Relationship Between Organisations, Information Systems, and Business Processes:

Relationship Between Organisations, Information Systems, and Business Processes: 

An organization is a stable, formal social structure that takes resources from the environment and processes them to produce outputs. This technical definition focuses on three elements of an organization. Capital and labor are the primary production factors provided by the environment.

Business processes refer to the manner in which work activities are organized, coordinated, and focused to produce a specific business result they also represent unique ways in which organizations coordinate work, information, and knowledge and the ways in which management chooses to coordinate work. Managers need to pay attention to business processes become they determine how well the organization can execute and thus are potential sources of strategic success or failure. Although each of the major business functions has its own set of business processes, many other business processes are cross-functional such as order fulfillment. Information systems can help organizations achieve great efficiencies by automating parts of these processes or by helping organizations rethink and streamline them. Firms can become more flexible and efficient by coordinating and integrating their business process to improve the management of resources and customers.  

The nature of business is another aspect that significantly influences the design of information systems while a large number of attributes of the business have an impact on the information systems, the following are the salient ones:

• Size of organization 
• Size of the user population
• User interaction
• Level of automation
• Organization culture
• Nature of business   

The Challenge of Information Systems:

Although information technology is advancing at a blinding pace, there is nothing easy or mechanical about building and using information systems. There are five key management challenges in building and using information systems:

1. Obtaining business value from information systems.
2. Providing appropriate complementary assets to use information technology effectively.
3. Understanding the system requirements of a global business environment. 
4. Creating an information technology infrastructure that inflexible enough to support changing organizational goals; and  
5. Designing systems that people can control, understand, and use in a socially and ethically responsible manner.