sisp issues
TRANSCRIPT
SISP ISSUES
SISP ISSUES: Success or Failure
Omar bin Mohamad Pauzi2010559559
M. Sc. (Information Technology) Students,Faculty of Mathematical and Computer Sciences,
Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM),Shah Alam, Selangor.
Abstract
Planning is one of the most important things in everyday life. Most people have routine in their everyday life where if the person is working, then, every morning he or she have to wake up earlier and ready to go for works and back home in the evening except weekend if they are not working in weekend. Same goes to school children where they come and go back from school in the morning and evening. Not only in individual life a person must plans, to bring an organization or company to success, planning also plays very important roles moreover in this world of technology where everything can be automated using technology such as computer. To make this happen and avoid from it become chaotic, a deep and careful planning must be done. SISP is one of the field that cater about the planning of the information system and it objective is to make sure the organization or company can control their business process to optimize the resources and gain a lot of benefit. Even though the creation of SISP is to give positive element to an organization or company, it sure has its drawback if the people do not carefully implement it in their organization or company. This paper discusses the key success factors and key failure factors when implementing SISP in an organization or company and also comes out with an example of research that have been done toward some organizations and companies. The division of topic in this paper will be for part I is the introduction, part II is the key success factors in implementing SISP, part III is the key failure factors in implementing SISP and in part IV is the lack of SISP in organization and finally in part V is the conclusion.
Keywords: SISP issue, key success, key failure, implementing of SISP.
I. INTRODUCTION
Most of the people learnt since in the primary school where planning is very important in life
where if an individual does not have any planning, thus, his life will become chaos and
unstructured where he does not know what to do. Even in Islam, Allah gave his servant choices to
take even though Allah already knows what would happen in the future. It is because He wants us
to learn to plan for the future and if we did not take any action to get a better future, then, we will
never get a better future. Same goes to the company and organization where there are a lot of
factors that influence and affect the success of a company and organization such as their product,
market, competitor and many things. Thus, planning become very important to them for them to
predict what would happen in the future and also to prepare for something unexpected. It is also
to improve their company and organization. Moreover when now is the era of technology and
there are a lot of information can be found. It become crucial to one company to keep the
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information safely because it can be their
factor of success or failure if the information
goes to a person that is not qualify and
authorize to use that kind of information.
As said before where now is the era of
technology, there is Information System (IS)
and Information Technology (IT) that can be
used to manage that information and it needs
to be managed carefully and strategically.
People in the era of 1970’s have already
thought about managing the information where they come out with Management Information
System (MIS) and therefore in 1980’s, Strategic Information System (SIS) have been known as a
system critical to business operations and competitive advantage (Issa-Salwe and Aloufi,
2011). Today, the pervasive nature of IS and the increased pressure to leverage technology assets
has rapidly raised the importance of Strategic Information System Planning (SISP) (Pollack,
2010).
When there is planning, there is also the process to plan. Pollack 2010 have summarized the
SISP planning process in figure 2 where Strategic Business Planning is compulsory to the
systems planning and it includes also mission,
future direction, target and strategy. While
Information System Assessment is the
evaluation of current IS resources, Information
Systems Vision is the ideal role that should be
pursued to use IS resources, Information
System Guidelines is a state of statements that
articulate use of organization’s technical and
IS resources and the finally, the Strategic
Initiatives which is the 3 – 5 years of proposal
that gives new initiatives for IS organization (Pollack, 2010).
Topics that will be discussed in this paper will include the key success factors in SISP
implementation in the next part that is part II, the key failure factors in SISP implementation in
part III follows by case studies and conclusion for part IV and V.
II. KEY SUCCESS FACTORS IN SISP IMPLEMENTATION
SISP is an improvement in the world of making strategy and planning of an organization or
company where it involves the technology which comes from the SISP itself that is Information
Figure 1: Framework to show the importance of IS
Soure: Pollack T. A., 2010. Strategic Information Systems Planning. 2010 ASCUE Proceedings, p48.
Figure 2: Strategic IS Planning Process
Soure: Pollack T. A., 2010. Strategic Information Systems Planning. 2010 ASCUE Proceedings, p50.
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System. There are many opinions in defining and identifying the key success factors in SISP
implementation. According to Hisham and Ariza (2006), they put the operational definition of the
success of SISP - according to Earl in their paper, is when it fulfill the satisfaction scores, absence
of problems and audit checklists. Meanwhile, Lederer A. L. and Sethi in the same paper
operationally defined the success of SISP when it fulfills the objectives that are the business is
aligned with IT, competitive advantages is gained, payback and strategic applications is
identified, top management commitment is increased, communications with users is improved, IT
resource requirements is forecasted and allocated, information architecture is developed and the
visibility of IT is increased. Hartono, et. al. (2003) in the paper defined operationally the success
of SISP is when the organization had implemented SISP study in their organization, objectives of
SISP achieved and the result of the study benefited the organization (Hisham and Ariza, 2006).
While Al-Aboud (2011), studies done in defining the success of SISP where the success are
measured from the ‘goal-centered judgment’ and ‘improvement judgment’ which mean that it is
considered from the output of the planning system and its adaptability of the process. In simpler
word, IS planning system and IS planning system capability is identified. Thus, today,
environmental factors, managerial factors and organizational factors become the main focus of
researching the success of SISP in term of its goals – as said above, that is its alignment, analysis
and cooperation and also its improvement which is its capability (Al-Aboud, 2011).
In exactly the same way as Al-Aboud (2011) mentioned in his paper about the definition of
the success of SISP, Henry, et. al. (2003) and Albert (1998) were also written the same
measurements in their paper where Albert (1998) did mentioned about the judgment and gave
another two judgments in assessing the capability, effectiveness or performance of SISP success
that are ‘comparative judgment’ and ‘normative judgment’. Comparative judgment evaluate by
comparing the effectiveness of the system with the same or similar system in the same
organization or between comparable organizations. The result should be better than the similar
system to show the success of SISP. Normative judgment also comparing SISP system with
another system but the other system is only theoretically ideal system such as the idea of an
expert about a future system.
The main point here when measuring the success of SISP implementation is by looking at
what is the benefits given by SISP when implementing it to the organization mostly toward its
productivity and adaptability. It includes the satisfaction of the organization itself where the
optimum used of resources can be achieved and it is dynamically change according to the
environment such as the market, social, culture, time, place and others. In concordance with the
objective of SISP implementation which is to align with the raising of needs and strategies for an
organization (Al-Aboud, 2011).
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III.KEY FAILURE FACTORS IN SISP IMPLEMENTATION
Every company or organization aim for success in the field they are focusing to or in their
core business and they know the risks and obstacles that they must overcome before they can
achieve of what they aim for like running the gauntlet. They also will try any action to make sure
that the company or organization can achieve the goal and objective and also their vision and
mission. The action included implementing SISP. To avoid from not getting any benefit from the
implementation, it is important to the company or organization to know and understand
thoroughly about SISP itself. For example was said by Al-Aboud (2011), SISP have many stages
for implementation and an organization must carefully ensure the implementation of each stages
is done correctly and properly to avoid the negative issues to the organization which may cause to
the organization failure either on short term or on long term.
In every organization, there are many departments that have their own work scope and tasks
but still related to each other thus communication is very important to ensure the synchronization
between departments in the organization that can avoid from redundancy of works and to make
sure all the information is shared between the departments. Calhoun and Lederer (1990) focus on
the strategic business planning which they said that it is the most important thing in an
organization to succeed and the strategic business plan must be shared throurghout the
department to avoid from inallignment. Thus, they conclude that high quality of the strategic
business plan and the communication of the business plan is needed for SISP. Pita, Cheong and
Corbitt (2009) list out top five management concerns that are attracting, developing and retaining
IT professional, IT and business alignment, IT strategic planning, security and privacy and
business process reengineering. From their paper, they focus on human factor which is the
perspective of the top management where most of top management does not believe that IT or IS
become an enabler towards an improvement in the business process. Their assumption is that the
top management did not have
much knowledge to understand the
plan and they – top management,
did not believe that IT can carry
out the strategic planning. Even in
some of organization and
company, they put IT as a
department just to supervise electronic devices in the organization or company or to buy new
electronic devices according to what the employees needed and justified about it.
A research by Neeley (1990) showed also that the human factor is the challenge to implement
SISP. 40% most extreme problems in implementation, process and output of SISP were kindred
Table 1: The Key SISP Barriers
Soure: Pita, Z., Cheong, F. & Corbitt, B. 2009, Major Issues in SISP: Insights into the Main Reason of SISP Failure, 17th European Conference on Information Systems, p2.
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to personnel issues. Resent research by Yeo (2002) describe IS as a failure if the whole system
operated unexpectedly where its overall performance is only sub-optimal. Another failure factors
are when it does not perform as expected even in the implementation phase and it is rejected by
the users and users does not used it or not fully utilized it. When looking at the cost of
implementation, if it is exceed the benefit to the organization or company, it also can be
considered as a failure system. People are also tend to abandoned the project of implementation
before it is completed when they feel that it is very hard to do it at that current time without
thinking the benefit of it for a long period of time.
Thus, from the literature review, most of the obstacles or barriers come from human itself
where they did not have much knowledge about SISP and how to implement it accordingly. They
also did not convince and believe that IT can help in improving their organization moreover to
give the trust to IT in their organization’s strategic planning. Support are needed in SISP
implementation either mentally or physically because if there is no one willing to support in
doing the SISP implementation, then that cannot be done. Most of all is the support from the top
management which also includes financial support.
IV. SISP LACK IN ORGANIZATION
SISP today become the most important thing in an organization and company and everyone is
trying to implement SISP in their own organization to improve their business process and
services. Some organization do it in house while the others outsourcing to vendors because of the
lack of knowledge in their own organization. Either way, they all are hoping to get a lot of benefit
from SISP implementation.
One organization at Croatia has been the best interest by Spremic and Strugar (2002) and they
did a research there about SISP implementation in that organization. According to them, Croatia
have an advanced technology but still not giving SISP as their interest and look it up to
implement it in their organization. Every planning made are related to political issues and it is
treated occasionally without any systematic way of treating it and because of the changes of
environment over time, they did not want to continue any research on SISP area. They – Spremic
and Strugar, found out that Croatian organization does not care much about SISP and treated it as
only an operational tool with less effect and impact on the company’s strategy even though from
the result of their study also shows that SISP does not really concern about the company size and
the employee quantity. The support for implementing SISP only come from IS management and
top management but line management did not involved in the project which giving the
organization the risk of IT failure. In other words, major barrier in implementation of SISP in
Croatian companies is from the lack of practicing strategic planning and less cooperation from
inside of Croatian companies and lack of knowledge in defining business and IS strategies.
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Another study has been done by McBride and Hackney (2001) at St John’s Hospital at United
Kingdom. This hospital give an expert service in orthopedics, urology, gastroenterology,
maternity, rheumatology, cardiology and pediatrics which includes diagnostic imaging,
ambulance, laboratory, therapy service and also pharmacy. This hospital is stated in tourist area
thus when it comes to holiday season, there are a lot of foreign patients with a non-booked
admissions. From the research done, the authors comes out with some questions such as why the
IS strategy was produced, what changes from the external and also the internal environment
effect and influenced the SISP implementation, how was the IT strategy naïve, and lastly the
question of the IS strategy exercise is worth in that hospital. The authors found that with the
SISP, it brings closer between clinicians and managers in term of communication and cooperation
and because of it, the IT managers aware about the information management and how it may
benefits to the hospital. The technology and business environment changes will give a better
influences on IS direction inside an organization.
From both case studies, the main focus is the management that includes the top management
and also the IT management where both managements do not have enough knowledge in SISP.
They are afraid of the environment changes that can affect their business process when they
implement SISP even though the reality is that SISP will help them moving towards and adapting
to the changes of the environment. Thus, it may also reduce the cost of labor and resources
because almost everything is automatically controlled by the computer and everything is recorded
to find any loop holes in the strategy when implementing SISP but people does not see that. They
only look at its first stage of initiating the implementation where for sure that the cost may rise a
bit to implement it but the cost will become lower over time when the implementation is already
matured and stable.
V. CONCLUSION
The technology of SISP is already there in this world and as mentioned before, the big factor
that become the barrier to the SISP implementation is the human itself where they are still lack of
knowledge in the IT and does not think that IT or IS are an enabler towards improving their
organization or company and even if they know that it is good for a long period of planning, they
still does not want to put an effort to that and giving it up after finding it complicated even though
the process is already half to go to the finish line. The truth is everything that is good will give
good result in the end. People have to change their way of thinking towards positive thinking by
trying all the possible matters that definitely give a long period of benefit and people must stop
from being a ‘toxic-people’ where this kind of people always criticized, negative thinkers and
always try to stop other people from doing something by giving excuses that may convince other
people to not do anything that they are planning for. As for Muslim, they will not lose anything
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by giving it a try even though the risk is high because Allah has promised that when you have
tried enough and do it and then praying to Allah to make it come true, then Allah will give it and
even though if the thing that the person aim for did not get in this world, it will be a presents and
gifts in the end of the world which is in heaven as promised.
Acknowledgement
I as the authjor are very grateful to the honorable and dedicated lecturer, Dr. Ariza Nordin for
the guidance and best advices in doing this term paper. Also a special thanks to all our colleagues
for a great discussion and comments on this paper that give a lot of information and advise either
in the initiate process of writing this term paper, the process of writing it and the final check up on
the format of this term paper. It is a pleasure to acknowledge them of that work.
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3. And will provide for him from where he does not expect. And whoever relies upon Allah - then He is sufficient for him. Indeed, Allah will accomplish His purpose. Allah has already set for everything a [decreed] extent.
(Ath-Thalaq[65]:3)
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