A New Methodology For Developing The MIS Master Plan

Abstract

Organizations, small and large, for profit and non-profit, service oriented as well as manufacturing, have continued to increase their expenditures in information technology (IT) in recent years throughout the world. These expenditures in manufacturing floor and office workflow automation, PC’s, application packages, customized software development, communications and wireless networking, the Internet, and web-based applications, have been intended to be investments for improving efficiency, increasing effectiveness, and maintaining or advancing competitive position. Unfortunately, not all investments in IT have brought the anticipated payoff. This fact, combined with the rapid pace of change in IT leading to quick obsolescence of hardware and software platforms, have renewed attention to long term planning for IT investments. This paper presents an input/output model for developing a Management Information Systems (MIS) Master Plan and compares several methodologies, including IBM’s Business Systems Planning and the Information Engineering approach, for developing such a plan. Moreover, we present a new methodology for IT planning that seeks to overcome the shortcomings of the existing methodologies while building on their strengths.