FREE online courses on Information Technology - Chapter 5 MANAGING
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY - Develop Guidelines for Shared Versus Local Systems
We can add another important strategy to Roche's list: You
need to develop guidelines for when a system should be shared and when a local,
autonomous system is more appropriate. The obvious advantage of shared systems
are economies of scale and the ability to share data. The problem with shared
systems is that they tend to become very large and complex. Also, individual
locations and users have special needs which must be incorporated into the
system. As the number of exceptions increases the system becomes more cumbersome
and difficult to program.
The advantage of a local system is that it can often be
developed quickly in response to a local condition. If it later becomes
necessary to coordinate this system with other applications, special interfaces
will have to be created. If each location ends up needing a similar system and
cannot share this one, the firm has paid for many systems when possibly one
would have sufficed.
There are no firm guidelines for making this kind of
decision. Firms have had success and failure with both approaches. Systems
development in an international environment (or even a domestic one where there
are many locations) leads to this problem. Management has to recognize that the
problem exists and compare the alternative of local versus global, shared
systems.
