Managing Diversity
Strategic responses to a changed environment

In a previous section we saw that the global, knowledge-based economy was both diverse and complex. In this section, it will be argued that the strategic responses to the need to manage this diversity can be understood by using the concepts of control and collaboration to assess the potential costs and benefits of the various strategic options. If you are not familiar with the concept of a strategy you should look at the notes of strategy and tactics from another course or one of the text books from the MIS books section and/or the work of M. Porter or S. Neumann.

• Control
  Control is a one-way, hierarchical, top-down approach to co-ordination between or within business processes. It is a formal activity that is centralized, proceduralised, restrictive and explicitly exclusive. Control is often associated with a sequence of activities that cross internal or external organizational boundaries. Information Systems are often used as a technological solution to problem of maintaining control over certain processes in an organization.

• Collaboration
  Collaboration is a multi-directional, interactive, ebb and flow of ideas and opinions between people. It is often an informal, decentralized and loosely structured activity. It usually contains a social component, is empowering and is implicitly exclusive. Collaboration is an activity that takes place within certain groups in an organization with defined, socially constructed, boundaries such as teams or professional groupings.

The lecture will use the idea of the risks and rewards associated with these strategic responses to changes in the external environment to examine the potential costs and benefits of four different approaches to managing diversity.

Reading

Books

• See any of the books from the MIS books section

or

• Ward. J. and Griffiths. P. Strategic Planning for Information Systems, Willey, 1996
• Peters. T Liberation Management: Necessary disorganization for the nanosecond Nineties. Pan, 1992
• Neumann, S. Strategic Information Systems - Competition through information technologies. Macmillan College Publishing Company, New York, 1994
• Chap 1 and 5 in Porter. M.E. Competitive Advantage: Creating and sustaining superior performance, Fee Press, 1985
• See also any of the books from the books section, in particular, Robson. W. Strategic Management and Information Systems: An Integrated Approach, Pitman Publishing, 1997.

Articles

• Lundkvist, A (2004) User Networks as a Source of Innovation, Chapter 9 in Knowledge Networks: Innovation through Communities of Practice, Paul Hildreth and Chris Kimble (Eds), Idea Group Publishing, pp 96 - 105.
• Sangway. D. (1994) Information Management: maximizing the value and reducing the costs of your information resources. Information Management and Technology, 27(4).
• Porter. M.E. and Millar. V.E. (1985) How Information Gives you Competitive Advantage, Harvard Business Review, July-August, pp. 149 - 160.
• Goldhar. J.D. and Jelinek M. (1983) Plan for Economies of Scope. Harvard Business Review, November - December, pp. 141 - 148.

Links

• If you wish to search for additional sources of information, use the MIS links page

• From Big Brother to Electronic Panopticon
• Communication and Trust in Global Virtual Teams
• Collaborative Software

• The Path of Development of Strategic Information Systems Theory
• A Process-oriented Assessment of the Alignment of Information Systems and Business Strategy
• Strategic Information Systems Theory in 'Low-Competitive' Contexts

Some illustrative examples

• BPR and the Internet: Transforming Business for a Connected World
  The Internet and corporate Intranets present opportunities to re-engineer business processes for direct access between customers and suppliers. Re-engineering for this environment requires close integration of business plans, business processes and business information, to ensure that systems are built that are closely aligned with strategic directions.

• Designing Organizational Memory: Preserving Intellectual Assets in a Knowledge Economy
  Organizations have a valuable asset in the informal knowledge that is the daily currency of their knowledge workers, but this asset usually lives only in the collective human memory. This paper explores the design of an organizational memory system that overcomes the barriers to capturing such knowledge.

• The Factors Influencing Information Systems Outsourcing Partnership
  This study focuses on the working relationship between the outsourcing service receiver and the service provider in the outsourcing on-going stage based on a social perspective. The purpose of this study intends to use the social theories to investigate the influencing factors of IS outsourcing partnerships between the firm and the service providers.

• Managing Collaborative Innovation in Complex Networks: Findings from Exploratory Interviews
  This paper discusses why companies should consider collaboration with customers and suppliers for innovation and identifies a set of activities that appear to be critical to managing innovation.