer.

Oz, E. (2014). Management information systems. Boston: Cengage Learning.