MS-54 Management of Information Systems Question Paper

MBA - Master of Business Administration

Note: Attempt ant three questions from Section-A each carries 20 marks. Section-B is compulsory and carries 40 marks.

1. Name the changing applications of organisational information systems that existed from the 1950s to the 1990s. How has the role of information systems on the organisation changed over this time period?

2. If you wish to study the function of business as an institution in society using the systems approach, would you proceed "inside-out" (business, industry, economy, society) or "outside in" (society, economy, industry, business)? Why?

3. How can we measure system success? Why it is necessary to understand the concept of implementation when examining system success and failure?

4. What are the advantages of having a companywide databank? What typical items are contained in a databank and how are they structured? Show how different functions (e.g. cost accounting, sales, inventory) can be integrated with a databank

5. What is the relevance of the Nolan's stage growth model for the study of information systems in today's organisation?

SECTION B

6. Read the case carefully and answer the questions at the end:

The sun never stets on the worldwide holdings of Unilever one of the world's largest multinational corporations. The sprawling conglomerate has over 1000 different product brands, 300,000 employees, and more than 300 operating divisions located in 75 countries. Its holdings include T.J. Lipton, Calving Klein Cosmetics, and Lever Brothers. Unilever's largest core business if food products. Since the 1980s Unilever has brought more than 100 businesses and sold nearly twice as many Nevertheless,. Its cost-conscious management has made sure it has a rich supply of available cash (Unilever's annual cash how is more than $3 billion) and relatively little debt.

The product of a 1930 merger between a Dutch margarine company and a British soap maker, Unilever maintains two equally powerful co-chairmen-Sir Michael Perry in London and Morris Tabaksblat in Rotterdam. Perry and Tabaksblat are trying to make their octopus-like organization a nimble player in today's mypercompetitive global marketplace. Unilever is constantly mired in battled over soap, ice-cream, shampoo, margarine, and sauces with fierce competitors such as Procter & Gamble, Nestle, Colgate-Palmolive, and Snapple. Unilever needs to tend off these rivals while dealing with slow-growing populations in its mainstay markets and huge increases in its advertising and promotion costs.

As profits in developed markets stagnate. Unilever is shifting its weight to Asia. Latin America, and Central Europe. Perry and Tabaksblat are trying to pare down unilever's broad array of products into four basic categories: food personal products, detergents and specialty chemicals. The food category is focussing on pasta sauces, tea drinks, margarine, and ice-cream. The personal product category emphasizes cosmetics prestige fragrances and anti-aging skin creams Management also wants more efficiencies by building plants that serve entire continents instead of just one country. It wants to be able to roll out the best products globally in the shortest period of time.

To balance worldwide headquarters with brand managers and country managers. Perry and Tabaksblat have delegated the job of developing products and marketing strategies for an entire region. This means that Thailand might be the detergent expert for Southeast Asia and the Philippines would handle manufacturing. In Europem the Frankfurt office would oversee skin core, while the Paris office would be in charge of shampoo. In other words, one country develops new products and creates marketing campaigns for the whole region,. In t he past, Unilever stressed geographic decentralization, while maintaining a measure of centralized control, it allowed country managers to meet the needs of local markets in different countries. The firm tries to "Unileverize" its managers with a common organizational culture that transcends national boundaries. Managers are trained at Unilever's international management training college near London and are assigned job positions in various countries throughout their careers.

The senior management of this London and Rotterdam -- based firm believed that with so many companies under one roof, Unilever was "drowning in technology". Unilever had many redundant systems as well as many systems that were poorly conceived and poorly implemented. Management handed Michael Johnson, Unilever's head of information technology, the responsibility of standardizing the behemoth's multitudinous hardware and software systems around an open system architecture and bringing them together in a global network.

Unilever's old laissez-faire approach a polyglot mix of hardware and software. Despite the official corporate policy of only using IMB, Hewlett-Packard, or DEC hardware, the firm had drastic incompatibility problems. The systems of various operating units had mushroomed out of control. To make his plan work, Johnson had to convince his three designated vendors to cooperate on a cross-vendor software architecture.

According to Norman Weizer, a senior consultant with Big Six accounting firms Arthur D. Little the challenge for global firms is to consistent, common format while allowing local units to perform effectively. Unilever wanted to pursue this goal by providing a common foundation for disparate far-flung operations without hamstringing its businesses.

Johnson moved quickly. In June 1990 he started focusing on applications portability. He told Unilever's three primary hardware suppliers --- IBM, DEC and Hewlett-Packard- that he wanted to be able to build an application and port it anywhere wanted to build "competitive - edge applications" in our place, send them to other Unilever companies, and install them instantly as if the recipients had developed them themselves.

Johnson enlisted Unilever's key hardware and software vendors to agree upon an open systems architecture for the firm that could serve as the foundation for a global network. Unilever chose the suite of standards built around the Open Software Foundation's Applications Environment Specification (AES) for systems and software throughout the corporation. AES is a massive set of standards that includes elements of the OSF/1 operating system, the Motif graphical user interface, OSF's Distributed Computing Environment, SQL (Structured Query Language), and Posix (Posix establishes a standard interface between an application program and an operating system rather than requiring a specific operating system).

With this base environment, Johnson added important software and database standards. Unilever chose Oracle and Sybase Inc's database management systems, Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet software and word-perfect word processing software/ Oracle's SQL Forms and Unity Corporation Uniface application environment were selected as front-end software development standards.

Johnson and his team decided to use AES's distributed client/server capabilities as the foundation for Unilever's global data network. Unilever chose Sprint International to manage its pan-European data network. Eventually Unilever hopes its software tools and global network will provide the technology to manage group projects around the world. Perry and Tabaksblat can use a sophisticated E-mail system to help them monitor Unilever's new operating regions.

Unilever believes its move to open systems has not stifled local technology innovation. For instance Quest International, a Unilever food ingredients and Fragrance Company based in England and the Netherlands, is using AES standards to develop its critical applications. Quest is relatively small (its 1991 revenue was $842 million) and it could move quickly to new standards.

While Johnson has taken a strong position about standards and open systems, he does not want to disrupt the company's operations during implementation. He realizes that he will not be able to make all the Unilever's operations switch to open systems overnight Unilever inherited hundreds of proprietary applications that Johnson wants to leave in place until his staff figures out how to make them communicate among computers. While Unilever's company wide open systems model excludes proprietary systems such as those using IBM's AS/400 minicomputer environment, it is too costly to shut down these machines right away. Johnson is letting companies with AS/400 computers delay the changeover while mandating that all new software purchased or developed for the AS/400 computers must be portable to RISC (reduced instruction set computing) machines that are compatible with AES standards.

Case Questions:

(1) How well did Unilever's information systems support its business strategy?
(2) How would you characterise Unilever's strategy for dealing with connectivity problems? Do you agree with this strategy?