What Are the Different Types of Strategic Business Systems?

Strategic Information System (SIS) was developed based on EDPS, MIS, DSS and OAS under the guidance of a competition-oriented information management strategy.

Strategic information system

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Strategic Information System (SIS) was developed based on EDPS, MIS, DSS and OAS under the guidance of a competition-oriented information management strategy.

Strategic information systems are information systems that enable companies to have a competitive advantage by generating new products and services, changing relationships with customers and suppliers, or by changing the way companies operate internally.

Chinese name

Strategic information system

Foreign name

Strategic InformationSystem

Shorthand

SIS

based on

Based on EDPS, MIS, DSS and OAS

In the mid-1980s, the application of information technology in some enterprises achieved great success, which brought obvious competitive advantages to these enterprises and greatly promoted their development. At this time, people began to pay attention to how to apply information technology strategically, and the concept of Strategic Information Systems (SIS) began to appear, which aroused great interest and attention from people and was widely studied.

In 1988, Charles Wiseman defined a more representative definition of strategic information systems: "A successful strategic information system refers to the use of information technology to support or reflect a company's competitive strategy and business plan. To enable companies to obtain or maintain a competitive advantage, or to weaken their competitors' competitive advantage " ^[1]

Analyzing the various definitions of strategic information systems and summarizing the research results of strategic information systems, we can see that strategic information systems often have the following characteristics:

1. The strategic information system can support the company's business strategy.

Strategic information system is the strategic application of information technology. It is different from the simple mode of information technology applied by people in the past, such as improving efficiency, reducing human labor, and assisting decision-making. Support the realization of business strategy or provide new solutions for the implementation of business strategy. For example, in the 1980s, in order to implement its business strategy of improving customer service and reducing business costs, City Bank of the United States (CITIBANK) took the lead in establishing a network system in New York that includes more than 800 automatic teller machines (ATMs). The cash machine works 24 hours a day, providing customers with more timely and efficient services, enabling customers to withdraw cash at any time they need. At the same time, the application of a large number of ATMs has greatly reduced the number of bank branches and cashiers, and reduced business costs. Obviously, this strategic information system represented by the ATM network application provides a brand-new solution for the implementation of the city bank's business strategy, which has effectively promoted the realization of its strategic goals.

2. Strategic information systems can greatly change the way companies manage and operate, and bring competitive advantages to enterprises, or weaken the advantages of competitors.

The implementation of many strategic information systems, such as transaction processing systems (TPS), management information systems (MIS), office automation systems (OA) and enterprise resource planning systems (ERP), customer relationship management systems (CRM), etc., often Caused by the re-engineering of business processes, streamlining of personnel and reorganization of organizations, at the same time, it also profoundly changed the working methods and decision-making methods of enterprise managers. The optimization of business processes, the reorganization of institutions, and the change in management methods can greatly improve the efficiency of business operations, reduce operating costs, shorten production cycles, reduce the number of inventory, and greatly improve the quality of services, which significantly enhances the overall competitiveness of enterprises. Gain a clear competitive advantage.

3. Strategic information systems can often have a substantial impact on the products, services, business processes, organizational management, and industry structure of an industry.

When an enterprise in the industry establishes and applies an information system for strategic purposes and achieves great success, its demonstration effect will affect the entire industry, thereby changing the process of industry production, service, operation, and management, and industry structure . For example, the automatic booking system of American Airlines, the automatic teller machine of American City Bank (CITIBANK), the parcel delivery and tracking management system of FedEx, etc. These information systems have won competitive advantages for their respective companies at the beginning It has brought huge economic benefits to the enterprise, played a good role of demonstration, and at the same time, due to the pressure of competition, other companies in the industry will imitate and apply similar information systems as much as possible, thus affecting the entire industry. And promote the development of the industry. From this perspective, strategic information systems are often creative applications of information technology in an industry.

From the above characteristics of strategic information systems, it can be seen that not any information system used for management can be called a strategic information system. Only when the information system can directly support or influence the business strategy of the enterprise and help the enterprise obtain a competitive advantage, Only when the advantages of competitors are weakened can the information system be considered as a strategic information system. For example, when an enterprise decides to implement a low-cost competitive strategy and at the same time the cost of inventory accounts for a large proportion of the cost structure of the enterprise, the enterprise establishes a "inventory management and control system". If the application of this system greatly reduces the inventory cost, then the system strongly supports the business strategy of the enterprise and wins a low-cost competitive advantage for the enterprise. The system can be considered as a strategic information system; and if the system's The application failed to effectively reduce the inventory cost of the enterprise. Although the establishment of the system is closely linked to the business strategy of the enterprise, it cannot be said that the system is a strategic information system. Similarly, if this "inventory management and control system" Effectively reduced the company's inventory cost and brought low-cost competitive advantages to the company, but if the company does not implement a low-cost competitive strategy, it also does not intend to switch to a low-cost strategy due to the success of the information system , The information system cannot be regarded as a strategic information system.

Strategic Information System Competition Needs

As contemporary socio-economic activities increasingly move towards global integration and regional grouping, market competition has become extremely fierce, manifested by faster product upgrades, higher quality and performance-to-price ratios, and more humane and personalized features of products. The technology content is getting higher and higher, and the service around the product is getting better and better. This requires modern enterprises to have the following two basic competitiveness in addition to traditional competitiveness in quality, price, and service:

(1) Innovation and competitiveness. This is the most important competitive ability of an enterprise. In addition to the innovation of product design and production technology, the innovation of enterprises should also include the renewal of ideas, reorganization and business reorganization, that is, comprehensive innovation. From Intel (Int) to Microsoft, from Peking University Founder to Qingdao Haier, countless successful companies have demonstrated that constantly updated and improved knowledge is the original source of competitive advantage, and comprehensive innovation capabilities are the real driving force for enterprise development And the most powerful competitive weapon.

(2) Time competitiveness. That is, the product has a short production cycle, fast time to market, and timely delivery. This is also an important condition for the survival and development of modern enterprises. In order to cope with rapidly changing market demands, the company's competitive strategy has evolved from expanding production scale in the 1960s, reducing production costs in the 1970s, and improving product quality in the 1980s to a competitive strategy centered on increasing market response speed in the 1990s. The time factor has been raised to a key position in the competition of modern enterprises. For this reason, the concept of a "virtual enterprise", a distributed networked enterprise that can achieve agile enterprise response and a variety of organizational flexibility such as technology, personnel, production and management, came into being. The so-called virtual enterprise refers to the rapid combination of existing resources in different regions into a business entity that transcends space constraints and relies on electronic means for unified command, thereby launching high-quality, low-cost, diversified new businesses at the fastest speed. product. It is characterized by information integration and management under the premise of incomplete enterprise functions, non-permanent organizational structure, and regional decentralization (i.e., enterprise function virtualization, organization virtualization, and regional virtualization). To give play to the overall benefits of resources and enhance the competitiveness of enterprises.

With the increasingly motivated competition, enterprises must respond quickly to any changes in market demand, which puts forward higher requirements for enterprise information management. The traditional MIS obviously cannot meet the needs. SIS emerged to adapt to the changes in the competitive situation of enterprises. In many cases, it is only a "virtual information system" connected through the network. The functions and structure of the system change with the changes in the competitive goals of the enterprise. Therefore, it can meet the requirements of modern enterprises' competitive decision-making based on rapid response.

Strategic Information System Technology Promotion

The rapid development of information technology has severely impacted the traditional information management model, which mainly uses internal information resources of enterprises, and has provided technical conditions for the birth of a new generation of information systems. These technologies are:

(1) Object-oriented technology. The dynamic nature of business process reorganization and organizational restructuring of agile enterprises puts forward higher technical requirements for enterprise information systems. The emergence of object-oriented technology just meets the dynamic changing characteristics of corporate reorganization. The object-oriented technology itself has the characteristics of encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, hierarchy, easy modification, dynamic linking, reusability, etc., making a system not only scalable and maintainable, but also Meet the various requirements of low cost, high quality, short cycle and small batch, and flexibility and reliability of agile management, so that the 515 with object-oriented technology as the development tool can provide enterprises with a rapid response to the unpredictable market Changing competitive strength.

(2) Data warehouse technology. The present age is the information age, and the competition in the information age is actually the competition in information. As an enterprise's management decision maker, of course, the more accurate, comprehensive, and efficient the information it has, the better. Data warehouse technology reassembles and processes various cross-platform decentralized data in the enterprise to form a decision-oriented data warehouse, enabling end users to perform deep data mining, multi-dimensional data analysis, dynamic querying and reporting on the basis of the data warehouse. Develop and utilize strategic information resources. The data warehouse is for management decision makers. Its goal is to obtain valuable information from a large number of cluttered historical data and summary data, which is used to support high-level decision analysis and strengthen the competitive advantage of enterprises. Therefore, data warehouse technology is also an important support tool for enterprise SIS.

(3) Intranet technology. The intranet of the enterprise uses the Web model of the Internet as a standard platform, TCP / IP as the communication protocol, and the use of firewall technology to ensure the security of internal network resources. A three-tier client is formed on the internal network of the enterprise. / Server mode, namely the browser / application server / database server mode, and thus forms the infrastructure of the enterprise SIS. Intranet makes full use of Internet technology, so it is easy to develop, low cost and easy to use. Through the intranet, companies have transformed the previously independent "information islands" of separate information structures into a relatively unified "information continent" with an integrated network system. In this way, not only can the Web-centric, more Convenient and flexible information release and exchange methods and more rapid collaborative operations, and because of the successful connection between the Web server and the database, the backbone database of the enterprise can also be accessed in time from outside the enterprise. Therefore, it is easy to build an SIS that can respond quickly to the competitive environment by using the intranet, and enhance the competitiveness.

The commercialization of the Internet, especially the rise of the intranet technology, has greatly expanded the information management methods of enterprises. While the ability and efficiency of information production, distribution, collection, and processing of enterprises have been greatly improved, the relationships between enterprises have also appeared multiple. They may be both partner or customer relationships, as well as market-to-market or competitive relationships. With the construction of the global information infrastructure (G11) and the social information environment becoming increasingly networked and digital, the opportunities and scope of inter-agency or transnational cooperation between enterprises have greatly increased. Enterprises that are good at using the information environment can realize global and real-time operations through information technology, improve their rapid response capabilities and strategic coordination capabilities, and thus participate more effectively in competition. Companies that pay attention to sharing global information resources through a networked and digital open information environment; especially small and medium-sized enterprises, have the opportunity to enter all aspects of the international market and commerce and trade relations that were previously difficult to crowd, and share the advantages of quality, price and service Big companies compete. The global competitive environment will therefore become more fair. These developments have provided enterprises with huge opportunities on the one hand, and also presented severe challenges on the other. These challenges are related to the survival of enterprises in the market competition. In order to survive, an enterprise must change its management strategy in a timely manner, place more emphasis on agility, and reform its organizational structure and market operation methods. That is to say, companies need to formulate a competition-oriented information management strategy, that is, to re-determine the relationship between the company, customers and competitors, and change the internal and external information contact methods of the company, and establish a more flexible information system that can meet the needs of market competition. SIS. This is an important guarantee for enterprises to gain a competitive advantage in a global networked and digital information environment.

Strategic Information System Management Change

The vigorous development of information technology and the drastic changes in the competitive environment have not only brought more, greater, and more severe challenges to enterprise management, but also brought many new opportunities, and promoted production and operation and organization of enterprises. Changes in management models. This change has laid the foundation for the formation of the enterprise 515 system. The business management models formed by the use of modern information technology are:

(1) ERP. ERP is the abbreviation of Enterprise Resources Planning, which is based on the latest developments in computer technology and management theory. It provides an enterprise overall management solution from the theoretical and practical aspects. It originated from Material Requirements Planning (MateriaI Reduiements Planning, MRP). MRP is a manufacturing inventory management system proposed in the mid 1960s, which is characterized by considering the relevant demand relationships between various materials and determining the required quantity and time of various materials by time. It uses a computer as a tool to simulate the "basic manufacturing equation": that is, it calculates according to the production plan (what to produce?), The product structure (what production D is used to, and the inventory record (what has already been?) ?, and indicates when it will There is a shortage of materials and the minimum inventory is used to avoid the shortage of materials (what else should I get?), So that the enterprise can determine the order quantity and delivery time of various materials (when are the plans released?). But MRP does not put the company's production Capabilities and complex and variable external factors are incorporated into the system, ignoring the contradiction between supply and demand, and in the implementation process, the workshop operations and other information are not fed back to the system in a timely manner, so often they cannot be carried out smoothly in actual work.

Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRPI) is the development and expansion of MRP. It is mainly aimed at the management of the entire production process of the enterprise, and extends from production planning, material requirements, inventory control, workshop control to product sales, and is supplemented by the financial management necessary for enterprise operations in order to accurately and timely reflect the production and marketing of the enterprise And financial situation, and then comprehensively plan and manage the production and operation process of the enterprise to achieve the overall optimization effect. With MRPII, various manufacturing resources can be effectively mobilized under careful planning, capital occupation can be controlled, production cycles can be shortened, and product costs can be reduced. But like traditional MIS, it is limited to the management of internal logistics, capital flow, and information flow of the enterprise. It does not pay enough attention to external information and lacks flexibility. Therefore, in the late 1980s, it was difficult to meet the development needs of corporate competition strategies. On the basis of traditional MRPII, ERP absorbs advanced management ideas such as just-in-time production (JIT) and total quality management (TQC), which greatly expands the scope of enterprise information management and gives a new enterprise management structure, that is, users Demand is integrated with production activities within the enterprise and the production resources of the supplier. The basic idea is that the production process of an enterprise is regarded as a tightly connected supply chain, which includes suppliers, production plants, distribution networks, and customers, etc .; the interior of the enterprise is divided into several supporting subsystems that work together, such as Manufacturing, quality control, service maintenance, marketing, engineering technology, finance, personnel, etc., including monitoring and management of competitors. Obviously, ERP is a management mode for enterprise supply chain. It can effectively manage all links in the supply chain, and through the close connection, coordination and balance of these links, it can achieve multi-enterprise and multi-regions worldwide. Multinational business cooperation. It can be seen that the ideas of ERP and SIS are consistent, and it will provide strong support for the formation of enterprise SIS.

(2) CIMS. CIMS is the abbreviation of Computer Integrated Manufacturing System or Computer Integrated Management System. In the past, it often refers to the former. Here is the integration of the two meanings, also known as CIMS.

CIMS is the perfect integration of various functional subsystems in the whole process of enterprise activities using modern information technology and management theory. It focuses on products and integrates product design / manufacturing / controlling layers (including computer-aided design CAD, computer-aided manufacturing CAM and flexible manufacturing system FMS and computer-aided quality control CAQC), production management (ERP, MIS, OAS) and The management decision-making layer (DSS, ES) enables the product management decision-making process, design and development process, manufacturing process, and quality control process to be reasonably connected as a whole through a computer network to ensure the consistency, sharing, Timeliness and reliability, to achieve intelligent production, management, and decision-making, and achieve high-quality and efficient goals. Because CIMS has a very important strategic significance for the competition and development of modern enterprises, countries around the world attach great importance to CIMS. The government of country H has listed CIMS as one of the 22 key technologies that affect the country's economic destiny and competitive position. Both the European Community and Japan have formulated CIMS research and development plans. The Chinese government is also very concerned about CIMS, and listed it as a theme of the "863 Plan", and set up the National CIMS Engineering Research Center at Tsinghua University. During the Eighth Five-Year Plan period, China selected 66 enterprises as CIMS application demonstration enterprises, including 51 state-owned large and medium-sized enterprises, including Beijing First Machine Tool Plant, Shenyang Blower Factory, and Chengdu Aircraft Industry Corporation. Beijing No. 1 Machine Tool Plant implemented the CIMS project to reduce the delivery time of super heavy-duty CNC gantry milling from 36 months to 18 months. Therefore, it applied for bids in 1996 in an international tender. In 1995, the CIMS project of Beijing First Machine Tool Plant also won the "Industrial Leadership Award" issued by the American Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME) worldwide, and also won the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) 94/95 "sustainable Industrial Development Award ".

The implementation of CIMS can put enterprises in a favorable position in the increasingly fierce market competition. The core connotation of the CIMS concept is a system and information perspective to improve the competitiveness of enterprises. The so-called system perspective means that CIMS emphasizes all aspects of enterprise production and operation, from market demand, product development, manufacturing, quality control, sales service, personnel and financial management, etc., and must be considered together; information perspective refers to The production and management process of an enterprise is essentially the process of information collection, processing, and transmission. This view has laid a foundation for the widespread use of information technology and the vigorous development of SIS. Under the guidance of this philosophy, CIMS supports the integration of technology through the integration of information in all aspects of production and operation, and then the integration of technology into the integration of materials, personnel, funds, organization and management, so that logistics, human flow, The capital flow and information flow achieve the overall optimized operation to improve the competitiveness of the enterprise. Therefore, CIMS forms the core of enterprise SIS.