Dublin City University

National Institute for Digital Learning

Open Education /DCU Connected

Module title or code: Managing IT for Business Success (MNA)

Assignment number: A2

Student Name: Lesley Claffey

Student ID number: 13212311

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

Table of contents:

Task A......................................................................................................................................... 3
Task B......................................................................................................................................... 6
Task C....................................................................................................................................... 10

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

Task A
D
MY POST REFERENCES

Describe one competitive strategy enabled by Bradfield, D. (2019) ‘Virtual class

(A) information systems that firms can pursue. Indicate No. 3’. [Recorded lecture] MNA:
10/12/19 how IS can support this competitive strategy. Give Managing IT for business success.
an example. Dublin City University. 12th
November. Available at:
Michael Porters four generic strategies developed in the 1980’s for https://loop.dcu.ie/mod/connecthoste
competitive advantage are taken from his Five Forces framework. d/viewrecordings.php?
These strategies are: id=1142866&groupid=0. (Accessed:
28 November 2019).
1. Low cost leadership Chaffey, D. (2015) Digital business
2. Differentiation and e-commerce management:
3. Focus strategy, implementation and
a. Cost practice. 6th edn. Harlow: Pearson.
b. Differentiation
Claffey, L. (2019) Assignment 7.
This post will describe the third strategy Focus. Information was drawn MS00B: Entrepreneurship and
from three sources a) Managing IT for business success (Langan, Emerging Technologies’. Dublin City
2018), b) Digital business and e-commerce management. Strategy, University. Unpublished assignment.
Implementation and Practice (Chaffey, 2015) and c) Virtual class no. 3
Langan, G (2018) MNA: Managing
(Bradfield, 2019). IT for business success. Dublin:
Open Education Dublin City
The Focus strategy is used by businesses who make a decision to target University.
specific markets, which could be considered as niche markets. These
strategies are further categorised under the headings of either Cost or Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P.
Differentiation. An example of a business choosing to focus on cost (2012) Management information
might be a small pottery shop operating seasonally in a rural location. systems: Managing the digital firm.
Only opening the premises for limited days in the year would help to 12th edn. New Jersey: Pearson
keep operational costs to a minimum. And as the premises would be Education.
small, the owner could staff the business with a very small team. In
contrast, a firm operating as a differentiator, might choose to offer a
premium product or service. By focusing on a narrower market it could
Lesley Claffey
Lesley.claffey3@mail.dcu.ie

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

concentrate on addressing customers’ needs in a far superior way to
that of its competitors. The car makers Rolls Royce or Bugatti could be
listed in this category.

How can Information Systems (IS) support this?

There are many ways IS can enable and support firms in their
endeavours to gain a competitive advantage. Langan (2018) suggests
the use of data and customer analysis tools for firms operating in the
Focus – Niche category. Laudon and Laudon (2012) explain how IS use
data from, for example, credit card purchases to form patterns of
customer buying behaviour. Companies seeking to gain ‘the edge’ may
decide to focus on developing a first class customer relationship with
their clients. CareAssist a fictional emerging technology application
developed as part of the MS00B emerging technologies module
proposed a competitive strategy based on the Focus – Niche strategy
(Claffey, 2019). The business aimed to become the GoTo application
for Carers working in the Homecare environment. It proposed to do that
by becoming very customer focused and providing a high functioning
application which incorporated artificial intelligence in the form of a
natural language tool. In addition it would build strong relationships with
additional stakeholders including Health Service Executive staff, Family
G.P.’s and private Homecare Providers. There will be a need to capture
information from Customers, Suppliers and Business partners alike. A
Customer Relationship Management tool would be key to managing
these relationships which could be considered as both Business to
Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B). The Blood Pressure
management tool would provide information to G.P.’s and link with the
supplier of this product. The Financial Management section of the
application would if possible provide invoices from the Homecare
Providers who supply some of the Carers to the customer and manage
invoices from private Carers. These functions would require
Operational/Transactional processing systems, such as online bill
payment systems and person to person payment e.g. CheckFree.com or
PayPal.com (Laudon and Laudon, 2012). In summary IS can become
part of a firm’s competitive strategy by enabling competitive advantage

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

 using Porters 5 forces.

Words (536)
Kind Regards
Lesley
Date RESPONSE TO JOSEPH’S POST (A) REFERENCES
06/12/19 Hi Joseph
Chaffey, D. (2014) Digital Business
Thank you for your post on Competitive Strategies enabled by and E-Commerce Management.
Information Systems The Amazon AWS story is a good example of Pearson Education UK. Available at:
differentiation through innovation. The warning of inefficiencies in http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/
innovation by Thierry and Lescop (2009) is well made. In his dcu/detail.action?docID=5137515
chapter on Strategy and Applications, Chaffey (2014, p.240) (Accessed: 5 December 2019).
discusses the ‘productivity paradox’, a term given to the link
between a company’s investment in IS and the performance of the Isckia, T. and Lescop, D. (2009)
‘Open Innovation within Business
business. This is measured “in terms of profitability or stock Ecosystems: A Tale from
returns”. Carr (2003, cited in Chaffey, 2014, p.241) argues that IT Amazon.com’, Communications and
has become a commodity and no longer delivers competitive Strategies, (74), pp. 37–54. doi:
advantage. He suggests that the scarcity of a resource rather than http://www.idate.org/en/Digiworld/Co
the ubiquitous nature of it, is responsible for it providing a company mmunications-
with a competitive advantage. This argument is refuted by authors Strategies/Archives/Archives_50_.ht
and it is suggested that the paradox is more likely to be a result of ml.
the mismanagement of IS projects (Chaffey, 2014).
(Note to tutor: I was unsure of
Regards exactly how to reference this article
Dermot. I had difficulties getting
Lesley access to read all of it using the link
Joseph used. It does appear to
Words (154)
have been published in the journal
Communications and Strategies
though.)

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

Task B
Date MY POSTS REFERENCES

(B) What is ‘cloud computing’? What are the key References

business benefits provided by cloud computing?
15th Dec 19
Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P. (2012)
“Cloud computing is a generic term used to describe the disruptive Management information systems: Managing
transformation in I.T. towards a service based economy driven by a the digital firm. twelfth. New Jersey: Pearson
set of economic, cultural and technological conditions.”(Wardley, Education.
2009).
MarketLine (2018) Cloud Computing:
Technology and Market Trends. Available at:
In his OSCON presentation Wardley looks back at some of the
https://advantage-marketline-
historical events which he believes has shaped the use of com.dcu.idm.oclc.org/Analysis/FullReport/clou
technology as a service. He explains how John McCarthy, the d-computing-technology-and-market-trends-
computer and cognitive scientist, had the forethought to draw 63609 (Accessed: 15 December 2019).
comparisons between electricity becoming a utility service and
computing evolving from a product to a service. Wardley (2009) Wardley (2009) ‘Cloud Computing - Why IT
believes that to create this ‘highly disruptive’ shift from product to Matters’ 25 July. Available at:
service, four components are essential - concept, suitability, https://www.youtube.com/watch?
technology and attitude. Businesses need to evolve and adapt to v=okqLxzWS5R4 (Accessed: 28 November
maintain a competitive advantage over their competitors and cloud 2019).
computing can be an enabler for this (Wardley, 2009).
Bibliography
Cloud computing is a service best described under these three
headings:- Basu (2019) The advantages of cloud
computing for business. Available at:
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) https://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-
This service enables companies to use web based service providers cloud-computing-business-21914.html
such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google to run their networks, provide (Accessed: 13 December 2019).
their processing power and store their data.
Coles, C. (2015) 11 Advantages of cloud
computing in 2019. Available at:
https://www.skyhighnetworks.com/cloud-
security-blog/11-advantages-of-cloud-

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020


Platform as a service (PaaS)
This service offers companies facilities to develop and test their
software applications. Google’s App. Engine and Amazon’s Elastic
beanstalk are popular examples.
Software as a service (SaaS)
The SaaS service provides an array of software to businesses.
Popular applications includes Customer Relationship Management
software e.g. Salesforce’s Sales Cloud or Enterprise Resource
Planning software e.g. SAP through IBM. Data storage options are
also available, free of charge in some cases, for example Google
Drive, Drop box or Media Fire.
Public or Private.
Cloud services can be offered through public networks or if security
is a high priority for example financial service organisations or health
care bodies then proprietary networks or data centres can be used
in internal clouds (Laudon and Laudon, 2012).
Hybrid Model Growing
This looks like the trend at present as some companies are not fully
committed to moving all resources to the cloud. The hybrid model
will bring additional challenges to IT. Management. New strategies
and models will be required to help manage and monitor this model.
Additionally companies are choosing a managed service platform in
preferred to self-service, to help them maintain greater compliance
and accountability which include the benefits of a service level
agreement (MarketLine, 2018).
What are the key business benefits provided by cloud computing?
Authors from the world of sales and business broadly agree on the
benefits of cloud computing. Perusal from a variety of websites,
journal articles and management information literature has yielded
Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020
computing-and-how-your-business-can-
benefit-from-them/ (Accessed: 13 December
2019).
Garrison, G., Kim, S. and Wakefield, R. L.
(2012) ‘Success factors for deploying cloud
computing’, Communications of the ACM,
55(9), p. 62. doi: 10.1145/2330667.2330685.
IBM (2019). Benefits of cloud computing
Available at:
https://www.ibm.com/cloud/learn/benefits-of-
cloud-computing (Accessed: 13 December
2019).
Ismail (2017) ‘What are the key benefits of
cloud computing?’ Available at:
https://www.information-age.com/key-
benefits-cloud-computing-123468212/
(Accessed: 13 December 2019).
Jones, L. (2019) ‘Amazon Web Services
Challenges Microsoft winning the JEDI war
cloud contract’. Available at:
https://winbuzzer.com/2019/11/15/amazon-
web-services-challenges-microsoft-winning-
the-jedi-war-cloud-contract-xcxwbn/
(Accessed: 5 December 2019).
Morgan, J. (2015) 5 Reasons why the cloud
Is environmentally friendly. Available at:
https://www.missioncloud.com/blog/environm
entally-friendly-cloud/ (Accessed: 15
December 2019).
Salesforce (2019) 12 benefits of cloud
computing and Its advantages. Available at:
https://www.salesforce.com/products/platform
/best-practices/benefits-of-cloud-computing/
(Accessed: 13 December 2019).
 the following list of key business benefits.
Weinberger (2017) The cloud wars
1. Reduction in IT related costs e.g. explained: Amazon Web Services versus
development, procurement, monitoring, capital Microsoft Azure, Google, Oracle. Available at:
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-
expenditure.
amazon-is-so-hard-to-topple-in-the-cloud-
2. Accessibility – e.g. staff may access and-where-everybody-else-falls-2017-7?
systems anywhere and on any device. r=US&IR=T (Accessed: 5 December 2019).
3. Flexibility – e.g. processing power and
data storage may be increased and decreased
as demand dictates.
4. Collaboration e.g. team members can
collaborate across the globe.
5. Disaster Recovery e.g. the ability to
recover and restore important data quickly and
efficiently.
6. Automated software updates – this
can be an expensive and time consuming
process when not automated.
7. Environmental – Reduction in climate
impact. Helping to decrease our carbon
footprint by using eco-friendly public data-
centres (Morgan, 2015).
8. Competitive Edge – Arguably, all of the
above can help companies obtain a competitive
edge in the world of business.

Words (550)

23/12/19 Response to Joe’s Post (B) References

Thanks for your post Joseph. Your description was precise and
easy to read. In particular your reference to the service as a form of Hashizume, K., Rosado, D.G.,
outsourcing reminded me of the discussions that are being had Fernández-Medina and Fernández, E.
around associated security issues for companies choosing to go B. (2013). An analysis of security issues

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

with the cloud. for cloud computing. Journal of Internet
Services and Applications, 4 (5).
If I remember correctly when I was working in the finance sector and doi:10.1186/1869-0238-4-5
the idea of outsourcing of various IT tasks was being broached, the
security of customers’ data was a major concern. In their article on
the analysis of security issues for cloud computing Hashizume, et.al,
(2013) discuss some of the vulnerabilities and threats associated
with cloud platforms. Storage, virtualisation and networks pose the
largest security concerns. In particular issues around the many
types of virtualisation technology which use different security
processes. There is a complex system architecture used in the
cloud environment and this also adds to the security challenge.

Regards.

Lesley

Words (148)

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

Task C
Date MY POSTS REFERENCES

(C) What is ‘knowledge management’ and how can firms use it to their
competitive advantage?
6/1/20
Knowledge management (KM) refers to the set of business processes Cox, S. A. (2014) Managing
information in organizations: A
developed in an organization to create, store, transfer, and apply
practical guide to implementing an
knowledge (Laudon and Laudon, 2012). This can be considered a ‘value information management strategy.
chain’ of business processes where each stage of the chain adds value to Palgrave Macmillan: Basingstoke.
information and raw data. Laudon and Laudon (2012) believe that the Available at:
field of knowledge management is 80% organisational and managerial http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/d
and 20% technology. Information management and knowledge cu/detail.action?docID=4763482
management systems whilst connected, have a subtle difference best (Accessed: 28 October 2019).
described by Sing (2007, citied in Cox, 2014, P.323) Information
management is tasked with documenting and retrieving explicit knowledge Laudon, K.C. and Laudon, J.P.
whilst knowledge management is the process of generating value from (2012) Management information
systems: Managing the digital firm.
these assets. Information management facilitates the knowledge
12th edn. New Jersey: Pearson
management process. Two such examples are:- Education.
 Capturing information for organisational
learning Lee, V-H., Foo, A. T-L., Leong, L-Y.,
 Ensuring information is meaningful and Ooi, K-B. (2016) ‘Can competitive
accessible by authorised staff. advantage be achieved through
knowledge management? A case
An example of this might be the instigation of a Risk Assessment process study on SMEs’, Expert Systems with
and workplace guidelines following an incident/accident. If employees only applications, 65, pp. 136–151. doi:
10.1016/j.eswa.2016.08.042.
learn as individuals about incidents or accidents then the likely hood is
that a similar incident will re-occur. The knowledge gained from the Urbancová, H. (2013) ‘Competitive
incident needs to be documented and a process put in place to help advantage achievement through
prevent similar events. In other words transformation needs to take place. innovation and knowledge’, Journal
Effective KM can be achieved by the presence of three elements within of competitiveness, 5(1), pp. 82–96.
organisations. doi: 10.7441/joc.2013.01.06.
1. Processes to enable the KM to take place
2. People who are willing to engage, – a
.

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

 knowledge-sharing culture.
a. Tools. e.g. Create repositories that can store
and share explicit knowledge
b. Facilitate the creation and sharing of tacit
knowledge by utilising online forums, webinars, and
workshops.
c. Maintain up to date directories and documents
to enable quick and easy contact and access of
people and documents. (Cox, 2014).

Most of the above has focused on KM working from within organisations.

But it is also important to ensure that there are processes in place to
capture external knowledge from both customers and competitors alike.
Social networking has become a popular way for firms to create
relationships within social communities and share information in the form
of photographs, videos and blogs (Cox, 2014).

What then is the greater value of all this knowledge? One strategic value
is to use it to gain competitive advantage in the market place.
When browsing the literature it became apparent that a third element
‘innovation’ is often added to the scenario.

Urbancová (2013, P.10) draws conclusions from a survey of internet firms.

Research showed that 80% of firms who believe in the importance of
innovation to gain competitive advantage also support “knowledge and
experience sharing by current employees”.
Capturing key information from employees is certainly seen as an
important part of gaining competitive advantage through knowledge
management. Lee et al., (2016) survey of Malaysian SME’s discovered a
strong relationship between KM and technological innovation. They
conclude that SME’s can achieve a stronger competitive advantage by
increasing investment in KM. They suggest the creation of a taskforce to
monitor KM practices and an employee reward/acknowledgment scheme.

In summary capturing employees uniqueness and creating working

conditions that are conducive to knowledge sharing are now considered

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

 key ingredients to achieving a firms’ competitive advantage (Urbancová,
2013; Cox, 2014; Lee et al., 2016).
Words (531)

Date Response to Joseph’s post (C) Reference

10/1/20 Hi Joseph Tutorialspoint (2020) MIS Knowledge
Thank you for your post. The Xerox story is eye opening. I imagine that fix management system. Available at:
alone has paid for the creation of the KMS! I came across some information https://www.tutorialspoint.com/manag
on tutorialspoint which I think summarises the topic of KM well. They list ement_information_system/knowledg
e_management_systems.htm
purposes of KMS as:-
(Accessed: 9 January 2020).
1. Improved performance
2. Competitive advantage
3. Innovation
4. Sharing of knowledge
5. Integration
6. Continuous improvement by –
a. Driving strategy
b. Starting new business lines
c. Solving problems faster
d. Developing professional skills
e. Recruiting and retaining talent.

I particularly liked their section on the Activities in KM which lays out in a clear
way how to use a KM system:-
1. Start with a business problem and its value.
2. Identify a strategy to help deliver the value and
address the KM problem.
3. Think about the system required from both a people
and process perspective.
4. What technical infrastructure is require to support the
process?
5. Implement system and processes in stages with
appropriate change management in place.

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020

Regards

Lesley

Words (169)

Assignment 2 – MNA – 2019-2020