To understand the information systems used in an organization, two stories must be taken into account:
- the history of technology, because if a company was born thirty years ago, the technologies it will have adopted will be greatly influenced by history;
- the history of companies, because for many companies the history is not linear, but subject to mergers, spin-offs, acquisitions, and therefore their information system will have changed with them.
The evolution of the company is important for those who develop information systems: information systems are dynamic entities and are sometimes subject to very tight deadlines.
To develop a company's information system, it is first of all necessary to understand what the needs of organizations are. The first step is to interpret the needs of the company and know how to understand the problems, trying to grasp the idea of โโhow it works. In fact, today organizations are no longer able to say what they need without imagining the solution they would like (for example, they do not ask to "manage the logistics", but ask for "a for logistics "). It is therefore our task to know how to interpret these needs: each company has different purposes and reasons, so we need to create systems that meet every single need.
The first problem therefore consists in being able to:
- identify all possible information, as it is impossible to access all of them, since no one within the company knows every single part of the system in their possession,
- being able to advise the company in the choices to be made, listening to its needs.
Then we want to distinguish the three facets of the systems, analyzing the levels of integration between these facts, identifying their stiffness points, the emerging problems (they will indicate to us where the questions that will make the stiffness points of the problems come from).
Given the rigidity to which the problems are subjected, the question is no longer that of integrating a date X with a date Y, but is to define the possibilities of integration. Integration costs must be reduced, allowing an organization to radically change its structure.
Another problem to be faced is that of where to put the services: it is possible to equip the company with an e-mail, but if there is a customer management system, for example, we can integrate the e-mail to that system. Many document management systems, in fact, today integrate technologies such as e-mail.
The problem of integration also arises in this area: the more we move towards groupware, the more we have integration problems concerning the tools used and their sectors of use.
To think better, we will make a picture of what's in it Italy, for two reasons:
- we will probably find ourselves analyzing the Italian organizations;
- Italian companies have unique characteristics.
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