BRIDGING THE GAP - BUSINESS AND INFORMATION SYSTEMS: A ROADMAP

Abstract

The success and rapid development of Information Technology (IT) has been a reason for increased interest in utilizing Information Systems (IS) for the business management. However, extensive usage of Information Systems for business is still at amateur level in Sri Lanka, and in many cases, it is limited to large scale enterprises. Requirement of high capital investment for bespoke solutions is a reason for the reduction the number of organizations that use IS. Conversely, commercially available solutions need immense customization to cater for one’s specific needs. Experiences in many cases have shown that managing the Information Systems inline with the objectives of the business is not straightforward. All these issues had led some business organizations to suffer from the digital divide. In this paper, this situation has been analyzed both from management perspective and IT perspective. The aim of this paper is to merge these two fields to reduce the identified gap between IT and Business providing a competitive advantage for enterprises, and give maximum Return On Investment (ROI) from Information Systems. The paper tries to introduce several state of the art tools and techniques to bridge this gap. Business management has its own paradigms and so with the IS management. Numerous redundant aspects of both fields are put together and Key Process Areas of these two paradigms with best practices were used to form a clear path to manage IS in business.

Keywords: Business Objectives, Information Systems, IS Lifecycle Management, IT Roadmap, Process Paradigms

For full paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.lk