Investment

TUTORIAL 8: SUMMARY & REFLECTIONS

In this week tutorial, students were asked to discuss three case studies that involved usage of IS system in three organisations. The first case study is about the IS system implemented in a healthcare organisation which consists of many medical officers to share knowledge and cases of their patients in one IS system. The usage of IS in this system helps them to get reference to different medical conditions from other physicians under the same system even they are miles away from one another. Besides, this system helps them to hold virtual meetings without the need to gather physically at one place, thus reduce time consumption and improve their efficiency. This system also makes retrieval of information faster as compared to the conventional method which data is stored in a book and need to find reference manually. However, the main challenge of having this IS system is to keep the content of updated while maintaining the quality of knowledge provided in the system to be easily understood by other users. Furthermore, although all users have access to the same data in the system, not all physicians are able to conceive the information similarly due to existence of tacit knowledge owned by the physicians themselves.

Reflecting upon my own experience while doing part time job, the manager will usually give me more elaboration on how to execute a similar task as compared to more experienced employee. This is because the experienced employee has better tacit knowledge about the operation of the business but as for a newbie like me, I will need more explanation to do the job although we were presented with the same explicit knowledge. In the above case, junior physicians might need to refer to their senior colleagues to carry out certain treatments due to lack of tacit knowledge while senior physicians might find the information provided in the IS system is sufficient as reference.

For the second case, we discussed about the system used by a supplier of metal components for car seats. As global manufacturing companies with offices and factories are scattered around the world, the main challenge they face is to synchronise its production due to different time zones and locations from each manufacturing sites. Therefore, the use of computerised IS system is used to monitor the production process in all its production sites to meet the firm’s objectives. This company also uses management information system (MIS) in which the managers can easily troubleshoot problems as soon as they arise and make database entries to all locations at a time. The MIS system can also detect defective products from suppliers during the assembly process and settle the flaws as quick as possible, maintaining efficiency in the production. This IT based system helps to improve efficiency as the managers could monitor and troubleshoot problems across all its factories by assessing the