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• Information systems and organizations influence one another.
• Information systems are built by managers to serve the interests of the business firm.
• The organization must be aware of and open to the influences of information systems to benefit from new technologies.
• The interaction between information technology and organizations is complex and is influenced by many mediating factors, including the organization’s structure, business processes, politics, culture, surrounding environment, and management decisions.
• Information systems can change social and work life in a firm.
• Understanding your own business organization is crucial for designing new systems or understanding existing systems.
• An organization is a stable, formal social structure that takes resources from the environment and processes them to produce outputs.
• Capital and labor are primary production factors provided by the environment.
• The firm transforms these inputs into products and services in a production function.
• The products and services are consumed by environments in return for supply inputs.
• Organizations are more stable than informal groups in terms of longevity and routineness.
• Organizations are formal legal entities with internal rules and procedures that must abide by laws.
• Organizations are also social structures because they are a collection of social elements, much as a machine has a structure — a particular arrangement of valves, cams, shafts, and other parts.
• A more realistic behavioral definition of an organization is a collection of rights, privileges, obligations, and responsibilities delicately balanced over a period of time through conflict and conflict resolution.
• All modern organizations share certain characteristics, including being bureaucracies with clear-cut divisions of labor and specialization.
• Organizations arrange specialists in a hierarchy of authority in which everyone is accountable to someone, and authority is limited to specific actions governed by abstract rules or procedures.
• All firms share market space with other competitors who are continuously devising new, more efficient ways to produce by introducing new products and services and attempting to attract customers by developing their brands and imposing switching costs on their customers.
• Information systems must be built with a clear understanding of the organization in which they will be used.
• New technologies create new substitutes all the time.
• Porter’s competitive forces model provides a general view of the firm, its competitors, and the firm’s environment.
• The Internet and the World Wide Web have a significant impact on the relationships between many firms and external entities, and even on the organization of business processes inside a firm.
• Implementing information systems has consequences for task arrangements, structures, and people.
• The only way to bring about change is to change the technology, tasks, structure, and people simultaneously.
• In almost every industry, there are some firms that do better than most others, often referred to as having a competitive advantage.
• In some industries, there are very low barriers to entry, whereas in other industries, entry is very difficult.
• The Internet is capable of dramatically lowering the transaction and agency costs facing most organizations.
• The Internet increases the accessibility, storage, and distribution of information and knowledge for organizations.
• In just about every industry, there are substitutes that your customers might use if your prices become too high.
• According to a model, to implement change, all four components must be changed simultaneously.
• Changes in technology are absorbed, interpreted, deflected, and defeated by organizational task arrangements, structures, and people.
• In a free economy with mobile labor and financial resources, new companies are always entering the marketplace.
• Organizational resistance to information system innovations can be overcome by changing all four components simultaneously.
• Organizations try to hire and promote employees based on technical qualifications and professionalism, not personal connections.
• The organization is devoted to the principle of efficiency: maximizing output using limited inputs.
• Due process is a related feature of law-governed societies, ensuring that laws are known and understood, and there is an ability to appeal to higher authorities to ensure that the laws are applied correctly.
• In an ethical, political society, individuals and others can recover damages done to them through a set of laws characterized by due process.
• Ethics is about individual choice: When faced with alternative courses of action, what is the correct moral choice?
• Basic Concepts in Ethics include Responsibility, Accountability, and Liability.
• Liability extends the concept of responsibility further to the area of laws, permitting individuals to recover the damages done to them by other actors, systems, or organizations.
• NORA technology can take information about people from disparate sources and find obscure, nonobvious relationships.