CURRENT CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES FOR SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
Part A
Introduction 2
Background 2
Agile Development 3
Opportunities of Agile Development 3
Current challenges of Agile Development 4
Opportunities of Cloud Computing 7
Challenges to Cloud Computing 9
Green Computing 10
Conclusion 11
Current Challenges and Opportunities for Systems Management and Development
Introduction
This report presents “Current Challenges and Opportunities for System Management and Development.” The report is targeted at a medium sized company offering services such as requirement analysis, systems development and general IS consultancy. Research information for this report is drawn from existing literature on the challenges and opportunities of the three main topics discussed: Agile Development, Cloud Computing, and Green Computing. In the past, business were mainly concerned with managing such resources as raw materials, capital, and labor (Khosrowpour, 1996, p.21). However, with the changing business climate, it is has become increasingly necessary for an organization to manage its information resource. In order to successfully develop information systems capable of meeting the growing needs of the business, ISM executives must have solid technical and business knowledge (EMC Education Services, 2010, p. 75). They need to comprehend organizational structures, goals and objectives, financial needs, and operations (which entail processes as well as flows of data in the organization). This translates that ISM managers need to stay in touch with changing information technologies in addition to possessing sufficient technical skills that would enable them to adopt appropriate technologies together with implementation of computer-based information systems (Lytras er al, 2008, p. 496). In general, therefore, an organization needs a team with sufficient knowledge n key areas such as information architecture, systems techniques and development tools, databases, network configurations, and systems integration.
Background
Information Systems Management (ISM) entails using information technology to support the core functions and activities of an organization. ISM thus refers to the primary integration of computers and related technology in the day to day functionalities of enterprises, private and public organizations. The evolving business needs speed, responsiveness, flexibility and information security have made organizations to adopt more responsive infrastructure, communications systems, information architecture, software development, as well business process redesign (Varajao et al, 2010, p.341).
In the increasingly competitive business environment, organizations are faced with a myriad of challenges relating to systems management and development (Khosrowpour, 1996, p.21). IS departments currently face strategy and management challenges which stem from the rapidly changing location of major IT infrastructure such as cloud computing, virtualization; the organizational function of IS (e.g. offshoring, outsourcing, nearshoring, crowdsourcing); and IS capabilities (e.g. collaborative innovation, boundary spanning, value co-creation).
On the other hand, there exist a host of opportunities for IS departments which can be achieved through following a well-defined methodology. This entails determining and structuring requirements, project planning and implementation, testing, and maintenance.
Agile Development
While the contemporary methodologies such as Object-oriented and life-cycle-based structured approaches offer a viable method of developing information systems, agile development methodologies (also called lightweight methodologies), provide extra capability in addressing the limitations the traditional plan-drive methodologies (Hasnain & Hall, 2009, p. 46).
The agile approach is comparatively a more general philosophy of development compared to traditional methodologies. The philosophy includes several principles captured in the Agile Manifesto, where the significance of the agile values are stressed as follows:
1. More value is placed on individuals and interactions than on processes and tools.
2. More value is placed on working software than on comprehensive documentation.
3. More value is placed on customer collaboration than on contract negotiation.
4. More value is placed on responding to change than on following a plan (Law, 2007, p.34).
The diagram below represents the fundamentals of agile development.
(Hasnain & Hall, 2009, p. 46)
Opportunities of Agile Development
Agile development approaches help an organization to produce first delivery in a matter of weeks, achieve fast win together with rapid feedback, to produce new simple solutions, so that there is little to change and the changes are easier, to realize improved continuous design quality, making the subsequent iteration more less costly to implement, and undertake earlier, less expensive tests for any defects in the system (Rubin & Rubin, 2011, p.124). The primary principles of agile approaches include an unforgiving straightforwardness of working code, and focuses on building teamwork where individuals work together with genuine goodwill. Agile development methods have characteristic common sense methods such as less documentation needed, people matter, and communication plays a crucial role (Salo & Abrahamsson, 2008, p.62). Agile development therefore promotes adaptive planning, a time-framed iterative approach, evolutionary development & delivery, besides encouraging rapid flexible response to change (Harma et al, 2012, p.895).
Current challenges of Agile Development
Given that most IS Departments are deeply steeped in the contemporary systems development methodologies, adopting the new agile methodologies poses a number of challenges.
a) Management & organizational issues – Organizational culture bears immense impact on the social structure of an IT organization, which consequently affects the behavior and actions of its members. Organizational culture significantly influences the decision-making processes, innovative practices, problem-solving strategies, information filtering, planning and control procedures, social relationships and negotiations within the organization (Aydin et al, 2004, p.130). This translates that it is particularly difficult to change the culture and mindsets of people, something that renders transition to agile methodologies rather challenging. An organizational culture that encourages such shift must be flexible and responsive enough to take advantages of synergy (Sutharshan & Maj, 2011, p.18)
Traditional development approaches make use of much documentation for information storage and management. Conversely, agile methodologies favor lean thinking and reducing overhead, especially documentation (Beyer & Holzblatt, 1997, p.115). The bulk of the knowledge in agile development is largely tacit and found in the heads of development team members. This implies that there is much reliance on the development teams, creating a power shift from the management or leadership to the development team. Such state of affairs often does ogre well in many organizations (Bhimani 2006, p.72).
Furthermore, the fact that agile development depends greatly on teamwork, instead of individual role assignment identified with traditional development, makes it more challenging to adopt. The adoption of the new information management system requires teams to put in more effort in implementing it. During the developmental phase, the teams often get stressed from increased responsibilities that result in change burnout (Boivie et al, 2003, p.631). While it is implementing the managing approach in phases may help in reducing or avoiding team burnout, the undertaking is often expensive and less efficient in terms of productivity.
b) People-related issues – Agile development has high requirements for a cooperative process having excellent communication and collaboration among the team members. This presents a problem for people who are used to solitary activities or working with homogeneous groups of designers and analysts (Boivie et al, 2006, p.627). Such individuals would find it particularly challenging to engage in pair programming as well as collaborative decision making. Similarly, agile development has special demands on staffing and staff morale. It is often difficult to get enough personnel with the knowhow on software development considering that agile development is a recent concept. Further, it is highly likely to create a new culture of elitism inside the systems development team that would in turn deal a blow to the moral of non-agile developers (Borgholm & Madsen, 1999, p.94).
Pluralist decision making is also a problematic area in the agile environment. It often takes much time, effort, and patience for an organization to realize a culture of respect and trust among its staff to enable collaborative decision making. Similarly, agile development strategy entails much communication between the organization and consumer (Boynton, 2004, p.357). Maintaining constant communication for the entire long implementation period often proves challenging and reduces the acceptability of the agile development strategy. As such, successful agile development depends on finding collaborative, authorized, representative, committed, and knowledgeable customers who would actively participate in the entire development process (Bruggeman, 2004, p.168).
c) Process-related issues – the agile development approach entails the challenging problem of changing practices and attitudes from process-centric to people-centered. Agile methodologies depend on planning, or speculation with the belief that everything is uncertain, to guide speedy development of the relatively flexible and adaptive systems (Catarci et al, 2002, p.133). A great barrier to transition s the needed change in process model from the traditional lifecycle model to the new feature-based development that uses evolutionary along with iterative development. Such significant changes require major alteration to communication channels, work procedures, problem-solving strategies, tools and techniques, along with roles of people (Chenhall, 2003, p.148).
Another challenge that development manager would encounter is selecting the most appropriate method from a range of agile methodologies that are currently on offer. Although all agile methods subscribe to the same tenets spelled out in the agile manifesto, they differ in team size, duration of individual iterative cycle, code ownership, emphasis placed on upstream and downstream activities, as well as the procedures for immediate feedback and change (Clegg et al, 1997, p.863).
d) Technological issues – the current technology of a organization greatly affects its efforts to shift to agile methodologies. This means that companies that rely entirely on mainframe technologies would find it exceptionally challenging to adopt agile methods as compare to organizations that employ OO development methodologies. In addition, people must be extensively trained on the use of the new information software (Constantine, 2002, p.8). Managing of software systems has also incredible amounts of risks. Agile development has its own range of risks that compromise the productivity of the organization. The implementation process calls for adoption of risk management techniques against any threats or risks to the performance of the organization (Damodaran, 1996, p.369).
The planning and testing phases of the agile system implementation present certain challenges to an organization. The planning process entails setting timelines and targets to be fulfilled in transitioning into new unfamiliar territories, which in itself is challenging for an organization (Deschoolmeester and Braet, 2004, p.146). Successful implementation requires that the team goes through a testing period, where performance of the agile development system is analyzed. This testing phase is quite intensive because it requires double checking of the processes, responsibilities, results and related production necessities (Efendi et al, 2006, p.121). The period is characteristically labor-intensive and often means additional expenses to the firm.
Cloud Computing
Opportunities of Cloud Computing
Cloud Computing entails hardware and systems software, together with application are provided as services over the Internet (Gozzi, 2010, p.120). Cloud Computing model provides an opportunity for great reduction of costs as well as increased IT agility. Embracing Cloud Computing means that an organization is undertaking asset-lite strategies which serve to eliminate fixed costs through outsourcing to external specialized firms (Sehgal et al, 2011, p.288). Adoption of Cloud Computing services has the impact of dramatically speeding up the introduction of new relevant technologies within the firm and enables IT to be more effective in supporting the activities of the organization (Graham, 2004, p.346).
Cloud Computing also brings about empowerment to the workforce and customers who are the end-users of computing resources. The provisioning of the resources are placed in the control of the end-users, and not under the traditional centralized IT service. Furthermore, Cloud Computing is an Application Programming Interface (API) which enables computers with cloud software in the same manner the user interface that enables interaction between people and computers (Granlund & Mouritsen, 2003, p.80).
Cloud Computing model significantly reduces cost of operations for an organization. In particular, capital expenditure is able to be converted into operational expenditure in the public cloud delivery model. This has the advantage of reducing barriers to entry because the hosting infrastructure is offered by a third-party, ruling out the need to purchase them for either one-time or infrequent computing tasks (Grudin, 1991, p.65). In addition, the model has the advantage of multi-tenancy which enables sharing of both costs and resources across a very large pool of user. This allows for centralization of infrastructure in specific locations having lower costs. Further, users are saved from the need to engineers for higher load levels because the peak-load capacity is increased through multi-tenancy (Gulliksen et al, 2006, p.569). There is also improved utilization and efficiency for systems that are often underutilized.
There is also greater reliability of Cloud Computing model where multiple redundant sites are utilized. This makes the model highly suitable for not only business continuity but also disaster recovery (Gulliksen et al, 2010, p.404). In the Cloud Computing environment, performance is constantly monitored while loosely coupled architectures constructed via web services which is the service interface. Maintenance of the Cloud Computing application is comparatively easier given that they do not require installation of every user’s computer and access is possible from different locations (Hagel & Brown, 2001, p.110). The security of cloud computing is usually as good as and in some instances, better than other contemporary systems, because the providers devote their resources to dealing with security issues that are expensive to customers.
Cloud Computing also provides significant location and device independence which enables to access the systems through a web browser without the limitations of either location (off-site infrastructure) or device such as personal computer and mobile phone (Jacobson et al, 1999, p.124). Similarly, virtualization technology enables servers and storage devices to be promptly shared and increase utilization. This is especially the case because application can be migrated easily from one physical server to another.
Nonetheless, there are a number of concerns that relate to Cloud Computing. Success with the Cloud service is dependent on having clarity on the reason for adopting it. Its successful implementation to realize targeted benefits necessitates a detailed strategy and clear implementation plans (Keen, 1993, p.451).
Challenges to Cloud Computing
Though Cloud Computing services are relatively easier to use and less expensive in comparison to traditional in-house IT services, they bring about added complexity to the operations of established organizations venturing into the evolving cloud computing market (Tolk & Aaron, 2010, p.45). This is especially because Cloud Computing introduces new, multilayered revenue streams with characteristic complex uncertain security, portability, privacy, tax, compliance and control implications for both users and providers alike.
Adoption of Cloud Computing often results in corporate culture shock. This is because organizations often have developed the belief that “we can do it better ourselves.” It is often a big shift for IT managers to detach themselves from the existing technical implementation and focus on differentiate value-add for the firm (Cook, 2010, p.40). It is particularly challenging for the IT managers to switch from their traditional role as in-house provider of services to manager of external service providers. Similarly, Cloud computing is a new concept that requires users obtaining new information, techniques and strategies of using the resource. The users of cloud computing need more guidance on the working of the system, as from the description it provides different platforms of operation (Peppard, 1995, p.127). Requiring guidance in cloud computing is justifiable in the concept that a user of SaaS, IaaS or PaaS, has different requirements to meet to effectively use the cloud computing ideology. The guidance is necessitated by the lack of expertise and knowledge on the providers and users terminals. The guidance relates to issues of application, purchases, IT resource assessing and management, with government also playing a role in the management concept (Forrest & Crawford, 1991, p.118).
There is also the feeling of loss of control among cloud users who now cannot manage their IT environment directly as they control IT infrastructure via their interaction with the cloud service providers as well as service level agreements (Ragowsky & Gefen, 2009, p.132). This calls for skills that IT organizations are yet to have, something that necessitates reinventing themselves prior to making shift to Cloud Computing.
Information security is a major concern for users of Cloud Computing. There is much concern over lack of security for the stored personal information on cloud. The complexity of security increases as data is distributed over wider areas or large number of devices in multi-tenant systems that are shared by lots of unrelated users (Sprague, 1995, p.35). In addition, accessibility of the user to security audit logs is often difficult if not impossible. This is why an increasing number of user are favoring private cloud installations so as they can have control over the infrastructure and avert loss of control of their information security (Kurp, 2008, p.12).
In the same light, Cloud Computing poses privacy concerns. This is because Cloud Computing complicates how the CSPs safeguard the personal information of their customers, employees, and business partners, so as to meet the legal and ethical requirements relating to privacy regulations (Ryan, 2011, p.37).
There are also regulatory compliance concerns relating to Cloud Computing. Given that cloud services are typically provided by virtualization of both hardware and software which could be located anywhere in the world, there are questions about exactly whose regulatory compliance rules are to be adhered to (Garrison et al, 2012, p.65). Similarly, there exist few standards to simplify the interoperability between cloud services and enterprise systems and cloud providers. The lack of standards has the potential of posing obstacles to recovery of data, be it for the purpose of shifting from one cloud service provide to another or for legal discovery (Boroujerdi & Nazem, 2009, p.1114).
Green Computing
Green computing is a concept developed that focuses on the idea of effectively using computing resources, while observing minimal impact on the environmental, maximizing the viability of the venture economically while encompassing the responsibility social duties (Kurp 2008, 12). The idea of green computing is based on the requirement of improving the efficiency as well as the life of the products used in computing. Green computing involves minimizing the amount of energy dissipated during the use of computing resources (Chenhall, 2003, p. 121).
Opportunities for Green Computing
The biggest benefit of implementing green information technology is that it provides significant financial incentive to the organization compared to other environment-friendly practices. Considering that it takes much cost to cool data centres, green computing is a cost-effective of developing energy-efficient data centres, with decreased cost of cooling hardware along with savings in operating the data centres (Sharavanan et al 2010, p. 132). IBM and HP are the leading consultancy firms in this area whose record attest tot the financial benefits of the green data centres.
Green computing also have direct telecommuting and tele-working financial benefits. This is because telecommuting enables employees to strike a balance between work and personal life, while benefitting the environment through saving fuel needed to commute to work. Similarly, teleworking affords the employee much Eccles et al, 2000, p.399). A company is able to save much on energy costs in addition to marinating significant flexibility by contacting with employees and customers using a tele-working system. Microsoft processors, for instance, offer energy-efficient computing opportunities.
It is also relatively simple to understand and implement green computing practices. Companies are able to easily communicated the concept of environment friendliness through such simple actions as engaging their employees to implement such rules as use of recycled paper, and regulations on using personal computers, or laptops as well other hardware. In addition, the organizations experience much cost saving in hardware and power when using green computing (Sharavanan et al 2010, p. 135). The organizations bears the high cost of recycling but indirectly benefits from much positive publicity associated with being environment friendly.
Challenges of Green Computing
Implementing green computing in information system management often requires careful consideration, a detail level relatively greater than other traditional information management techniques. Green computing also forces infrastructure architects and software developers to work together – this is usually challenging (Sharavanan et al 2010, p. 132). Green computing advocates for reducing machines in use by integrating functionalities. Sharing of servers is particularly challenging because there are some applications that run best on their individual servers as a result of their complex installation issues. Generally, there is significant underutilization of resources such as hardware. Implementing green computing also takes a toll on corporate budgeting and purchasing policies. There is higher net used on the support together with relatively higher support costs (Sharavanan et al 2010, p. 134).
Given there are increased number of servers and computing power in the information department across the floor, there are increased cooling challenges because air and empty space alone are not sufficient to provide adequate cooling for computers. Although the computing power required is considerably less per unit, the overall energy needed will be increased because of much need for improved cooling (Sharavanan et al 2010, p. 135).
Conclusion
Success in business environment today heavily depends on maximizing technology and internet to fit in the competitive needs of supplier, other business partners and customer in the global marketplace. Information systems and their technologies have to be properly managed to support the organizational strategies, business operational and processes, culture and structure of a business enterprise. This is because computer-based information systems, are operated, designed, and used by staff in the variety of business settings and environments, even if they heavily depend on information technologies. It is therefore necessary for a company to fully access the risk factors and benefits that result from adopting newer information system management approaches such as agile development, cloud computing and green computing. Modern-day IS executive need to highly knowledgeable about how best to harness information technology in order to fully support the activities of the organization. This is especially crucial because the goal of IS organization is to attain speed, flexibility and desired responsiveness that would result in satisfied customers and increased profitability for the company.
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