TOOLS FOR BUILDING INFORMATION SYSTEMS:CONCLUSION

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CONCLUSION

Over the past 35 years, tremendous strides have been made in management information systems, contributing greatly to organizations’ abilities to grow, provide quality outputs, and operate efficiently. These strides have been fostered by continually improving hardware, advances in software tools for building ISs, formal methods for IS development, and progress in understanding the management of ISs. There is no sign that these trends are abating. Nor is there any sign that an organization’s needs

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for ISs will disappear. Thus, even though their platforms, delivery methods, interfaces, and features will change, information systems will persist as indispensable elements of tomorrow’s organizations, continuing to satisfy record keeping and reporting needs.

Integration will be a keynote as we look ahead. Integration is a collaborative interplay of com- ponents. It is operative at several levels. At the tool level, we should see a trend towards integration of traditionally distinct functions (Watabe et al., 1991). The resultant tools will enable more rapid IS development and the construction of systems having features not readily achieved with conventional means. At the IS level, we should expect to see a trend toward integration across IS classes. For instance, local ISs will increasingly be built to plug into (i.e., operate on the data of) functional and enterprise ISs; the modular ERP tools are designed for cross-functional IS integration; enterprise- wide ISs will increasingly exhibit transorganizational features. Within a very few years, all major ERP tools will be Internet-based and oriented toward collaborative activity.

At the level of business computing systems, the integration trend will manifest itself in efforts to incorporate decision support functionality into conventional management information systems. IS record keeping and reporting will still be essential for operational control, regulatory compliance, and legal purposes, but their records can be further leveraged for decision support. This can already be seen in ISs equipped with ad hoc query facilities. The use of IS records to build data warehouses that are subject to online analytical processing and data mining is another example in this direction. ERP vendors will increasingly offer decision support modules that work with their tools for building enterprise ISs (Holsapple and Sena 1999). Websites that handle transactions (create / update records and produce transaction reports) will increasingly incorporate facilities to support the decisions that underpin those transactions (Holsapple and Singh 2000).

At an organizational level, the rise of transorganizational ISs has been an important factor enabling and facilitating the appearance of network organizations and virtual corporations (Ching et al. 1996). Advances in supply chain, customer relationship, electronic commerce, and collaborative computing tools will add impetus to this trend. Its business driver is the increasingly dynamic and competitive nature of the global marketplace, in which collaboration and agility are vital. Dynamic, open business models are replacing those characterized by static trading partners.

Artificial intelligence technologies have long been recognized in the DSS realm, particularly in the guise of expert systems (Bonczek et al. 1980). It is likely that tools for building ISs will increas- ingly employ artificial intelligence technologies. This will lead to ISs that interact with users via speech (based on speech recognition / synthesis and natural language technologies), are self- maintaining (based on automated reasoning technologies), and can modify themselves in light of their experiences (based on machine learning and automatic program-generation technologies).

Application service providers will grow in importance as developers and hosts of information systems, particularly for small and mid-sized firms. These are firms that need an IS (e.g., for human resources functions) but cannot afford the infrastructure. For a rental fee, an application service provider (ASP) operates ISs for other companies on its own computing facilities (i.e., servers). ASP customers access their ISs via the Internet or private networks. ASPs specialize in various ways, such as hosting ISs for a particular industry (e.g., health care) or a particular class of ISs (e.g., transor- ganizational).

Information systems have become the centerpiece of the much-heralded Information Age. How- ever, this 50-year era is rapidly being engulfed by the emerging knowledge economy, populated by knowledge workers and knowledge-based organizations (Holsapple and Whinston 1987). Information is being subsumed within the far richer notion of knowledge. The technology-driven aspect of this knowledge economy is variously known as the digital economy or the network economy, and its fabric is being defined by a multitude of electronic commerce initiatives (Holsapple et al. 2000). To be competitive in the knowledge economy, organizations (both traditional and virtual) strive to ensure that throughout their operations the right knowledge is available to the right processors (human and computer-based) at the right times in the right presentation formats for the right cost. Along with decision support systems, information systems built with tools such as those described here have a major role to play in making this happen.

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