California Southern University Future of Information Delivery Discussion Question Q. Discuss the future of information delivery. Minimum 600 words Use at

California Southern University Future of Information Delivery Discussion Question Q. Discuss the future of information delivery.

Minimum 600 words

Use at least 2 references

Use the attach documents for referance Information Delivery Best Practices
.
Approach information delivery as an iterative development project. No one gets it right
the first time.
• Separate data from function to create greater flexibility.
Buy data models and enhance them. This will save many person-years of effort.
• Use middleware to translate data from one system to another. This is especially important
for companies using several different packaged systems, each of which contains its own
embedded data model.
• Evolve toward a real-time customer information file. These files are notoriously difficult to
build all at once; however, having a single source of customer information makes man-
aging customer privacy much easier and also makes it possible to offer new integrated
products and services.
• Design information delivery from the end user (whether external customer, employee, or
supplier) backward. This substantially reduces internal infighting and focuses attention on
what is really important.
organization wants to accomplish with information and how it proposes to derive busi-
ness value from it. Interestingly, many organizations are currently placing their highest
priority on using information for internal management and administration. Employee
self-service cuts out much administrative overhead in human resources management,
procurement, and accounting. “There are huge savings to be gained by delivering bet-
ter information on our operational processes and using information to better manage
workflows and approvals,” said a participant.
Some firms are also developing microstrategies for particular areas of the busi-
ness or types of user. These small-scale initiatives often involve giving users sub-
sets of data containing the specific information they need and appropriate analysis
tools. One company has developed an information-access architecture that provides
different types of tools to users depending on their abilities to use them to “mine”
data. Basic users are given canned inquiries with drill-down capabilities and the
ability to export information into an Excel spreadsheet. More skilled users are given
basic analytic tools and access to metadata, and expert users are given professional
analytic tools.
At the other end of the strategy scale are companies such as UPS, CEMEX, and
Monsanto that have made information a strategic priority. Each of these companies has
an enterprisewide strategy for using information. UPS collects information about every
element of the delivery process (Watson et al. 2010). CEMEX uses information to control
every aspect of its cement production and delivery logistics worldwide (Kettinger and
Marchand 2004). Monsanto improved the accuracy of its sales forecasting by routinely
testing assumptions about prices and trends (Holmes 2011).
THE FUTURE OF INFORMATION DELIVERY
Organizations have begun to discover the power of information, but they have barely
scratched the surface of what will be possible over the next decade. Already new tech-
nologies are beginning widespread implementation that will have as big an impact on
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Section IV • IT Portfolio Development and Management
information delivery as the Internet has had over the past decade. These technologies
will not only change what is possible to do with information, but they will also change
how we view the world of information delivery and how organizations and individuals
behave with respect to information. Some of the most im ant future directions for
information delivery include the following:
The Internet of things. Wireless communications and radio frequency identifi-
cation (RFID) product tags will soon enable organizations and industries to track
individual physical objects (e.g., cans of beans, car parts) as they move through the
supply chain. Already, Walmart is conducting large-scale trials of this technology
with two hundred of its major suppliers. Within a few years, many predict that RFID
will replace the Universal Product Code (Langton 2004). And this is just the begin-
ning. As these technologies become more sophisticated, organizations will be able
to track and remotely monitor the status of everything from the freshness of lettuce
between the field and the store to the location of hospital supplies. Even though this
technology is almost ready for prime time, most organizations are nowhere near
ready to cope with making sense of such a large influx of information. This will be
one of the biggest challenges of the future (Smith and Konsynski 2003).
Networkcentric operations. The growth of standardized communication proto-
cols, network devices, and high-speed data access will soon make it possible to
collect, create, distribute, and exploit information across an extremely heteroge
neous global computing environment in the near future. Value will be derived from
the content, quality, and timeliness of the information moving across the network.
Three critical elements must be in place to achieve this goal:
1. Sensor grids. These are coupled with fast and powerful networks to move raw
data. Small sensory devices and computers will be connected to other machines
to evaluate and filter a wide variety of information, highlighting areas and
anomalies to which the organization should pay attention (Watson et al. 2010).
2. High-quality visual information. Along with sophisticated modeling and sim-
ulation capabilities and display technology, high-quality visualized information
will provide dramatically better awareness of the marketplace, operations, and
environmental impact. This will enable more targeted strategies, support more
focused logistics, and provide full-dimensional understanding of the business
environment at a variety of locations and levels.
3. Value-added command and control processes. Superior information will make
the loop of control shorter, effectively taking decision rights away from competi-
tors and providing rapid feedback to frontline workers.
These new capabilities will be developed to achieve information advantage (i.e., to
know more) and execution advantage (i.e., to produce less friction between parts) over
competitors.
•
.
Self-synchronizing systems. Traditionally, leaders have worked from the top down
to achieve synchronization of effort. When decisions are made in this way, each itera-
tion of the “observe-orient-decide-act” (OODA) loop takes time to complete with the
front line passing information up the hierarchy until enough is accumulated to make
a decision, which is then passed back down the organizational levels to the front line
to take action. In contrast, we know that complex processes organize best from the
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Chapter 21 . Information Delivery: IT’s Evolving Role
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bottom-up (eg., markets, the Internet, and evolutionary processes), and they are effi-
cient and can allocate resources without high overheads. Such self-synchronization
eliminates the lags in the OODA loop and accelerates responsiveness.
In the future, information in organizations will be used to promote self-
synchronization to enable a well-informed workforce to organize and coordi-
nate complex activities from the bottom up without management involvement.
(Crowdsourcing is an early application of this concept.) Systems themselves will
be designed to self-monitor and self-correct in a similar way. This will dramatically
change the role of management and how organizations operate. Leaders will set the
“rules of engagement” but be much less involved in the day-to-day running of their
organizations (Smith and Konsynski 2003).
Feedback loops. A central feature of self-synchronization is the creation of
closed feedback loops that enable individuals and groups to adjust their behav-
ior dynamically. Researchers have already demonstrated the power of feedback to
change behavior (Zoutman et al. 2004). Feedback mechanisms built into systems
will require the creation of new metrics for monitoring such individual behavioral
factors as transparency, information sharing, and trust. Similarly, organizations
will incorporate feedback loops into their operations, continually scanning and
evaluating and adapting strategies, tactics, and operations. With the right technol-
ogy and infostructure (i.e., appropriately organized and managed information),
different views can be brought to bear on a situation and adjustments made on an
ongoing basis.
Informal information management. Finally, organizations have a significant
unmined resource in the informal information kept by knowledge workers in their
own personal files. Information-delivery mechanisms of the future will look for
opportunities to organize and leverage this information in a variety of
ways. For
example, software exists today that “crawls” people’s address books to find who
in an organization knows people whom others in the organization want or need
to contact. Other types of software analyze personal files to compile an expertise
profile of individual employees. The field of informal information management is
still in its infancy, but it is certainly one to which IT managers should pay attention
because it represents a huge, untapped pool of information.
Conclusion
Information delivery in IT is an idea whose
time has finally come. IT practitioners and
experts have been talking about it for years,
yet only recently has the business truly begun
to understand the power and the potential of
information. New technologies and channels
now make it possible to access and deliver
information easily and cheaply. As a result,
information is now being used to drive many
different types of value in organizations,
from business intelligence to streamlined
operations to lower administrative costs to
new ways to reach customers. The challenges
for IT are huge. Not only does effective infor-
mation delivery require IT to implement new
technologies, but it also means that IT must
develop new internal nontechnical and ana-
lytic capabilities. Information delivery makes
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