Investing in the IS assets to meet your changing needs, managing to reduce IS operations risks, and above all, harnessing these assets for competitive advantage is the primary function of your IS department. Your IS department must not only exploit these assets to improve business process efficiency, but also to improve IS effectiveness in executing the business strategy. Understanding Your Assets To derive the maximum value, you must understand the nature of your IS assets and how they link to your business and to other information assets. In this column, I will show one way of analyzing these information assets. This categorization is based on the criteria of usage level, data volume, application complexity, depth and breadth of organizational knowledge about the application, and the overall management support provided for the application.
Institutional systems have high transaction and data volumes with a large number of users.
These systems typically perform low-order processes, such as accounting or operational processes. A centralized IS department maintains the systems, and the data models and program behavior are widely understood across the organization. Groupware systems perform higher order processes than institutional systems, such as project planning or product design management. Although some IS departments also build capabilities such as skills and know how in developing groupware applications centrally, they primarily cater to ad hoc application needs and do not use a common framework or methodology. From a KM viewpoint, therefore, groupware systems are not managed as well as institutional systems.