Information System For Business Profession Of Global Services

Different information systems for business organizations

Describe about the Information System for Business Profession of Global Services.

In the given case study, the GEC (Global Education Services) is specialized in recruiting students to different overseas universities including in Australia. GEC is in business for a period of two years and has seen various opportunities to expand their business to different countries including South America, Northern Europe, and India. With the increase in the business opportunities, GEC is facing various operational risks to operate efficiently. This particular assignment evaluated the management and operations of GEC in order to identify the business requirement and needed to improve the business processes. This particular task includes various suggestions and recommendations for improving the business and operational needs of GEC.

Weske (2012, p-339) has defined information system as a collection of both computers and people for processing the information according to business needs. On the other hand, Rebuge and Ferreira (2012, p-111), showed that the information system is used in business organizations for enabling decision making processes with utmost efficiency in reliability. Both large and small businesses leverage the information technologies for managing the business activities and take a crucial decision.  The four most common information system used in small business organizations are-

Transaction Processing System:

This particular information system benefits the organization while providing data storage, data collection, data processing and other functionalities related to core operations. Transaction processing system takes the information from the user, process it with the data stored within it and generates the desired output (Baden-Fuller and Haefliger 2013, p-200). The TPS is beneficial for maintaining transaction update of the business. 

Customer Relationship Management System:

for synchronizing the marketing effort and sales of business, the use of ‘Customer Relationship Management System’ has been proved to me most beneficial. The CRM system assists in tracking and accumulating activities of the customers, including the inquiries and trends in purchasing. The CRM system provides the business organizations, with problem resolutions and feedback while interacting with the business. Ward (2014, p-635) cited that, the CRM assist in maintaining collaborations between business in real-time residing in different locations.

Business Intelligence System:

BIS are one the most complex information system as it identifies extracts and analyses the information required for crucial decision making needs. Business organizations leverage BIS for identification of sales patterns and forecasting sales revenue (Demirkan and Delen 2013, p-419). 

Knowledge Management System:

Business organizations utilize ‘Knowledge Management System’ for an organization the data and information available to the business and efficiently share it with every individual in the business (Tran et al. 2013, p-58). The KMS improves performance, retain knowledge and bring integration and innovation with the organization.

Opportunities to GEC

GEC is recently facing issues for maintaining and locating files of the students while manually storing them in hard copies. Most of the times, it has been found that the students’ documents went missing that impacts the efficient business procedure. Therefore, GEC requires installing ‘Knowledge Management System.’ Furthermore, the client contract, documents, payments are traditional, a manual procedure with a small client base. With the increase in clients, the GEC finds it hard to manage a large number of clients. Therefore, for the efficient management of client documents and issuing receipts, GEC needs to invest in ‘Customer Relationship Management System’ and ‘Transaction Processing System’ (van der Aalst 2013, p-56). In addition to that, GEC is focusing on investing in expanding their business opportunity in different countries including Northern Europe, South America, and India. Therefore, for managing the operations efficiently at all the locations, GEC requires to implement the ‘Business Intelligence System’ system.

Opportunities to GEC:

The expansion of business to overseas locations, will allow GEC to target more customers and increase the sales. Keeping the transparency of the different commissions in written form to the students helps in gaining customer satisfaction and trust. The hiring of assistant staff has benefitted the organization for managing the high traffic at peak times. Furthermore, the company’s decision to opening a franchise and taking the advantage of company’s name will provide GEC the opportunity to target more clients within a wide range of area. The business’ decision to make an advertisement and have social media presence will allow the company to reach a large number of clients with a small period of time.

Problems to GEC:

The most significant business problems GEC is facing is the increase in the number of competitors. The competitors invest in advertising and online registration for that they have been gaining more popularity and sales. GEC, with the current ten staff in the organization, Mr. Peter is facing relevant problems in managing the workforce. The expansion of business comes with the difficulty of managing the business procedures in all the locations simultaneously. In the past two years, the company has been operating with a small client circle. The increase in the number of clients increases the possibility of inefficient managing of the documents in any location. Moreover, the sharing the information in the hardcopy and storing them for at least seven years (according to legislations in different countries) has imposed the risk of inefficient management of the procedures and decreasing clients’ satisfaction. In addition to that, secure transfer and accessing the information about the clients’ information arises a certain concern within the organization. With the increase in the number of locations, GEC needs to hire more employees for delivering business needs. In the current situation, the Mr. Peter manually manages the payroll, leave, and timesheet of the employees. Increasing the business opportunities to expanding the business to different locations brings about risks in managing the in-house operations.

Problems to GEC

Information Requirements:

The GEC organization needs to enhance the business operations and business strategies for better management of the client and have a competitive advantage in the market. The trend in the sales, transmitting information among the different employees n the business organization are continuously changing. GEC needs to obtain the information about the current sales trend and analyze the market for targeting more clients. For improving the current situation of the business, GEC needs to understand and comprehend the market, customer and while analyzing and processing the results (Rebuge and Ferreira 2012, p-111). The different internal information requirement of GEC are the financial statements, forecast and budgeting, account managements, business, marketing, strategic plans, internal and market analysis. Another significant requirement of GEC is the information about the schedules, clients’ documents, transactions, and employee information from all the locations.

Information enhancing competitive advantage:

The information related to any business organization is continuously changing. The information obtained from different sources has the potential to change the entire business process. The information requirement will assist the GEC in reshaping the procedure of conducting business (Tran et al. 2013, p-58). The analyzing of the competitive marketplace will provide GEC with different opportunities to improve their business processes. In the market, various competitors have been utilizing online marketing and information technology for getting an upper hand in the competition. With the evaluation of the information, GEC can easily identify the market trends, client’s trends in choosing educational institute. The continuous analyzing of the information will provide an opportunity to change the competition nature. GEC can gain the competitive advantage with the integration of information technology in the business procedures (Weske 2012, p-339). The use of internet technology will allow GEC to have strategic innovation in the business in terms of both internal and external operations. The competitive forces determine the profitability of business organizations. The required information will enable GEC to identify the different external forces acting upon the organization. The use of information will further provide the client with real time information, documents and receipts to the students. All these will contribute to the improvement of GEC’s competitive position in the market.

For fulfilling the business requirements, information requirements, develop market opportunities and make strategic business decisions, GEC needs to invest in implementing information system within the business organization. In the current situation of GEC, all the documents of students and shareholders’ are manually kept, stored and managed in the organization. The utilization of the knowledge management system in the business organization will help in efficient storing, sorting and retrieving the information throughout every location of the business operations (Boehm and Thomas 2013, p-251). The KMS will provide easy maintenance, location and will effectively improve the collaboration of the employees from all the locations. In addition to that, all the processes, documents, information, client contact, generating letters are done manually by GEC that takes a lot of time while managing the documents and storing them efficiently. Furthermore, the details and information about the client and their appointment are being maintained using spreadsheet and Microsoft Outlook. Moreover, all the client files are kept on hard copy and consume a great amount of time for searching a particular file. In order to overcome the problem, GEC requires investing in ‘Transaction Processing System’ and ‘Customer Relationship Management System.’ With the help of the TPS, GEC can effectively store, collect and process a huge amount of data (Baden-Fuller and Haefliger 2013, p-200). The TPS helps in improving the performance, consistency and reliability of the data after modification, retrieval and collection of data. in addition to that, the TPS allows real time processing of the information and data available to the information system. Since GEC is looking forward to opening different franchises in overseas location; the CRMS will provide easy collaboration between the various locations of GEC. The CRMS will further allow generating and providing information and collaboration between the client and business in the organization  (van der Aalst 2013, p-56). This will provide GEC a wide opportunity and scope to resolving the problems are information and document management in the business operations. The most significant need of the GEC is the installation of ‘Business Intelligence System’ to achieve a competitive need in the business. The utilization of BIS helps GEC in the decision making processes for having a competitive advantage while processing and analyzing the information about the business trends, student’s selection and targeting potential clients (Amit and Zott 2012, p-41).

Information Requirements

For the implementation of the information system for efficient business needs and organizational goals, GEC needs to utilize informational technology infrastructure in the organization. The use of the internet, intranet and extranet will expand the opportunity of GEC to a more productivity and innovative business.

Internet:

The use of the internet is the most basic need for creating and fulfilling networked marketing and information retrieval. With the use of the internet, GEC can easily expand the business operations. GEC can further utilize the internet for strategic business application providing the business to exchange information through the electronic medium to the clients and stakeholders. The internet provides GEC in easy targeting the potential clients provide assistance through the remote area (Vasconcelos et al. 2015, p-50). The Internet can be further taken advantage of for interacting with the clients, stakeholders, business partners, employees for collecting and sharing information in no time. The Internet further provides the opportunity for conducting e-business.

GEC can strategically utilize Intranet for providing and satisfying the business’s communication requirements. An intranet is defined as an organization’s personal network for communicating between and with an organization. The utilization of Intranet in GEC’s business operations will provide easy access and sharing of files within the business organization. GEC can strategically use the intranet for secure communication through voicemails, emails, and faxes within the organization  (Tran et al. 2013, p-58). The use of intranet will enhance the communication, collaboration and in-house business procedures with great efficiency and speed. In addition to that, the Intranet will allow the employees, stakeholders, and business partners to run any application on the network for easy collaborations.

Extranet:

Extranet is utilized for communicating between more than one Intranet. GEC is planning for expanding their business in different overseas areas. GEC requires maintaining collaboration and communication between different location through a safe and secure medium. The utilization of Extranet will provide the easy communication and sharing of information from different locations (Tran et al. 2013, p-58).. Furthermore, with Extranet, the GEC ca implement VPN (Virtual Private Network) that allows the clients, stakeholders, and business partners to communicate through secure internet links between different locations of GEC (Vasconcelos et al. 2015, p-50). The use of extranet will further provide the business to use unsecured Internet for clients and business partners while using a secure connection for secure communications between the employees and business locations.

For implementing the Information System in GEC, the company needs to handle the change management with the business organization. Implementation of the Information System will entirely change the process and procedure followed in the GEC for achieving the business needs. The intensity of change required in GEC is directly proportional to the extent of change management required (Zhou et al. 2013, p-68). The planning and implementation of the IS do not affect the businesses much as the human resources in the organizations does. For the implementation of the Information system for GEC, the two major types of changes are predicted in the business organization. The most significant change is due to inefficient evaluation of the GEC’s needs and the requirement for efficient organizational operations and to overcome competitive advantage. The second type of change is the change that occurs during the implementation of the IS (Prajogo and Olhager 2012, p-514). The most significant need to manage the change is hiring specialized person to evaluate and determine the GEC’s need and requirement. The GEC requires evaluating the purpose of the change along with the detailed management of the objectives for the implementation. Further, the GEC needs to plan the details with efficient resources in the organization.  The continuous monitoring of the changes and modification of the plan is required for change of any condition within the business. The GEC needs to involve all the employees for understanding the need of information system within the organization (Saini et al. 2013, p-103). As the information system leverages the information technology, GEC needs to invest in hardware and networking elements for efficient implementation. GEC needs to converts all the existing document, files, and information into electronic data for storing in the information system. Since, all the documents have been stored in hardcopy until date, managing the change for converting hard copy of the documents to electronic copy requires special monitoring. After the successful implementation of the Information system, the end user needs to provide training for using and managing the documents with the use of different information system.

Information enhancing competitive advantage

The stakeholders in GEC can be vulnerable to different security issues while using the proposed information systems. Security vulnerably occurs in the system due to various flaws in the software, computer, network or hardware of the system. The most possible and significant security issues in the information systems are computer viruses, unauthorized access, and data loss (Zhou et al. 2013, p-68).  Computer viruses have the potential to modify other programs and infect the computers while increasing the processing speed. This can be easily eliminated with the installation of antivirus software on the computers. The second security issue is the unauthorized access to the system. In unauthorized access, any user can access the IS database without permission. For preventing the unauthorized access, GEC needs to include second verification procedure by sending a one-time password to the user’s mobile phone for verification (Tran et al. 2013, p-58).. The employees required training to change their password frequently in the system. In an information system, all the data are stored in electronic form in the database. The major issue in the system is the loss of data due to any technical problems or natural calamities. GEC needs to backup their data on a daily basis at a remote and secure place to retrieve the information in case of data loss.

Ethical Issues and Solutions: Ethical issue in the information system is defined as the wrong and the right process followed in the system. The ethical issues in the information system lead to unauthorized access to misuse of information within the organization (Zhou et al. 2013, p-68).  GEC required identifying and defining the code of ethics and needed to monitor if all the employees are abiding them for eliminating the ethical problem in the information system.

Conclusions

In this particular paper, GEC is proposed to install various information systems like Knowledge Management System, Business Intelligence System for efficient management of the business operations and procedure. The utilization of the internet, extranet and intranet will allow the easy business communication and collaboration between the employees, clients, and stakeholders of GEC.  The assignment further identified the different issues and problems in the information system. Therefore, it can be concluded that the implementation of the Information System will provide GEC with a competitive advantage while managing the documents in more efficient and effective way.

References

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