Warren McFlaran is a professor of Information Systems Administration at the Harvard Business School. In his paper, "Information Technology changes the way you compete" he describes a taxonomy for classifying the use of Information Technology in an organization into four types, Factory( We have chosen the term incipient to fit this organization better), Support, Turnaround and Strategic. We have briefly described each classification with examples and then explained the case of Madison County's Highway Department. Factory (Incipient): This is a very basic utilization of Information Technology to support the business function. Examples of the same could be office automation software and desktops. These could also be mainframe systems whose use positioning may have been support oriented at a certain point in time. However as time passes, a technology may shift in value to the business function due to the shift in the basic expectations of the customer and the environment. Support: Madison County's highway department currently deploys disconnected database systems to support their accounting and document management functions. The highway department has a low bandwidth internet connection which it uses to connect to the other business units of the Madison County. One can evaluate this technology as depreciating support to the business. Turnaround: The highway department with its vision to utilize information as a key asset definitely looks to turnaround the value of IT to it's business processes. By orchestrating the business processes to capture key information and storing them in distributed repositories across organizational borders, they plan to reduce cycle time and achieve process integration. |