MIS2 (assignment2)

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan?

For the passed time of our discussion we have discussed about plan , a strategic plans for our self for the future , we had learned also about why we should do these, how we could imply these plans.

Planning is important not only for us in our self but also for the company , businesses , firms etc for the future achievements of the organizations. They have business plans and some of these businesses has a Information system plan(IS plan) for the better service of the company .For us to know more about the nature of the these two (Business plan and IS plan ) lets discuss their destinction.

Business Plan

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan

Business planning is a management-directed process of identifying long-term goals for a business or business segment, and formulating realistic strategies for reaching those goals. Through planning, management decides what objectives to pursue during a future period, and what actions to undertake to achieve those objectives. Plans may be broad and encompass the entire enterprise, like a plan to double corporate profits, or they may concentrate on certain functional domains, such as information technology planning. Business planning may also entail developing contingency plans of what to do if some goals prove unattainable along the way or of how the business would survive a crisis, e.g., data center failure, natural disaster, and so forth.

Successful business planning requires concentrated time and effort in a systematic approach to answer three basic questions:

1. Where is the business enterprise today?
2. Where does management want to be in the future?
3. How can the business accomplish this?

In answering the first question management assesses the present situation and its implications for future developments. Through planning, management concerns itself with the future implications of current decisions it is about to make, and considers how these decisions limit the scope of future actions. The second question anticipates future profitability and market conditions, and leads management to determine pragmatic objectives and goals. Finally, management outlines a course of action and analyzes the financial implications of those actions. Often management will specify measurable outcomes along the way that will demonstrate whether the business is progressing toward the goals as planned. From an array of alternatives, management distills a broad set of interrelated choices to form its long-term strategy. It is in the annual budgeting process that management develops detailed, short-term plans that guide the day-to-day activities meant to attain the objectives and goals.

PURPOSE AND FUNCTION OF PLANNING

Effective planning enables management to craft its own future, at least to some degree, rather than merely reacting to external events without a coherent motivating force for corporate actions. Management sets objectives and charts a course of action so as to be proactive rather than reactive to the dynamics of the business environment. The assumption, of course, is that through its continuous guidance management can enhance the future state of the business.

PLANNING CONCEPTS

Business planning is a systematic and formalized approach to accomplishing the planning, coordinating, and control responsibilities of management. It involves the development and application of: long-range objectives for the enterprise; specific goals to be attained; long-range profits plans stated in broad terms; adequate directions for formulating annual, detailed budgets, defining responsibility centers, and establishing control mechanisms; and evaluative methods and procedures for making changes when necessary.

Implicit in the process are the following concepts:

• The process must be realistic, flexible, and continuous.
• Management plays a critical role in the long-term success of a business.
• Management must have vision and good business judgment in order to plan for, manipulate, and control, in large measure, the relevant variables that affect business performance.
• The process must follow the basic scientific principles of investigation, analysis, and systematic decision making.
• Profit-planning and control principles and procedures are applied to all phases of the operations of the business.
• Planning is a total systems approach, integrating all the functional and operational aspects of the business.
• Wide participation of all levels of management is fundamental to effective planning.
• Planning has a unique relationship to accounting which collects, books, analyzes, and distributes data necessary for the process.
• Planning is a broad concept that includes the integration of numerous managerial approaches and techniques such as sales fore-casting, capital budgeting, cash flow analysis, inventory control, and time and motion studies.

A business plan, then, incorporates management objectives, effective communications, participative management, dynamic control, continuous feedback, responsibility account .

Information System plan

A information System plan is a a process for developing a strategy and plans for aligning information systems with the business strategies of an organization.

The systems planning function of the life cycle seeks to identify and prioritize those technologies and applications that will return the most value to the business. Synonyms include strategic systems planning and Information resource management.

Study the Business Mission with Information System

Although many businesses haven't formally documented their mission, they all have one. If information systems are to truly return value to the business, they need to directly address that mission. Thus, the first phase of systems planning is to study the business mission.
Ideally, the scope of the phase should be the entire business. For some companies, that is much too large. consequently, the scope might be reduced to a more manageable level-a division, a plant, or some other significant operating unit. For other companies, the scope of the phase is limited by the level of top management support received. Top executives of the organization must be willing to participate in the development of any strategic plan.

Planning analysts are specially trained information systems planning professionals. Their job is similar to that of systems analysts; however, they must be even more business-oriented that? the average systems analyst. Planning analysts must be familiar with the planning methodology to be used and the deliverables to be produced. They require a unique blend of skills and experiences, including business management, systems analysis and design, data management, and networking.
Many IS shops have difficulty finding the correct mix of these skills. Particularly, IS professionals tend to be either too applications-oriented, too database-oriented, or too network-oriented. In this case, the business usually hires management consultants to serve as the planning analysts. These consultants are widely available through IS consulting firms (e.g., Ernst & Young, James Martin & Associates, or IBM)
The input to this phase is the business mission, as "discovered" through interviews and group sessions with system owners. The business mission Is usually defined in terms of customers, products and services, material resources, human resources, geographic operating locations, management structures and philosophy, corporate goals and objectives, unavoidable business constraints, critical business success factors, and other management-oriented criteria.
The key deliverable is business plans. Hopefully, those plans already exist; this phase merely translates them into terms or formats that are useful to the system owners and planning analysts in subsequent planning phases. (All too often, that plan does not exist!)
Based on the findings of this phase, the planning effort could be canceled due to a lack of management commitment or funding. It Is more likely, however, that the project will continue to the next phase-possibly with a reduced business scope.

My analysis about the question “What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS?” is that IS plan is an important thing in business planning now a days .And this starts with the evolvement of the businesses .For now many organizations prefer to have a Information system and in that this component would help them to make an business plan of their company.

IS exist to support the needs of the business area . Without this connection, information technology can be a solution in search of a problem and business goals may not take into account new IS capabilities. As planning processes mature over time, business planning and IS planning should align to meet the same goals. Any endeavor that seeks to improve the organization must take into account all the tools available and deliver an integrated solution. Even today, it is rare to find a business initiative that doesn’t contain an IS component that must be coordinated with organizational, human resource, and procedural components.
IT planning occurs in a framework of other types of planning . IS Strategic planning, IRM planning, business planning and tactical planning are all closely related. In addition to plans, there are enterprise and IS Architectures design documents used to optimize information systems and IS investments. They create a model to ensure the choice of technologies has the greatest long-term value and benefit to the organization. The following chart shows how each of these elements relates to the state organization hierarchy, business and IS domains, and to each other.

Real estate organizations are globally undergoing dramatic changes and shifts in their underlying operating models — a direct result of extensive M&A activity, expansion of product offerings, geographic expansion and an increasingly transparent and global economy. The trend of outsourcing key business processes to emerging service providers adds additional complexity, resulting in increasingly sophisticated IT demand

Reference:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan

http://newton.uor.edu/Courses/SysAnaDes/planning.html

http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Bre-Cap/Business-Planning.htmll

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