CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Change Management in Information Systems



Change Management in Information Systems

Introduction

In today's dynamic world everything is changing very radically; and as the 21st century dawns, revolutionary changes are also beginning to challenge the business and marketing world. To cope with the increasing competition and uncertainty, companies need to take advantage of the information technology (IT) and information systems (IS). IS offer firms new ways of improving efficiency? Thus, the need for management of information is becoming the heart of marketing for the firms in order to survive in highly competitive markets.

Traditionally a marketing information system (MkIS) has been seen as a system to support the marketing management in its decision making. Talvinen classified MkIS into six groups based on the type of primary use (Talvinen, 1995). These classes are data gathering, data analysis, marketing planning, marketing decision making, implementation of marketing activities, and control. The use of MkIS allows companies external control (control of marketing environment and activities) and internal control (control of marketing effectiveness, performance against plans and personnel).

As the significance of management information systems (MIS) has been increasing, marketing and business environments have been revolutionizing through the applications of IT. Hence, the role of MIS in business and marketing has been also changing continuously due to rapid advancements in technology. The purpose of this research is to grasp the development, change, and transformation of MIS in marketing and business over time. This change in the management and implementation of IS can be examined over time through several ways. Content analysis is one of the ways to capture the change in MIS and to understand the effect of this change on marketing and business implementations.

Literature review

The field of MIS has been changing in response to the needs of the business and marketing environment. The purpose of this study is to understand the development, change, and transformation of MIS in the marketing and business over time. Reviewing the content of the articles that is published in professional and academic journals can be helpful to see the evolutionary change in the field of MIS. Thus, in this study, content of the articles was analyzed to capture the changes and trends that likely have an impact on MIS concepts, processes, and implementation.

The results of the content analysis indicate a change in the themes and concepts of IS over the past three decades. Between the years 1970 and 1979, most of the articles have concentrated on the development of IS design and they have underlined critical factors in achieving successful and effective IS design. In the first ten years, IS has been used predominantly to support the managers in their decision making. Besides, it is evident that implementation of IS into sales management has been popular and widespread in this era. However, IS implementations in the sales management have been limited to make forecasting about the sales and to take feedback from the sales persons.

However, in the second ten years, IS implementations have disseminated into different domains of business such as ...