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50 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

TABLE 1.2 MAJOR BUSINESS FUNCTIONS

FUNCTION PURPOSE
Sales and marketing Selling the organization’s products and services
Manufacturing and production Producing and delivering products and services
Finance and accounting Managing the organization’s financial assets and maintaining the
organization’s financial records
Human resources Attracting, developing, and maintaining the organization’s labor
force; maintaining employee records

are informal work practices, such as a requirement to return telephone calls from
coworkers or customers, that are not formally documented. Information systems
automate many business processes. For instance, how a customer receives credit
or how a customer is billed is often determined by an information system that
incorporates a set of formal business processes.
Each organization has a unique culture, or fundamental set of assumptions,
values, and ways of doing things, that has been accepted by most of its members.
You can see organizational culture at work by looking around your university or
college. Some bedrock assumptions of university life are that professors know
more than students, the reasons students attend college is to learn, and that
classes follow a regular schedule.
Parts of an organization’s culture can always be found embedded in its
information systems. For instance, UPS’s first priority is customer service, which
is an aspect of its organizational culture that can be found in the company’s
package tracking systems, which we describe later in this section.
Different levels and specialties in an organization create different interests
and points of view. These views often conflict over how the company should
be run and how resources and rewards should be distributed. Conflict is the
basis for organizational politics. Information systems come out of this cauldron
of differing perspectives, conflicts, compromises, and agreements that are a
natural part of all organizations. In Chapter 3, we examine these features of
organizations and their role in the development of information systems in
greater detail.

Management
Management’s job is to make sense out of the many situations faced by
organizations, make decisions, and formulate action plans to solve organiza-
tional problems. Managers perceive business challenges in the environment;
they set the organizational strategy for responding to those challenges; and
they allocate the human and financial resources to coordinate the work and
achieve success. Throughout, they must exercise responsible leadership. The
business information systems described in this book reflect the hopes, dreams,
and realities of real-world managers.
But managers must do more than manage what already exists. They must
also create new products and services and even re-create the organization from
time to time. A substantial part of management responsibility is creative work
driven by new knowledge and information. Information technology can play a
powerful role in helping managers design and deliver new products and services
and redirecting and redesigning their organizations. Chapter 12 treats manage-
ment decision making in detail.

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