Strategic Information Systems

&citemExplain the use of Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) and Executive Support Systems (ESS) in an organisation of your choice. Also explain the role of IS led change in successful adoption of such systems. Please provide examples and illustration where required.

The science of today is the Technology of tomorrow.

(Edward Teller, American Physicist and Author)

The 21st century has witnessed an age for Organisations to follow the flow of the technological pragmatic shift from manual to automation of their business processes, procedures and activities. As a result, organisations are being driven towards the technological frontier in the opportunity to acquire more new customers and attain a competitive advantage over their competitors. In this modern era, the use of Information Systems (IS) have played a major role for Organisations to transform society, creating innovative and easier ways of managing their business operations. Information systems (IS) can be defined as set of interrelated components working together to collect, process, store and disseminate information to support decision making, coordination, control, analysis and visualization in an organisation. (Laudon & Laudon, 2002, p.7).

The aim of this assignment is to explain the practical application and limitations of using Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) and Executive Support Systems (ESS) towards my chosen organisation, Sony. The next section of this essay will explain the role information systems and how their management and led change has impacted upon the organisation itself, providing clear justifications and examples.

Altogether there are six types of Information Systems performing at six different levels of Sony. Fig 1 provides a diagrammatical view as to where TPS and ESS lie in Sony’s information systems structure.

The main purpose of Information systems like TPS and ESS at Sony, is to achieve it’s special criterion objectives for which it has been built for, where each system designed usually follows a set standard procedure and information systems process as explained in Fig.2

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Headquartered in Japan, the organisation Sony was established in 1946 and is run under the reigns of it’s British CEO Sir Howard Stringer (Sony 2007).

Since beginning, Sony has acquired the brand reputation and image of making highly technological products in the electronic consumer goods industry. By far it has been very successful in building awareness and selling it’s state of the art inventions. Fig.3 gives a summary of Sony’s innovative creations.

Let us now begin by defining what Transaction Processing Systems and Executive Support Systems and how Sony utilises their usefulness while conducting it’s business activities and operations.

Transaction Processing Systems (TPS) are defined as operational level business systems which observe, trace and record the basic activities such as credit decisions, cheques and sales on a day-to-day basis (Laudon et al 2002). At Sony Transaction processing systems are developed separately for different departments like Finance, Production, Human Resource Management and Marketing, each with a specific function (Fig.4).

The advantages of using TPS at Sony are countless. They are very reliable, consistent, durable, easy to use and accurate in matters of speed, recording and retrieval of records, carrying out the process in a matter of seconds. Serving both as a benefit and a limitation of TPS at Sony is in matters of inflexibility, where transactions in HR and Finance departments are treated the same regardless of any employee or customer (JPU 2007). This means everyone is treated the same way. Major disadvantage of TPS is it’s process state which uses atomicity, where transactions