Management Information Systems
These MIS systems are critical to business processes and as most executives say, critical for competitive profit. However, when the
process of implementing and maintaining MIS and Decision Support Systems (DSS) becomes paramount, keeping middle managers updated with latest tools that follow industry best practices becomes a burden on the IT department. This is what happens when the IT department fail to see their vision...
Where I work, we have two separated IT departments. The "IT" department is the traditional infrastructure/support/etc department that is around in all food manufacturing companies. It plays a secondary role in business operations. My department is a sales team support department, focusing on providing the latest gadgets, programs and tools for the business marketing & sales department.
We're a highly organised and efficient work unit, pumping out solutions at ratios which embarrass the IT department. However, we have been hitting resistance from the IT department with certain solution implementation. This solution requires some Java JRE to be deployed to corporate computers. The trade-spend package, by Blueshift Corporation, called
Feathers TPMS allows us to provide almost live trade spend and promotional data from our near Sydney, Australia headquarters to sales representatives, middle managers and executives in Western Australia, New Zealand and other countries. Its a great package which provides better functionality and easier integration than SAP Business Warehouse. For the record, the SAP BW has taken over 6 years to set up across 8 international sites, while Feathers has worked in a few months. SAP BW is being perpetually overhauled and upgraded with maintenance outages being common.
Structurally speaking, implementing SAP BW requires a redundant cluster of proprietary database (SQL Server, Oracle, Sybase) whereas Feathers TPMS runs happily with the open source MySQL.
(We have it running on SQL Server, for SAP integration). About SAP integration - Feathers runs happily with SAP, both complementing each other.
The most important thing now is turning this great potential into a strong competitive advantage. Feathers blurs the boundary between a TPS and a DSS. This MIS is a great tool for managing retailer promotions with up to date data.
However, all this comes at a strong cost with a stagnant IT department. The IT department has come to realize the value of business processes over business solutions. Thats quite a contrast! What I mean is that the IT department can see that the Feathers TPMS solution is a better one, with more features and quicker delivery, however they also see that changing their existing infrastructure to empower the strengths of Feathers TPMS will disrupt their highly calibrated and smooth working information chain.
Its a great ability to be able to move, but unless the IT department sees value in harbouring technological solutions which provide better business intelligence to middle and senior management, the struggle for what is better over what works will continue.
I will keep you posted as this MIS saga continues....