Abstract

The information explosion and increasing business demands have put heavy pressures on information systems (IS) management almostto the point of creating an identity crisis. For competitive advantage, successful businesses have been able to integrate the changing IS environment into the business environment. To accomplish this required a bonding of business and IS goals which literally turned out to be an organizational revolution resulting in a philosophical change for managers at all levels in the organization. For IS the challenges could be likened to the days of yore search for the Holy Grail or the "fountain of youth." Successful managers in search of excellence can no longer expect to find magical solutions to technical problems; in fact, the problems may be more management and people oriented requiring solution by both non-technical and technical resources working in concert. The challenge is sharpened by statements such as one made by Peter Drucker in 1991 that, "within the next 10 years, both the structure of organizations and the jobs of the senior people within organizations will be drastically changed, primarily because of information. " There is little doubt that change, and with it flexibility, is the key to success in IS management. The rapid proliferation of emerging information technologies drives home the point that IS cannot run in place without losing ground. Even the traditional classes of architecture for data processing, word processing, data management, spread sheets, and data communications are changing at a greater pace than current IS organizations can absorb. To meet today's and tomorrow's challenge requires that IS executives and managers must look at the entire enterprise--not just the technical. This involves the business environment and processes and then deftly fitting in a reengineered IS and information technology (IT) to meet increasing demands in anenvironment of greatly reduced budgets. Taking this broader view does not lessen the impact of automation and high technology but shifts some of the emphasis in other directions. The focus can remain on the computer but, in the final analysis, values to the organization are in the business processes. Only with the shift to a business philosophy can bridging the gap between research and practice become a reality in the 21st Century. The rapid proliferation of emerging information technologies drives home the point that IS cannot run in place without losing ground. Even the traditional classes of architecture for data processing, word processing, data management, spreadsheets, and data communications are changing at a greater pace than current IS organizations can absorb. To further analyze this in the presentation, ten major emerging technologies that must be recognized by IS will be identified as critical and trendy developments. This presentation will concentrate on how these IS challenges can be met, how resistance to change can be overcome, why IS design is more of an art than a science, why must the IS/MIS be user oriented, what should a successful information technology platform look like, what are the critical emerging technologies, and what are the major issues facing IS. Business climate and integrating methodologies will be at the forefront.

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