IS/IT STRATEGY

Business Strategy and IS/IT Strategy - The Case of Marketon Inc.



Business Strategy and IS/IT Strategy - The Case of Marketon Inc.

Imagined Fictitious Organization

The fictitious organization selected for this discussion is Marketon Inc., an organization working in the Marketing Consulting Industry.

A Profile of the Sector

The industry is highly active and organizations working in this industry provide services in the area of marketing practices and strategies. The services offered range from the development and recommendation of marketing strategies, to the implementation of marketing strategies. In addition, clients in this industry range from business start-ups to MNCs; with clients preferring consultancy providers that have significant experience and diverse portfolios.

Introduction

Information systems are an integral part of modern business. They allow real-time monitoring of business processes across the value chain and enable cost-effective and timely communication with customers and suppliers. However, the rapidly increasing complexity and demand for modern information systems makes their sustainable and efficient operation of a new challenge in the corporate governance.

A more detailed analysis of the current Information Technology (IT) situation reveals a wasteful use of computing resources. Many commercial data centers are characterized by a low average utilization. The reasons for this inefficiency include that information systems are typically scaled to the maximum expected load. In operation, they are highly exposed to fluctuating load (McNurlin & Sprague, 2005). Moreover, they are often developed with a strong focus on service quality. Cost factors are therefore often regarded as secondary. Meanwhile, this issue very well known and under the name of Green IT are already a variety of concepts have been developed to reduce the environmental impact of IT and reduce operating costs (Mullins, 2007). Due to the higher complexity of large IT systems, these concepts are, however, these are often not fully applicable.

Discussion & Analyses

One possibility for the efficient and flexible operation of large information systems are resilient systems. This new software design paradigm allows the resource dynamic operation and allows the utilization of the benefits of cloud computing to ring resource allocation. In particular, this concept allows the addition and removal of resources during the term, and thus the adaptation of infrastructure to the actual payload in operation (Xiaojun & Belkin, 2010; Schniederjans & Cao, 2009). Although the potential of this new method is generally acknowledged, nor do many of the problems are solved by a ready to allow use of this new technology.

The objective of management of information systems is to ensure that no harm could jeopardize the sustainability of Marketon Inc. (Saebo, Kossi, Titlestad, Tohouri & Braa, 2011; Hyunmyung, Jun-Seok & Jayakrishnan, 2012). This is to reduce the likelihood of threats to materialize, to limit damage or malfunctions induced, and allow a return to normal operation at acceptable costs and delays in case of disaster. Management does not directly earn money but avoids losing. This is nothing more than a preventive strategy that is part of a business intelligence approach (Choi, Kim, Yungman & Kim, 2011; Newkirk, Lederer & Johnson, ...