Summary-Making the Summaries

For new readers, welcome to the Summary-Makers’ Insight!  I hope you have enjoyed and/or found useful some of our previous posts.  Seeing as we have had quite a bit to say already, I figured it was about time for a summary-making of our summary-making (a little recursive summarizing, if you will).  But before I do that, I’ll give you a quick dramatic summary of what summary-making is all about:

I’m sure all of us are aware of many of the players in this complex drama we call Infomation Systems Management.  There are the Boogiemen - villains and naysayers who often nitpick the technical details and question the value of ISM, but who still bring very valid light to real problems.  There are the Question Keepers, who make sure we ask the right questions (though seem to rarely give us the answers we crave).  There are the Champions, the evangelists of the new technologies and systems ISM brings us, who can promise the world, and every so often deliver it.  We have The Keepers of the Treasure, who keep what we’ve got running, but can get a bit snippy if there’s too much change.  And we can’t forget the Script Writers, who rarely get their hands dirty from their thrones, but at least keep everyone going the same direction.  All of these actors (and more) play their ongoing roles, and fight thier battles.

We, the Summary-Makers, try to step out of the fray and see the whole picture.  We understand the value and strength of each perspective, and we take it upon ourselves to represent a broad and balanced view by using our most cherished tool: the summary.

So, without further ado, here are some summaries:

- Web services (such as Google Apps) are commoditizing basic computing for business, which will add value to the business world as a whole by decreasing the costs of ISM.

- The proliferation of integrated mobile devices will serve to increase the reliability of the web services that complement them, which business will be able to harness.  Despite the locked-down nature of these devices, the innovation and creativity of the online world will not be comprimised.

- The value of Information Systems Management is in the connections between those three concepts.

We as summary makers summarise the need to forsee, invest and understand ISM and look through the cultural perspective how its connecting people and how ISM technologies have created convinience for living beings and how as normal people we could evaluate it.

Connecting ISM and Organizational Culture

How is Information Systems Management accomplished when cultural change of an organisation is attempted and, what does this accomplishment mean for those touched by it?

Efforts of this kind are being made in the UK National Health Servise (NHS), where modernisation programmes involving technological rationalisation and change are aiming to make the NHS more reponsive to contemporary public demands. The largest and most appraised of English services, the London Ambulance Service (LAS) is a good specific example, with a history of information systems implementation efforts over 20 years.  

A perceived need for cultural change involving the use of advanced information technologies is pervasive in managerial and ministerial discourses about modernising the health servise, yet the way that ambulance services are regulated and monitored has given rise to a modernisation programme in which cultural change and ISM have been conveived largely instrumentally in terms of achieving performance targets. Moreover, goals to which the modernisation efforts aspire are at most partially realised. Organisational change is uneven, and the performance improvements achieved are contradictory, and this is not only true in London but elsewhere in the UK.

Drawing from organisational theory and critical social theory, past Information Systems implementation efforts at the LAS can be reinterpreted in light of recent developments, with contributions to theory and practice in mind. The theoretical contribution rests in exploring how emotion as well as rationality may be conceptualised to examine historically and culturally constituted working practices. Implications for practice address how ISM can give rise to cultural fragmentation, and also how professional identity can constrain information systems innovation.

We need to focus on the nature and development of organisational culture research without very specific reference to the broad range of practices and symbols in organisations that were addressed by the studies.  Also, we need to be able to take a cultural perspective to study IS development, management, and use in organisations, and also to study high technology corporations and software consultancies as organisational cultures based around ISM, rather than the other way around.

Summary / conclusions needed

 

What really is “Information Systems Management”?

In an animated Summary-Maker discussion today, each of us in turn managed to stumble over de-acronymizing ISM.  As with any TLA, the term seems to take on a life of it’s own, and can roll flippantly into the conversation with no regard for it’s actual meaning.  With this in mind, we decided that the acronym needs to be disected, and with that disection we may be able to bring to light and summarize the link between technology and value.

Information:

To be strongly differentiated from pure data, in business this is the stuff that people need in order to make decisions.  It connects to systems by being the deliverable from any system.  It connects to management by being the key requirement for decision making.  Information is the prime intangible asset of a business, and can be naively thought to be contained by electronic files or paper documents, but is much more slippery than that.  Information is highly affected by context, the same way that this paragraph would hold no value outside the context of this blog entry, this blog, or even the mind of you the reader.

Systems:

A system is the description of the links between processes, data, information, and people.  This connects to Information by describing how the informaiton is actually delivered to the person who needs it.  It connects to Management both by being the lever by which managers control information delivery, and the channel by which they recieve it.  It serves as a significant portion of the context of the information that is being delivered. 

A broader understanding of systems, from the realm of systems theory, allows for feedback, dynamic systems, chaotic systems, stabilizing or de-stabilizing systems, and a whole gamut of other complex concepts.  Even within the realm of ISM, we talk of systems modeled on techonology, competencies, business structures, social networks, and business processes.  This is the realm of boggy detail within which most of our debate and work as ISM people occurs.

Management:

Actually making the decisions!  Key to this is trust in the Information that is being delivered by the System.  Also key is the configuration of the system itself.  Management of the system is what controls and coordinates the delivery and use of the information.

I have deliberately mixed up uses of the Management concept here.  The term Management in the acronym ISM is generally used to describe control and planning of the Information System itself.  I have also included Management as a broader concept that includes the use of any information for decision-making at any level of the business.  From this it is evident that there is a certain amount of recursiveness going on: managing the information system leads to information for managing the information system.  Where, then does the information for managing the business fit?  Remember that an Information System is in essence a model of the business, (or whatever portion of the business it covers).  Managing the information system is in of itself part of managing the business.

 

Further into our discussion, it was evident that a strong component of talent in the realm of ISM is the ability of a practitioner to help other people understand all three of these concepts holistically; that is, to see the forest despite the trees.  It is also clear that the value of ISM itself is in the holistic view of these three concepts.  None of the three is useful on its own, and the real value comes in the connections between the concepts.  That is, the value of ISM is in connecting Information to Systems, in Connecting those systems to Management, and in turn connecting Management to Information.

While ISM is a TLA, it is also an excellent example of being more than the sum of its parts!

In Summary: