Summary Management of Information Systems Tutorial 1

McAfee (2006). Mastering the three world of information technology
One of the biggest problems companies face is coping with the abundance of technologies in the marketplace. Besides that, corporate IT projects have often delivered underwhelming results or have been failures.
Executives usually operate without a comprehensive model of what IT does for companies a good model/theory does 2 things: * It groups important phenomena into categories * Within these categories it makes statements of cause and effect
One way to build a comprehensive model is to place IT in a historical context IT is the latest in a series of general-purpose technologies (GPTs), innovations so important that they cause jumps in an economy’s normal march of progress.
Research suggests that 4 organizational complements allow process GTPs to deliver improved performance: * Better-skilled workers * Higher levels of teamwork * Redesigned processes * New decision rights

The three categories of IT It category | Definition | Characteristics | Capabilities | Examples | Function IT | IT that assists with the execution of discrete tasks | * Can be adopted without complements * Impact increases when complements are in place | * Enhancing experimentation capacity * Increasing precision | Simulators, spreadsheets, computer-aided design, and statistical software | Network IT | IT that facilitates interactions without specifying their parameters | * Doesn’t impose complements but lets them emerge over time * Doesn’t specify tasks or sequences * Accepts data in many formats * Use is optional | * Facilitating collaboration * Allowing expression of judgements * Fostering emergence (= high levels patterns of information because of low-level interactions) | Email, instant messaging, wikis, blogs and mashups | Enterprise IT | IT that specifies