Which characteristics support a sustainable mis infrastructure

5 CHAPTER

Infrastructures: Sustainable Technologies

CHAPTER OUTLINE

SECTION 5.1 MIS Infrastructures

SECTION 5.2 Building Sustainable MIS Infrastructures

The Business Benefits of a Solid MIS Infrastructure

Supporting Operations: Information MIS Infrastructure

Supporting Change: Agile MIS Infrastructure

MIS and the Environment

Supporting the Environment: Sustainable MIS Infrastructure

What’s in IT for me?

Why do you, as a business student, need to understand the underlying technology of any company? Most people think “that technical stuff” is something they will never personally encounter and for that reason do not need to know anything about MIS infrastructures. Well, those people will be challenged in the business world. When your database fails and you lose all of your sales history, you will personally feel the impact when you don’t receive your bonus. When your computer crashes and you lose all of your confidential information, not to mention your emails, calendars, and messages, then you will understand why everyone needs to learn about MIS infrastructures. You never want to leave the critical task of backing up your data to your MIS department. You want to ensure personally that your information is not only backed up but also safeguarded and recoverable. For these reasons, business professionals in the 21st century need to acquire a base-level appreciation of what MIS can and cannot do for their company. Understanding how MIS supports growth, operations, profitability, and most recently, sustainability, is crucial whether one is new to the workforce or a seasoned Fortune 500 employee. One of the primary goals of this chapter is to create a more level playing field between you as a business professional and the MIS specialists with whom you will work. After reading it, you should have many of the skills you need to assist in analyzing current and even some future MIS infrastructures; in recommending needed changes in processes; and in evaluating alternatives that support a company’s growth, operations, and profits.

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opening case study

Box Up Your Data

What happens when you need a file for a class that you have on your desktop back at home? What happens when you want to share your wedding video with your friends and family around the world? What happens when you want to safeguard the 4,000 selfies you have taken over the past year? Your best bet is to store your data in a Box! Box offers data storage services that: Help you securely store, share, and manage your files.

Store unlimited data at the start.

Securely send large files online.

Take advantage of comprehensive security for mobile devices.

Easily collaborate online with anyone, anywhere.

Control who can access content.

Edit documents and files online.

Box is a cloud data-sharing service that can increase your productivity by making it easy to create and collaborate with co-workers by using computers, iPhones, iPads, Androids, or other devices. With a Box site, you can access up to 50GB of files from anywhere. Through a web link, you can invite others to share your files or collaborate on your documents, and you can synchronize files from Box to your desktop and vice versa.

Another College Start-Up Box

Rachel King from InfoWorld interviewed Box founder Aaron Levie on how he and his childhood friends started the company. Box as a platform and company was born in 2005, but even that was well after the establishment of the friendship between Levie and his cofounder and Box’s chief financial officer, Dylan Smith. Smith and Levie met as classmates at Islander Middle School on Mercer Island, Washington, a suburb southeast of Seattle, and then went to Mercer Island High School together. “Even back then he started getting me interested in entrepreneurship,” Smith recalled. “He was much more interested in technology [than business] back then.” Two other key members of the Box team were also childhood friends.

Jeff Queisser, currently vice president of Box’s technical operations, met Levie when they were in the fourth and fifth grades, respectively, as neighbors. By high school, Queisser recalled that the two were starting “kinda crazy businesses.” “[Levie] was a magician, and I was very much a hard core nerd and doing programming,” Queisser laughed.

Sam Ghods, now vice president of technology at Box, joined the group in the tenth grade when his family relocated from Illinois to Mercer Island. The same year in school, Ghods recalled that he and Queisser became friends on the bus to school, eventually hanging out more frequently with Smith and Levie as well and getting involved in various business schemes.

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In high school, Levie’s parents’ hot tub served as the discussion forum. “We would get a call at about 12:30, and it would be Aaron, ‘What do you think about this? I think this could be absolutely insane. Like, come over right now. I got towels, just bring shorts, come over,’” Queisser remembers. “This would be at 12:30 and by like 12:40, we were in his hot tub just iterating ideas.”

And although he built a lot of websites in high school, Levie doesn’t brag about having a strong technical background, admitting, “They weren’t very good websites.” One example was a search engine dubbed Zizap, which Levie facetiously peddled as “the world’s fastest search engine if you have never been to Google.” Another project was Fastest.com, a website that let people buy and sell their homes online. Levie notes sarcastically that it “made sense as a high school senior to launch that company.”

These early rumblings of entrepreneurship would soon pay dividends. Levie enrolled at the University of Southern California in 2003 to study business, which is where the idea that was to become Box began to develop. “It’s not like a lightning bolt that hits you in the head, and all of a sudden you just get so obsessed with storing files online. It was a series of factors,” he explained.

The first piece of the puzzle came from the basic difficulty of getting work done. He and his fellow students were working from lots of computers, collaborating on projects, and accessing files from different places, including libraries, classrooms, and dorm rooms.

“It felt unbelievably kind of painful and taxing to share data across those different systems and with other people. It seemed like there should be a simpler solution,” Levie remarked.

A business school project in which students were asked to evaluate a particular industry added another piece to the puzzle. Levie chose the nascent online storage industry and wrote a paper on flaws with existing businesses in the market and what one could do to build a better business effectively. It didn’t take long before he realized the massive potential. “It was very obvious that there should be a technology category that solved this problem,” he said.

“When we were talking about just the things that we were doing and the stuff we were working on, Box came up,” Levie described. “It’s very, very early in the process, and Dylan Smith decided to join on board as the other half of the business and product side. He handled the finance and some of the early marketing stuff. That was how we started.”1

Market Competition

The storage market is increasing as the price and density of storage drops about every 18 months, making it cheaper to offer free storage from big companies that can absorb the costs, such as Apple and Google. There are a number of companies competing in the cloud storage arena, as compared in Figure 5.1.

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FIGURE 5.1

Test Center Scorecard

Source: www.inforworld.com

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section 5.1

MIS Infrastructures

LEARNING OUTCOMES

5.1Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.

5.2Identify the three primary areas associated with an information MIS infrastructure.

5.3Describe the characteristics of an agile MIS infrastructure.

THE BUSINESS BENEFITS OF A SOLID MIS INFRASTRUCTURE

LO 5.1: Explain MIS infrastructure and its three primary types.

Management information systems have played a significant role in business strategies, affected business decisions and processes, and even changed the way companies operate. What is the foundation supporting all of these systems that enable business growth, operations, and profits? What supports the volume and complexity of today’s user and application requirements? What protects systems from failures and crashes? It is the MIS infrastructure , which includes the plans for how a firm will build, deploy, use, and share its data, processes, and MIS assets. A solid MIS infrastructure can reduce costs, improve productivity, optimize business operations, generate growth, and increase profitability.

Briefly defined, hardware consists of the physical devices associated with a computer system, and software is the set of instructions the hardware executes to carry out specific tasks. In today’s business environment, most hardware and software is run via a network. A network is a communications system created by linking two or more devices and establishing a standard methodology in which they can communicate. As more companies need to share more information, the network takes on greater importance in the infrastructure. Most companies use a specific form of network infrastructure called a client and server network. A client is a computer designed to request information from a server. A server is a computer dedicated to providing information in response to requests. A good way to understand this is when someone uses a web browser (this would be the client) to access a website (this would be a server that would respond with the web page being requested by the client). Anyone not familiar with the basics of hardware, software, or networks should review Appendix A, “Hardware and Software Basics,” and Appendix B, “Networks and Telecommunications,” for more information.