Week 8

Reflection

This week our lecture focused on business models in the digital world. This focuses a lot on how a business runs online through modern day technology and how it stays up to date as technology is constantly advancing. We all know what a organisation is, a formal social structure that processes resources from environment to produce outputs, and we also know that organisations follow a lot of models, processes and routines. Well organisations still follow routines, processes and models when working with information systems, they may just differ from those not to do with IT. Information systems has a lot of impact on the business as information is found quicker and done so a lot more efficiently. According to management theorist Henry Mintzberg, an organisation's structure comes from the interplay of the organisation's strategy, the environmental forces it experiences, and the organisational structure itself. He then identified five main successful organisational structures, which are:

• The entrepreneurial organisation

• The machine bureaucracy

• Divisionalised bureaucracy

• Professional bureaucracy

• Adhocracy (Innovative)

These 5 successful organisational structures are only successful if they are used for the right organisation measured on the characteristics of the organisation, what shapes them and by understanding the different organisational types. 

I also learned about the three different levels of the organisation and how IS is used within that role. Such as operation level. This would be a member of the organisation that interacts with customers, deals with day to day business processes and transactions. IS is used within this level to optimise processes, understand any causes of underperforming and the processing of business events and transactions. The next level is managerial which focuses on effectively utilising and deploying resources while also monitoring operational-level activities. IS helps as it can be used to produce performance analytics, forecasts and reports which can help further support decision making within the organisation. The last level is executive level. This would be roles such as the president, CEO, vice presidents, board of directors, etc. Their job is to support the organisation and to help with planning and decision making. IS is helpful on this level as the information stored on the IS is very helpful when decision making and planning for the future of the company. 

I learnt the five types of organisational strategies such as OLCL, FLC, BD, FD and BCP. All of these strategies are competitive strategies to help the business compete within its own industry. Using IS will give a company a competitive advantage  due to automating, informating and strategising. Porter’s Value Chain model is used widely around the world as a tool for companies to gain a competitive advantage. 

Some businesses use Freeconomics Business Models which offers a free service or product to customers but the company still makes a profit from that. For example: Google is free to use for everyone on the internet, however when you click a sponsored link Google gets paid for that as companies pay Google to have their link added to the search. Just because something is offered for free, that doesn't necessarily mean that you can not profit from it. 

Teamwork

This week within our team we started to discuss and take notes of what type of slides we want for our presentation, what will be on them and who is talking about what problem. We chose a format and a presentation theme that we thought was relevant as it looked professional. We also chose an order of who is speaking as we want it to be constantly flowing. I am very impressed with our team as we get work done on time and to a high standard.