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Unit 1: Management Information Systems

If you watch the mergers taking place in the corporate world between the telephone companies Notes
and cable TV companies, you can start to understand another major change that may be in store
for us. The companies are working toward a convergence of the “entertainment outlets” we
know as television and the Internet. Why can’t we download a movie off the Internet whenever
we’re ready to watch it instead of having to follow a TV channel’s set schedule? This idea may be
a reality in a few years.
The music industry is struggling with the issue of music downloaded from websites. How do
the musicians protect their copyrighted work while making the music more accessible to the
public? How do the music publishing companies protect their business from disintermediation,
the process of eliminating the middleman from transactions?

1.2.2 Role of Information Technologies on the Emergence of New
Organizational Forms

During the last years, a consensus is emerging that to survive in the competitive turbulence that
is engulfing a growing number of industries, firms will need to pinpoint innovative practices
rapidly, to communicate them to their suppliers and to stimulate further innovation. In order to
be competitive, companies are forced to adopt less hierarchical and more flexible structures, and
to define strategies able to combine reduced costs, high quality, flexibility and a quick answer to
customer requirements. Nowadays, there are very few companies with enough resources to
form its value chain on their own.
Therefore, some changes are taking place within individual companies and in their relations
with other organizations, creating new structures in which relationships between customers
and suppliers are suffering considerable changes. One of these changes is concerned with the
formation of networks in which there is a division of labour that allows each company to exploit
their distinctive advantages, and be more competitive globally.
In a network model, a set of juridically independent companies establish cooperative long-term
links in order to achieve a higher level of competitiveness. The enterprises that belong to a
network have not all the elements needed for manufacturing a product or providing a service
under their absolute control. Therefore, the success of this kind of structures is conditioned by
the coordination degree obtained along the realization of inter-organizational activities, which
requires an efficient communication system among the partners. The Information Technology
(IT) represents a supportive element that facilitates the transfer of information across
organizational boundaries. In this paper we analyze the inclusion of the Interorganizational
Information Systems (IOS) concept within the network model and discuss the role IT plays in
enabling organizational transformation towards emergent forms of organization.
In order to attain relatively low costs in the last two decades the enterprises followed strategies
of backward-forward integration, based on the improvement of the effects of the experience
curve and the scale economies. We consider that this internal growth may be inadequate to face
the new situations appearing in the nineties and, no doubt, those that will appear in the next
century. The individual enterprise has less capability for foreseeing the consequences of the
different business decisions; however, the need for competing in a more and more complex
context requires the adoption of quick decisions, which facilitate the flexibility of the enterprise.
New technologies, fast changing markets and global competitiveness are revolutionizing
relationships both within and between organizations. Thus, the new environment requires
from the enterprises a strategy able to agglutinate reduced costs, high quality, flexibility, and a
quick response to the needs of the customer.
Nowadays, the enterprises have to compete in a more and more turbulent scene, which obliges
them to adopt less hierarchical and more flexible structures. During the last years, a major

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