2. Business and organisations think through IT and information processing

All too often, potential students as well as candidates for faculty or professional staff positions do not fully appreciate the deep and vital linkages between IT and the ability of any type of business or organisation to adapt, to change, to compete, to innovate and to create value. This is because they do not fully understand or appreciate that business and government organisations rely on IT and information processing to think.

So often, when we interview potential applicants for our SIS undergraduate programme, we hear students comment, “But I did not think IT had anything to do with business.” or similarly “If I am interested in business, I did not realise I would gain a strong advantage by entering the School of Information Systems at SMU.” How misinformed and wrong these potential undergraduate applicants were (at least until they went through our SIS admissions interview!). They did not realise that the way a modern business organisation and even a global economy “thinks” is through information processing capabilities enabled by IT software applications and systems.

Think about changing nearly anything in a modern business organisation these days, or in the future. How could you make any meaningful change across the enterprise or across the value chain without changing some aspect of the IT and software systems? Essentially, every aspect of business operations and customer service delivery is dependent upon automated data collection and management and upon business rules and logic embedded in software applications. The way an organisation thinks and makes decisions is increasingly dependent upon software enabled analytic decision analysis and decision support applications. In addition, there are also the ever expanding IT systems for enabling data and knowledge integration across processes and organisational units, and for sharing information across the enterprise, business partners, customers and stakeholders. IT systems and related internet applications are essential in most organisations for managing information workflow and for electronic channels of content distribution and service interaction. Related to all of these different aspects of information processing, there are also the many issues associated with ensuring that people access and share information in a secure and trustworthy manner.

Even for today's small scale local enterprise, it would be very difficult to make any substantive change without altering some of these aspects of IT-enabled information processing. For any company or organisation that functions across larger geographic areas, such as across countries on a regional or global scale, it is already impossible to implement any enterprise-wide change related to products, services or management operations without altering and improving their IT software systems and related business solutions.

In our teaching, projects and research, we do not focus on the hardware and commodity infrastructure aspects of IT (e.g. keeping the network up, keeping e-mail running, backing up databases, building better hardware, keeping the desktops working, installing and maintaining equipment), even though these “utility services” are very important. Of course, in our education and research, we have to deal with some of these “low level” issues to some extent as required, simply as a matter of practicality. However, this level of IT is not what the SMU School of Information Systems is about.

In our research and teaching related to information systems technology, we are primarily focused on designing, creating and leveraging software applications and information services that can cope with or solve some of the problems encountered by business and government organisations. We delve into the methods and models within the software that provide the functionality, logic and intelligence to enable “organisational thinking”. We explore how to use building blocks of software applications and information services to create larger applications and solutions which are “systems-of-systems”. In our IS Management work, we delve into the economic, strategic and business issues associated with different alternatives for investing in, using, or organising these IT solution capabilities.

In essence, we focus on how IT software applications and information services can be used to enable and improve the information processing and thinking aspects of an organisation. We also focus on how these software methods, applications and services can be combined and assembled into larger scale building blocks and applied within the context of business settings. As we do this, we are always mindful of how to create and provide software based applications and services that can support change, transformation, innovation and value creation within business and organisational settings.

We organise our teaching and research around the following five areas:

•  Data Management & Business Intelligence
•  Information Security & Trust
•  Software Systems, Architecture & Integration
•  Intelligent Decision Support Systems
•  Information Systems Management

These five SIS areas are essential components of the “brains, vital organs and central nervous system” of the business enterprises. By grounding our education and research in these five areas, we naturally link to the world of business and the economy.

The five areas noted above are all essential for helping individuals and groups within business and government organisations to think. This thinking occurs through people using these types of IT technology and management capabilities:

•  To sense the information in the environment;

•  To analyse and make sense of the information fragments and patterns;

•  To solve problems and to make decisions;

•  To plan strategies and tactics for how to adapt and to change; or