Essay About Sloan Management Review And Sloan School Of Management

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increasingly confronted with suggestions to use information
technology (IT) strategically. Many articles proposing
strategic information systems (SISs) have
appeared in journals such as the Harvard Business
Review, Sloan Management Review, and MIS Quarterly.
This stream of articles has had two salutary effects. The
first is that it has increased many firms awareness of the
strategic potential of ISs. This movement from narrowly
viewing IT as only appropriate for automating backoffice
functions to a broader conception of ITs applicability
has been of benefit. Second, it has relieved the
necessity for cost-benefit style justification of many
investments in IT where such justification may have been
inappropriate ~ .
For all these positive effects, however, there is growing
recognition that the current writings on SISs have been
extremely one-sided. The articles that encourage firms to
get on board the SIS movement have rightly pointed to
a trinity of legitimate successes: Merrill Lynchs Cash
Management Account (CMA), American Hospital Supplys
(AHS) ASAP order entry system, and the American
Airlines Sabre reservation system. However, these articles
have generally not addressed the significant barriers
to conceiving, developing, and implementing SISs and
the inherent risk of failure. (One exception to this is
McFarlans foreshadowing of a flip side to the promises
of SISs 2 (p 99).)
Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute
increasingly confronted with suggestions to use information
technology (IT) strategically. Many articles proposing
strategic information systems (SISs) have
appeared in journals such as the Harvard Business
Review,