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HALMSTAD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF BUSINESS AND ENGINEERING

CASE STUDY: MR. PARKER`S COMPANY

KELITON CRUZ
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HALMSTAD
2009
KELITON CRUZ
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CASE STUDY: MR. PARKER`S COMPANY

Conclusion Course presented as a partial

requirement for obtaining the title of graduate in
Business, University of Halmstad, under the
guidance of teachers:
Mrs. Jo Smedley
Mr. Torben Svane

HALMSTAD
2009

SUMMARY

1 ABSTRACT............................................................................................................................4
2 CASE STUDY BACKGROUND..........................................................................................5
3 CONCEPTS............................................................................................................................6
3.1 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY......................................................................................6
3.2 BUSINESS PROCESS.........................................................................................................7
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3.3 ARCHITECTURE AND INFRASTRUCTURE...............................................................8

3.3.1 Enterprise Architecture......................................................................................................9
3.3.2 Information System Architecture.....................................................................................10
3.4 DOING BUSINESS ON THE INTERNET........................................................................14
3.5 ETHICAL AND LEGAL USE OF INFORMATION........................................................16
3.6 HOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IMPACTS ON AN ORGANIZATION.....................16
4 MARKETING INFORMATION SYSTEM......................................................................17
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5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS...............................................................19
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1 ABSTRACT
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This paper will show the role of IT in achieving the organization’s strategic
development of goals, improvements in doing business and maintain the good work-flow. It
will explain some concepts (business process, information technology, marketing information
system…), which make up Information Technology as well as enhance the company
internally and externally. With Information Technology the company will have a great
management control, all departments have great access to information, enabling them to
function more effectively and efficiently, and since projections are more accurate or now
available, management will be able to make long-term strategic plans. Based on those
concepts, a plan of Information Technology will be developed and implemented in Mr.
Parker`s company, since this is the first time that the company will have a IT department this
is going to be an amazing opportunity to expand the company, their services, products, brand
name and image towards its competitors.

2 CASE STUDY BACKGROUND

Parker is a large department store with 25 departments of various types, e.g. food,
men`s clothes, women`s clothes, men`s shoes, women`s shoes, garden tools etc. The store was
founded in 1960 by Mr. John Parker, the company it is successful even though Mr. Parker has
always been very traditional limiting the use of computers and information technology. In the
year of 2008, Mr. John Parker retired and his son Mr. David Parker now was the new chief of
the company, before this happen Mr. David Parker has had some ideas about an implementing
of strategic use of technology and information system into the company, these ideas were not
approved by his father, but now he was free to implement those concepts, that will help the
company to get a new sight of the market and remaining as a big company as it is now.
Implementing new strategies it is not easy as it seems, it has to be seen very carefully
and has to have goals, objectives, acceptance of the people who work in the company, its
stakeholders etc. Based on some ideas Mr. David Parker has hired a consultant in business
information technology to help and implement strategic systems and technologies into the
company.
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3 CONCEPTS

To begin with, let`s have an idea of what is coming up:

o How information technology changes the nature of work, e.g. how and where it is
done and who with.
o Business processes.
o Architecture and infrastructure.
o Doing business on the internet.
o Ethical and legal use of information.
o How a management system impacts on an organization.

3.1 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

According to Sharma, Yetton and Zmud, (2007):

“The change is a central feature in the implementation of

Information Technology (IT).Usually IT is implemented with the
intent to promote or a support initiative in organizational change
and effective implementation requires a series of changes at both
the organization and the people”.

Start thinking in IT and how its work is a very good start to know how IT can really
increase the company itself, not just internally but externally as well that’s why many
companies threat IT as if was the most important part of the company, of course that is not
correct, because a company should work together in every way and that’s where IT comes,
connecting everybody in the company trying to do its best to not let the company down.
Information technology is increasingly competitive business environment (globalization,
transformation of industrial economies, transformation of the enterprise), in other words IT is
the use of computers and software to manage information, known as well as Management
Information System (MIS) and/or Information System (IS).
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The IT department is responsible for storing information, protecting information,

processing the information, transmitting the information as necessary and later retrieving
information as necessary. IT department would use computer, servers, database management
systems, would be made up of system administrators, database administrators and one
information technology manager, all that it will be reported to the CIO (Chief Information
Officer).

3.2 BUSINESS PROCESS

According to Leymann, Roller, and Schimidt (2002):

“Business process management (BPM) is all about transferring the

results of business process re-engineering into production. BPM
technology provides not only the tools and infrastructure to define,
simulate, and analyze business process models, but also the tools to
implement business processes in such a way that the execution of
the resulting software artifacts can be managed from a business
process perspective.”

The BPM infrastructure provides the run-time environment for public and private
process models. It allows users to monitor the execution of individual processes, to analyze
the overall behavior of a set of business processes, to verify their successful performance, and
to provide input for process optimization.
In other words Business Process Management integrates vision of managing the
lifecycle processes, seeking to maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the business,
combining the concept of Business process and Information technology as a means of
enhancing control changes in speed, visibility, execution and optimization through continuous
improvement. As for IT specialists, the focus on the BPM as process automation through
software tools, like: Business Process Management Suites or BPMS, including mapping of
business processes end-to-end design flows and electronic forms, workflow definition,
business rules, integrators, real-time monitoring activities and alerts. It is a powerful
management tool to ensure that procedures are being effectively implemented and modeled,
contributing for the company`s goals and objectives.
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Source: www.opermix.com/BPMS.gif

3.3 ARCHITECTURE AND INFRASTRUCTURE

Information systems, despite the major technological developments, it appears that

many organizations do not respond effectively to rapid changes imposed on business
processes, causing a misalignment between business and information systems and ultimately,
reducing the competitiveness of the organization, following this to obtain a full support by the
technology, it is essential to construction Architecture of Information Systems. This
architectural level, the main result of Planning Information Systems, organizations must be in
the map that leads the technological growth and orderly oriented business support.

According to Zachman (1997):

“The Information System Architecture is considered a key factor on

the success of the organizations, “the subject of the century”.

The Information System Architecture (ISA), which has a primary goal, the
Information Systems in an organization, relate to a broader universe and comprehensive list of
architectures and models for an organization, for instance: Enterprise Architecture and
Architecture of Information Systems.
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3.3.1 Enterprise Architecture

Tissot, Florence, and Wes Crump (1998), describes Enterprise Architecture as:

“Set of conceptual models built with the purpose of obtaining a

coherent and understandable picture of the company.”

The primary purpose of describing the architecture of an enterprise is to improve the

effectiveness or efficiency of the business itself. This includes innovations in the structure of
an organization, the centralization or federation of business processes, the quality and
timeliness of business information, or ensuring that money spent on information technology
(IT) can be justified. It is therefore considered the architecture of the company as a reality
wider than the ISA, which are included in the models and processes that enable the
characterization and implementation of business, in addition to the IS model that supports it.
Typically, the level of enterprise architecture, it is common to consider IS as “simple”
resources used in business (such as people, equipment and material).

The following frameworks show an example of the levels of architecture abstraction

in an Enterprise. Enterprise Architecture covers business as well as IT, but also evolution and
governance, which enables an enterprise to evolve from the current state architecture towards
a future state architecture GEAO (Global Enterprise Architecture Organization.

Source: GEAO (Global Enterprise Architecture Organization)

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Source: GEAO (Global Enterprise Architecture Organization).

3.3.2 Information System Architecture

Garlan, D. et al (1995) and Maes et al. (2000):

“Information System Architecture (ISA) is to represent the

structure of the components of information systems, their
relationships, principles and guidelines, with the main propose of
supporting business”.
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Information System Architecture usually distinguishes three aspects, defining three

“sub architectures” (Spewak et al. 1992):
o Informational Architecture, or Data Architecture, represents the main data types that
support business (Spewak et al.1992), (DeBoever, 1997).
o Application Architecture, defines applications needed for data management and
business support.
o Technological Architecture, represents the main technologies used in application
Implementation and the infrastructures that provide an environment for IS deployment – as
Network, communication, distributed computation, etc. (Spewak et al. 1992), (Open, 2003)
ISA description is a key step in ensuring that IT provides access to data when, where
and how is required at business level (Spewak et. al. 1992).
The CEO Framework aims at providing a formal way of describing business goals,
processes, resources and information systems and the dependencies between them. It is
composed of three separate levels, each of which provides adequate forms of representing the
notions about the layer being described (Vasconcelos et al. 2001).
The modelling language used to implement the CEO Framework was UML (Unified
Modelling Language) – for further reading, refer to Vasconcelos et al. (2001). Figure 2
presents the UML Metamodel defined for the CEO Framework.
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In order to model ISA key concepts the «Block» component was specialized. The key
concepts for the ISA are:
o Information Entity: Person, place, physical thing or concept that is relevant in the
business context;
o IS Block: The collection of mechanisms and operations organized in order to
manipulate organization data.
o IT Block: The infrastructure, application platform and technological/software
component that realizes (or implement) an (or several) IS Block(s). IT Block defines
three major sub-concepts:
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• IT Infrastructure Block – represents the physical and infra-structural concepts

existing in an ISA: the computational nodes (as servers, personal computers or
mobile devices) and the non-computational nodes (as printers, network, etc.)
that support application platforms.
• IT Platform Block – stands for the implementation of the services used in the
IT application deployment.
• IT Application Block, the technological implementation of an IS Block.
Service – is an aggregation of a set of operations provided by an architectural block. A
generalization of the web service notion (W3C, 2002). We consider three distinct services in
an ISA:
• Business Service, collection of operations provided by IS Blocks that support
business processes.
• IS Service, set of operations provided by an IS Block to others IS Blocks.
• IT Service, technological services provided by application platforms (Open 2001).
Operation, the abstract description of an action supported by a service (the minor
level concept in an ISA). Figure 3 describes how these high-level primitives are related, in a
UML profile for ISA. For further detail refer to Vasconcelos et al (2003).
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3.4 DOING BUSINESS ON THE INTERNET

Information and networking technologies are transforming the dynamics of business,

economics, education, government, and even international relations. Many long-held rules
and models are eroding. Traditional business strategies are losing out to new unconventional
tactics. Relationships among customers, suppliers, employees, and competitors are changing.
New businesses are popping up on the net, as a framework for assessing how doing
business on the Internet differs from industria Era business practice, it’s important to
recognize the major forces driving the new economy. Although viewpoints vary from source
to source, there appears to be substantial concurrence on several factors.
 Faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous information technology.
Internet technology is creating a universal technology platform at an affordable price.
Whereas proprietary systems were limited to the big and wealthy, the Internet delivers
connectivity all the way to the mom and pop business. Individuals and enterprises worldwide
are becoming electronically linked.
According to Lai, Vincent S. (2001):

“When it comes to intranets, smaller organizations can compete on

even terms with their larger counterparts”.

 Common information standards.

Even more important than universal connectivity is the emergence of common technical
standards for communication. As long as connectivity remained proprietary, it was difficult if not
impossible to communicate among different enterprises (Evans, Philip and Wurster, Thomas S.
Blown, 2000).
According to, the U. S. Department of Commerce, Digital Economy “the benefits of
information technology are quickly spreading across the board, and eventually will touch every
business, from the smallest mom-and pop shop to the biggest Fortune 100”. As it can be seen, do
business on the internet is more popular now than ever, everything (since pay bill, arrangements,
customer needs, suppliers contacts, feedbacks and promotions) can be settled through cables,
mailbox, msn, intranet or any other way of online contact, thus electronic commerce( e-
commerce) has reached the most notorious place in business.
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Ecommerce (e-commerce) or electronic commerce is the purchasing selling, and

exchanging of goods and services over the computer networks, which transactions and terms of
sale are performed electronically. In fact, ecommerce is not just on the web it was alive and well
in business transactions, via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), through VaNs (Value-Added
Networks). Ecommerce can be divided into four main categories: B2B, B2C, C2B and C2C.
 B2B (Business- to- Business)
Applies to business-to-business, where the customers are other businesses,
such as such as between a manufacturer and a wholesaler, or between a
wholesaler and a retailer (Paypal is linked to almost every website which
purchase sale, an example would be Ebay).

 B2C ( Business-to- Customer)

Applies to any business or organization that sells its products or services to
consumers over the internet for their own use, a transaction would be a person
buying a pair of shoes from a retailer (An example is the website
www.amazon.com).

 C2B (Consumer-to-Business)
Is an electronic business model, in which consumers offer products and
services to companies and the companies pay them, this is the reversal of B2C
(Business-to-Consumer), (An example would be the site www.priceline.com,
where you name your own price).

 C2C (Consumer-to-Consumer)
Is an electronic commerce, which evolves particular users from internet. Lots
of sites (EBay, Mercado Livre), is an intermediate company, where consumer
put its products for sale with a minimum price and other consumers pay higher
offers for that product. It is commerce between final consumer and final
consumer.
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3.5 ETHICAL AND LEGAL USE OF INFORMATION

The use of information in a company is a very important concern nowadays since

organizations have rules and laws that should be obeyed by its employees. Information is
being more and more secured by companies; they cannot afford to get their data base of sales,
customers, suppliers, financial and employee’s profile or any other information, if this
information is stolen by others can be very harmful, this should have strict rules concerning
the protection of this information. The IT department has the objective to protect and guard
that kind of information; usually the IT department has a guy, who has access to each other
department, one mistake and all the information from all the departments can end up the
wrong hands, easily.
According to Martha Smith, (2001):

“Ethics of information regarding the moral dilemmas and conflict

ethical arising in interaction between humans and the information
(creation, organization, dissemination and use), technology
information, communication (ICT) and information systems”.

3.6 HOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IMPACTS ON AN ORGANIZATION.

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With increasing international competition and the need to efficiently introduce new
production processes, Cassiolato and Lastres (2000) argue that advances in information
technology and communications have led companies to focus their strategies on the
development of innovative capacity. This essential and ate to allow them to and participation
in flows of information and knowledge. The use of IT helps the manager to get more control
and is able to get information faster; therefore he can react fast into changes in the company
as well as getting to make decisions right away helping the company to react as fast as
possible concerning both internal and external decisions. However, as the information comes
quite fast, this could be a problem because it could be right or wrong, if the information is
``old`` or wrong, the manager may come to make wrong decisions, also could be a problem
the lack of knowledge of the manager. Intranet could be described as managements system
that cause a big impact on any company, intranet is a internal network that link all the
computers in a company it is supposed to make work better, better flow of communication,
exchange of ideas, tasks, documents. However, many companies found out that their
employees were using intranet as a sort of MSN (Messenger), talking to other friends inside
the company, they were not working efficiently as they should be, they spent most of the time
talking to friends, making appointments(pubs, night out) for later, exchanging personal stuff
(e-mail, contacts from msn, pictures), well it seems to be two ways of looking at, when it
comes to impacts on an organization, after all some companies fix this problem and some
companies does not care about it.

4 MARKETING INFORMATION SYSTEM

To begin with, Marketing Information System (MkIS), a computerized system that

provides an organized flow of information to enable and support the marketing activities of an
organization. The internet is rapidly changing the way business views marketing information
system. New business models present challenges and opportunities as organizations seek to
adopt “e-business’’ methodologies in the search for competitive advantage.
Marketing glossary (2007), says:

“An organizational section or entity whose purpose is to gather,

organize, store, retrieve and analyze data relevant to a firm`s past,
present and future operations on an on-going basis in order to
provide support for management`s marketing decisions”.
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Organizations of all sizes are feeling the effect of internet-enabled customers, supply
chains and competitors. This sort of pressure is particularly in the marketing function where
information technology touches the costumer, becoming the key to creating superior customer
value. Modern marketing organizations, have their focus on internet, they create and manage
the customer interface where interactions are more virtual than face-to-face. They power lever
IT technology to integrate and coordinate with customers and business partners to rapidly
achieve measurable business results.
The emphasis in on the rapid conversion of knowledge into customer value which
depends on the ability to develop, deploy and manage powerful new marketing information
systems, the firm has to have ability to convert knowledge into customer relationships,
reduced time to market and lower costs. The business`s world is highly competitive in very
way, thus the companies need to be able to develop the marketing function and scale it up on
“Internet time” with best of class decision to support solutions for customer relationship
management, sales force automation, market research, marketing communications and
logistics. The figure below shows, how the marketing work itself. First of all, sources both
external and internal are made to identify how a product or service, are reacting towards,
clients, customers and media as well as collect customer`s profile and important data. Second
of all the information from database are collected and sorted out and finally is delivered to the
board directors, where they will make a decision whether is useful or not.
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5 CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The use of projects for implementing business strategies, whether to increase

profitability, broaden market share or even guarantee their survival, has been justified every
day, given the degree of competitiveness to which these companies have to achieve. Thus, to
know how projects are conducted and the ability to control their results is a factor of
relevance for the success of managing businesses, and this has increasingly been a strong
driver for the implementation of Information technology and its system that helps the
company.
To begin with, Mr. Parker`s company is a large department store with 25 department
of various types: men`s clothes, garden tools, women`s clothe and so on, it has never been
implanted nothing that associate information technology and business, so this is all new for
the company. In order to help the company as well as the manager, a good start would be an
strategically alignment of IT and business, fully, starts with a in-depth understanding of the
firm`s business, mission, vision, strategic goals and positioning in the market environment.
It could start creating IT departments for each of the store such as: Clothes
department, Shoes department… so each store has their own IT department no depending
from others department, putting together a information system (IS) as part of IT, it would link
the whole company (departments, stakeholders, board), promoting information (including
processing) whatever the use made of this information, providing flow that is more reliable
and less bureaucratic information enabling quick access to information, ensuring integrity,
accuracy of information security and access to information, including input, processing and
outputs, control and feedback, helping the company to know how its products are being
accepted or not.
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We come to business process, a important part of the company where begins with a
customer`s need and ends with a customer fulfillment, the business process are designed to
add value for the costumer and should not include unnecessary activities. All activities in the
company has a goal, no matter whether is a small or a big process, the employees mostly have
to show that everything they do it has some value, since a normal attendance to a customer to
a new development product. Using a Business Process Modeling, the company can model
their business process, implement and execute those models, improving the process efficiency
and quality, furthermore during a corporate merger, which Mr. Parker`s company might
assume, it is important to understand the processes of both companies in detail so that
management can correctly and efficiently identify and eliminate redundancies in operations.
Enterprise architecture is the organizing logic for business process and IT infrastructure; it is
built by defining and documenting business processes are key components of a full enterprise
architecture undertaking, Mr. Parker and the board will have to identifying the opportunities
and determining how to categorize them, put them into a portfolio, prioritize them, and fit
them into the strategy-planning cycle. To show all the work that’s going to be done a
framework and a diagram will be developed, demonstrating how the organization will handle
such activities as well as organize data and puts related information close, to have sure that its
business process is going all right a diagram will be developed, in order to understand and
check whether the process is going right or wrong.
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Business on internet is a natural thing to do nowadays people can realize, sales, offers,
purchases, they may be able to buy things from shopping without even going there all this is
technology. To integrate business on internet in a company it s not that hard, simply have a
good web designer and, one person to administrate and we have an e-commerce, one tool
most used is intranet, linking everybody in the company sharing information, documents,
tasks, video conferencing and lowing the costs regarding telephones, mobiles. Well, to
become this easier to Mr. Parker a good idea would be having a Marketing information
system, that sustains ads, interaction, ecommerce, sales, customer service, customer facilities
and of course information, no forgetting about the quickly changes trade scenarios and
markets. To begin with, Marketing IS provides information about customer profiles
suggesting which ones are more profitable for the organization, as well as many other things
that is relevant for the company, the scope of starts from identifying the need of customers,
evolving product concept, designing the product, positioning and selling at appropriate price.
I order to achieve this, market research, customer survey, advertising, sales promotion,
campaign and a dealer distributor network. All the campaign can be done through the
company`s website, developing advertisements, new products, a database build up on
consumer profiles (information about, preferences, behavior, needs, spending patterns…) is
really helpful to send direct e-mail offering, discounts, products, promotions (closed door
sales) by doing this the company will aim on that customer who always buy something, even
a minor purchase and keeping them interested and up to date.
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E-commerce gives the advantage to increase the business value, as the company aim to
sell to customers Business to consumer (B2C); e-commerce would open doors to sale to other
companies Business to Business (B2B) as well, is a great opportunity for the company extent
its business and gain a new “market”, making its products more well known inside the
marketing environment. How this would work in B2C, the company`s website would do all
the work possible, offering information about products, through multimedia clipping,
guidelines (how to purchase, register, find a specific product…), which by the way would
attract new customers and they may buy something on their first visit. Moreover in B2B, the
companies would exchange technical and commercial information through websites, to be a
bit more advanced the use of extranet which would allow client and authorized people to log
in through the web site, making a better communication between the two companies. With
such big flow of information, the use of them could be harmful if ends up in wrong hands,
that’s a big concern, yet that’s the first time that the company will be using Information
systems. One thing that could prevent is to have information Security Management System
(e.g. ISO/IEC 2700).

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