CASE STUDY

Case Study

Case Study

Section A

Introduction

ABC LTD operates under license to the UK Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Authority. The Board of ABC LTD however view the terms of the license as a minimum and are renowned for exacting the very highest standards of manufacture and medicine formulation and testing. Good customer care is the key to ABC's continuing success. The Board's stated mission is to combine good, responsive customer service and quality products, with an environment that encourages innovation.

Critical Review

The business environment is undergoing a dramatic change. Companies are under increasing pressure to respond quickly to changing market conditions. The demand for innovation, flexibility, and shorter time to market for new products has led to rethinking industry structures. New ways of intertwining IT and business structures are sought to maximize business flexibility. Concepts such as componentization and service orientation are developed to construct new business models were the business function (service) is separated from its fulfilment (implementation), allowing an enterprise to deconstruct, analyze, and then reconstruct distinct business functions into value nets. The process of deconstruction is realized through business components, which firms link efficiently and seamlessly with best-of-breed components provided by external partners to support their business processes. This enables companies to swiftly adapt their processes to changing market conditions and to adapt their contemporary business model.

The utilization of IT to create and support business components is referred to as IS services. The use of a service architecture leads to new roles in the business. In essence, services differentiate from other types of IT by the emergence of service intermediates. Hence, three large groups of stakeholders can be defined in a services environment. There are the service providers: they develop the services and publish the interfaces of their services to the service intermediates. The service intermediates (brokers) are the go-betweens that help the requestor to find the appropriate service. Service requestors are organisations in need of a service: they can send a request to the intermediates when looking for services. Once the service and its provider are identified, the service requestor binds to the corresponding service provider to consume its service. Each group has its own perspective on services, with their own goals and advantages.

In today's increasingly competitive business climate, there is a growing requirement for stronger cost control and a demand for higher returns while minimizing risks of investments. Recognition of the potential impact of IS services and service architectures on the strategic power of companies makes the evaluation, justification and control of such investments a critically important issue. However, the record on measuring and controlling investments has not been impressive. While financial economics is well-established and applied in many areas, there is not much data published on quantitative financial analyses for major IT-investments. Most companies are still characterised by an ad hoc, unstructured and unpredictable investment processes. Only a fraction of the organizations rely on rigorous methods to calculate the benefits of investment in IT. The reasons for these failures can be complex: technical, human ...