Let me today talk about Strategic Information Systems to educate anyone one who thinks of leveraging ICT in their organization.
(1) Many local organizations don't have an information strategy in place. They think ICT is just having computers and connectivity infrastructure. ICT is still considered as something for data processing only.
(2) Many people are yet to realize that ICT can give you a strategic advantage. In the 21st century, you need information to make accurate and timely decisions.
(3) When you design your products, you have to devise a way of getting feedback from your users so that you can be able to continuously improve the experience of your products.
(4) Using an information strategy, it is also possible to implement an information system environment where one functional unit to learn what is happening in another functional unit. A typical example of implementation is the use of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
(5) ICT can offer more, provided that you think strategically. You need to learn how you can create value from your ICT infrastructure. How you can serve your customer better using ICT.?
(6) An information strategy is a deliberate move to identify the demand of information within an organization. You can identify which information is needed and who is the consumer of that information.
(7) For instance the Marketing and Product innovation departments may be interested to know what people are saying about their products on Social Media. They can achieve this through the use of Big Data tools.
(8) Developing an information strategy, requires hiring of a consultant to visit different functional units of your organization to talk to people and analyze both their documents and day to day operations so that they can recommend an appropriate information strategy.
(9) Once an information strategy is in place, the basic implementation can start by having an ERP (Enteprise Resource Planning). These is a software suite to enable sharing of information among different transaction information systems from functional units.
(10) After that, you need to think how you can go beyond sharing of information. Now innovation comes into play. You can think of things that add value to your products. You need to come up with prototype quickly and get feedback from customers. The process is iterative
(11) Through, iterations you can learn how to best serve your customers.
(12) Let me now provide an example of organizations in Tanzania that don't have an information strategy, and opportunities that are there for having an information strategy. I will talk about local universities.
(13)Most universities have academic managements information systems that are integrated with admission systems. A lot of data is being generated in these systems that can help university get feedback about their curricula, admission criteria, etc.
(14) Therefore, these universities, don't have information strategies in place, hence don't know that they are sitting on top of a gold mine of 21st century (data).
(15) I can give an example of how the university can learn and adjust its entry requirements. When a student registers, for the first time they input their O-level and A-level results into an academic management information system (AMIS).
(16) Then in each semester students do examinations where their scores are then fed into AMIS. This process goes on for years and a lot of data is being generated. Can one learn from this information?
(17) We have very advanced techniques in data science/Artificial Intelligence that you can use to garner insights from this data. After several years, you can be able to tell how students with certain A-level subjects perform in certain degree programs
(18) Using that information, universities, can adjust their entry requirements accordingly. This is just one example. Just go learn more about strategic information systems. Here is the end of my tweets. #StrategicInformationSystems #Entrepreneurship #Competitive.
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