Assignment 2 (Due: before November 29, 2009, 13:00hrs)

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

Unfortunately, many people think of business plans only for starting a new business or applying for business loans. But they are also vital for running a business, whether or not the business needs new loans or new investments. Businesses need plans to optimize growth and development according to priorities.

Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers.[1] External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services.[2] For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.
Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.
Operational plans describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department.[3] Project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project's place within the organization's larger strategic goals.[4][5]
Presentation formats
The format of a business plan depends on its presentation context. It is not uncommon for businesses, especially start-ups to have three or four formats for the same business plan:
• an "elevator pitch" - a three minute summary of the business plan's executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.
• an oral presentation - a hopefully entertaining slide show and oral narrative that is meant to trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.
• a written presentation for external stakeholders - a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders.
• an internal operational plan - a detailed plan describing planning details that are needed by management but may not be of interest to external stakeholders. Such plans have a somewhat higher degree of candor and informality than the version targeted at external stakeholders.
Characteristics of a Quality ISP
A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.
Characteristic Description
Timely The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.
Useable The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
Maintainable The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.
Quality While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.
Reproducible The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Whenever a proposal for the development of an ISP is created it must be assessed against these five characteristics. If any fail or not addressed in an optimum way, the entire set of funds for the development of an ISP is risked.
ISP Within the Context of the Meta data Environment
The information systems plan is the plan by which databases and information systems of the enterprise are accomplished in a timely manner. A key facility through which the ISP obtains its Adata@ is the meta data repository. The domain of the meta data repository is set forth in Figure 1, and, as seen through Figure 1, persons through their role within an organization perform functions in the accomplishment of enterprise missions, they have information needs. These information needs reflect the state of certain enterprise resources such as finance, people, and products that are known to the enterprises. The states are created through business information systems and databases.
The ISP Steps
The information systems plan project determines the sequence for implementing specific information systems. The goal of the strategy is to deliver the most valuable business information at the earliest time possible in the most cost-effective manner.
The end product of the information systems project is an information systems plan (ISP). Once deployed, the information systems department can implement the plan with confidence that they are doing the correct information systems project at the right time and in the right sequence. The focus of the ISP is not one information system but the entire suite of information systems for the enterprise. Once developed, each identified information system is seen in context with all other information systems within the enterprise.
Information Systems Plan Development Steps
Step Name Description
1. Create the mission model The mission model, generally shorter than 30 pages presents end-result characterizations of the essential raison d=etre of the enterprise. Missions are strategic, long range, and a-political because they are stripped of the Awho@ and the Ahow.@
2. Develop a high-level data model The high-level data model is an Entity Relationship diagram created to meet the data needs of the mission descriptions. No attributes or keys are created.
3. Create the resource life cycles (RLC) and their nodes Resources are drawn from both the mission descriptions and the high level data model. Resources and their life cycles are the names, descriptions and life cycles of the critical assets of the enterprise, which, when exercised achieve one or more aspect of the missions. Each enterprise resource Alives@ through its resource life cycle.
4. Allocate precedence vectors among RLC nodes Tied together into a enablement network, the resulting resource life cycle network forms a framework of enterprise=s assets that represent an order and set of inter-resource relationships. The enterprise Alives@ through its resource life cycle network.
5. Allocate existing information systems and databases to the RLC nodes The resource life cycle network presents a Alattice-work@onto which the Aas is@ business information systems and databases can be Aattached.@ See for example, the meta model in Figure 2. The Ato-be@ databases and information systems are similarly attached. ADifference projects@ between the Aas-is@ and the Ato-be@ are then formulated. Achievement of all the difference projects is the achievement of the Information Systems Plan.
6. Allocate standard work break down structures (WBS) to each RLC node Detailed planning of the Adifference projects@ entails allocating the appropriate canned work breakdown structures and metrics. Employing WBS and metrics from a comprehensive methodology supports project management standardization, repeatability, and self-learning.
7. Load resources into each WBS node Once the resources are determined, these are loaded into the project management meta entities of the meta data repository, that is, metrics, project, work plan and deliverables. The meta entities are those inferred by Figure 2.
8. Schedule the RLC nodes through a project management package facilities. The entire suite of projects is then scheduled on an enterprise-wide basis. The PERT chart used by project management is the APERT@ chart represented by the Resource Life Cycle enablement network.
9. Produce and review of the ISP The scheduled result is predicable: Too long, too costly, and too ambitious. At that point, the real work starts: paring down the suite of projects to a realistic set within time and budget. Because of the meta data environment (see Figure 1), the integrated project management meta data (see Figure 2), and because all projects are configured against fundamental business-rationale based designs, the results of the inevitable trade-offs can be set against business basics. Although the process is painful, the results can be justified and rationalized.
10. Execute and adjust the ISP through time. As the ISP is set into execution, technology changes occur that affect resource loadings. In this case, only steps 6-9 need to be repeated. As work progresses, the underlying meta data built or used in steps 1-5 will also change. Because a quality ISP is Aautomated@ the recasting of the ISP should only take a week or less.
Collectively, the first nine steps take about 5000 staff hours, or about $500,000. Compared to an IS budget $15-35 million, that's only about 3.0% to 1.0%.
If the pundits are to be believed, that is, that the right information at the right time is the competitive edge, then paying for an information systems plan that is accurate, repeatable, and reliable is a small price indeed.
Executive and Adjusting the ISP Through Time
IT projects are accomplished within distinct development environments. The two most common are: discrete project and release. The discrete project environment is typified by completely encapsulated projects accomplished through a water-fall methodology.
In release environments, there are a number of different projects underway by different organizations and staff of varying skill levels. Once a large number of projects are underway, the ability of the enterprise to know about and manage all the different projects degrades rapidly. That is because the project management environment has been transformed from discrete encapsulated projects into a continuous flow process of product or functionality improvements that are released on a set time schedule. Figure 3 illustrates the continuous flow process environment that supports releases. The continuous flow process environment is characterized by:
• Multiple, concurrent, but differently scheduled projects against the same enterprise resource
• Single projects that affect multiple enterprise resources
• Projects that develop completely new capabilities, or changes to existing capabilities within enterprise resources
Figure 3
It is precisely because enterprises have transformed themselves from a project to a release environment that information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained on an enterprise-wide basis are essential.
There are four major sets of activities within the continuous flow process environment. The user/client is represented at the top in the small rectangular box. Each of the ellipses represents an activity targeted to a specific need. The four basic needs are:
• Need Identification
• Need Assessment
• Design
• Deployment
The box in the center is the meta data repository. Specification and impact analysis is represented through the left two processes. Implementation design and accomplishment is represented by the right two processes. Two key characteristics should be immediately apparent. First, unlike the water-fall approach, the activities do not flow one to the other. They are disjoint. In fact, they may be done by different teams, on different time schedules, and involve different quantities of products under management. In short, these four activities are independent one from the other. Their only interdependence is through the meta data repository.
The second characteristic flows from the first. Because these four activities are independent one from the other, the enterprise evolves by means of releases rather than through whole systems. If it evolved through whole systems, then the four activities would be connected either in a waterfall or a spiral approach, and the enterprise would be evolving through major upgrades to encapsulated functionality within specific business resources. In contrast, the release approach causes coordinated sets of changes to multiple business resources to be placed into production. This causes simultaneous, enterprise-wide capability upgrades across multiple business resources.
Through this continuous-flow process, several unique features are present:
• All four processes are concurrently executing.
• Changes to enterprise resources occur in unison, periodically, and in a very controlled manner.
• The meta data repository is always contains all the enterprise resource specifications: current or planned. Simply put, if an enterprise resource semantic is not within the meta data repository, it is not enterprise policy.
• All changes are planned, scheduled, measured, and subject to auditing, accounting, and traceability.
• All documentation of all types is generated from the meta data repository.

What Is A Business Plan?

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals. Business plans are believed to be the tools in decision-making. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan

What is Information System Plan?

A process for developing a strategy and plans for aligning information systems with the business strategies of an organization.

The information systems plan is the plan by which databases and information systems of the enterprise are accomplished in a timely manner. A key facility through which the ISP obtains its Adata@ is the meta data repository. The domain of the meta data repository is set forth in Figure 1, and, as seen through Figure 1, persons through their role within an organization perform functions in the accomplishment of enterprise missions, they have information needs. These information needs reflect the state of certain enterprise resources such as finance, people, and products that are known to the enterprises. The states are created through business information systems and databases.

Business Plan and the IS Plan

To start of with I had first defined what a business plan and IS plan is.

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan

Information has emerged as an agent of integration and the enabler of new competitiveness for today’s enterprise in the global marketplace. However, has the paradigm of strategic planning changed sufficiently to support the new role of information systems and technology? We reviewed the literature for commonly used or representative information planning methodologies and found that a new approach is needed. There are six methodologies reviewed in this paper. They all tend to regard planning as a separate stage which does not connect structurally and directly to the information systems development. An integration of planning with development and management through enterprise information resources - which capture and characterize the enterprise – will shorten the response cycle and even allow for economic evaluation of information system investment.

For a long time relationship between information system functions and corporate strategy was not of much interest to Top Management of firms. Information Systems were thought to be synonymous with corporate data processing and treated as some back-room operation in support of day-to-day mundane tasks (Rockart, 1979). In the 80’s and 90’s, however, there has been a growing realization of the need to make information systems of strategic importance to an organization. Consequently, strategic information systems planning (SISP) is a critical issue. In many industry surveys, improved SISP is often mentioned as the most serious challenge facing IS managers (Pavri and Ang, 1995, Beath and Orlikowski, 1994; Martin, 1993; Porter and Miller,

1985).

Planning for information systems, as for any other system, begins with the identification of needs. In order to be effective, development of any type of computer-based system should be a response to need--whether at the transaction processing level or at the more complex information and support systems levels. Such planning for information systems is much like strategic planning in management. Objectives, priorities, and authorization for information systems projects need to be formalized. The systems development plan should identify specific projects slated for the future, priorities for each project and for resources, general procedures, and constraints for each application area. The plan must be specific enough to enable understanding of each application and to know where it stands in the order of development. Also the plan should be flexible so that priorities can be adjusted if necessary. King (King, 1995) in his recent article has argued that a strategic capability architecture - a flexible and continuously improving infrastructure of organizational capabilities – is the primary basis for a company's sustainable competitive advantage. He has emphasized the need for continuously updating and improving the strategic capabilities architecture.

http://viu.eng.rpi.edu/publications/strpaper.pdf

Every year, $300-700 million dollar corporations spend about 5% of their gross income on information systems and their supports. That's from about $15,000,000 to $35,000,000! A significant part of those funds support enterprise databases, a philosophy of database system applications that enable corporations to research the past, control the present, and plan for the future.

Even though an information system costs from $1,000,000 to $10,000,000, and even through most chief information officers (CIOs) can specify exactly how much money is being spent for hardware, software, and staff, CIOs cannot however state with any degree of certainty why one system is being done this year versus next, why it is being done ahead of another, or finally, why it is being done at all.

Many enterprises do not have model-based information systems development environments that allow system designers to see the benefits of rearranging an information systems development schedule. Consequently, the questions that cannot be answered include:

* What effect will there be on the overall schedule if an information system is purchased versus developed?
* At what point does it pay to hire an abnormal quantity of contract staff to advance a schedule?
* What is the long term benefit from 4GL versus 3GL?
* Is it better to generate 3GL than to generate/use a 4GL?
* What are the real costs of distributed software development over centralized development?

If these questions were transformed and applied to any other component of a business (e.g., accounting, manufacturing, distribution and marketing), and remained unanswered, that unit's manager would surely be fired!

We not only need answers to these questions NOW!, we also need them quickly, cost effectively, and in a form that they can be modeled and changed in response to unfolding realities. This paper provides a brief review of a successful 10-step strategy that answers these questions.

Too many half-billion dollar organizations have only a vague notion of the names and interactions of the existing and under development information systems. Whenever they need to know, a meeting is held among the critical few, an inventory is taken, interactions confirmed, and accomplishment schedules are updated.

This ad hoc information systems plan was possible only because all design and development was centralized, the only computer was a main-frame, and the past was acceptable prologue because budgets were ever increasing, schedules always slipping, and information was not yet part of the corporation's critical edge.

Well, today is different, really different! Budgets are decreasing, and slipped schedules are being cited as preventing business alternatives. Confounding the computing environment are different operating systems, DBMSs, development tools, telecommunications (LAN, WAN, Intra-, Inter-, and Extra-net), and distributed hard- and software.

Rather than having centralized, long-range planning and management activities that address these problems, today's business units are using readily available tools to design and build ad hoc stop-gap solutions. These ad hoc systems not only do not interconnect, support common semantics, or provide synchronized views of critical corporate policy, they are soon to form the almost impossible to comprehend confusion of systems and data from which systems order and semantic harmony must spring.

Not only has the computing landscape become profoundly different and more difficult to comprehend, the need for just the right--and correct--information at just the right time is escalating. Late or wrong information is worse than no information.

Information systems managers need a model of their information systems environment. A model that is malleable. As new requirements are discovered, budgets modified, new hardware/software introduced, this model must be such that it can reconstitute the information systems plan in a timely and efficient manner.

http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262

Planning is essential for every organization. It is the point were they organize the following steps to be done and what are to be followed to be able to reach a goal. It is also important for an organization to have both Business plan and Information system plan and both should coincide with one other to achieve a definite goal.

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Subject: Assignment 2 Wed Dec 16, 2009 10:36 am

1.What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? (at least 2000 words)

What is a business plan?

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.
Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balance scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.
Operational plans describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department. Project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project's place within the organization's larger strategic goals.

Business Plan

Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.
For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.
Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."

Presentation Formats

The format of a business plan depends on its presentation context. It is not uncommon for businesses, especially start-ups to have three or four formats for the same business plan:
• an "elevator pitch" - a three minute summary of the business plan's executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.
• an oral presentation - a hopefully entertaining slide show and oral narrative that is meant to trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.
• a written presentation for external stakeholders - a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders.
• an internal operational plan - a detailed plan describing planning details that are needed by management but may not be of interest to external stakeholders. Such plans have a somewhat higher degree of candor and informality than the version targeted at external stakeholders.
Typical structure for a business plan for a start up venture
• cover page and table of contents
• executive summary
• business description
• business environment analysis
• industry background
• competitive analysis
• market analysis
• marketing plan
• operations plan
• management summary
• financial plan
• attachments and milestones
Revisiting the Business Plan
Cost overruns and revenue shortfalls
Cost and revenue estimates are central to any business plan for deciding the viability of the planned venture. But costs are often underestimated and revenues overestimated resulting in later cost overruns, revenue shortfalls, and possibly non-viability. During the dot-com bubble 1997-2001 this was a problem for many technology start-ups. However, the problem is not limited to technology or the private sector; public works projects also routinely suffer from cost overruns and/or revenue shortfalls. The main causes of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls are optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Reference class forecasting has been developed to reduce the risks of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls.
Legal and Liability Issues
Disclosure requirements
An externally targeted business plan should list all legal concerns and financial liabilities that might negatively affect investors. Depending on the amount of funds being raised and the audience to whom the plan is presented, failure to do this may have severe legal consequences.
Limitations on content and audience
Non disclosure agreements (NDAs) with third parties, non-compete agreements, conflicts of interest, privacy concerns, and the protection of one's trade secrets may severely limit the audience to which one might show the business plan. Alternatively, they may require each party receiving the business plan to sign a contract accepting special clauses and conditions.
This situation is complicated by the fact that many venture capitalists will refuse to sign an NDA before looking at a business plan, lest it put them in the untenable position of looking at two independently developed look-alike business plans, both claiming originality. In such situations one may need to develop two versions of the business plan: a stripped down plan that can be used to develop a relationship and a detail plan that is only shown when investors have sufficient interest and trust to sign an NDA.
Open Business Plans
Traditionally business plans have been highly confidential and quite limited in audience. The business plan itself is generally regarded as secret. However the emergence of free software and open source has opened the model and made the notion of an open business plan possible.
An Open Business Plan is a business plan with unlimited audience. The business plan is typically web published and made available to all.
In the free software and open source business model, trade secrets, copyright and patents can no longer be used as effective locking mechanisms to provide sustainable advantages to a particular business and therefore a secret business plan is less relevant in those models.
While the origin of the Open Business Plan model is in the free software and Libre services arena, the concept is likely applicable to other domains.

How Business Plans are Used

Venture Capital
• business plan contests - provides a way for venture capitals to find promising projects
• venture capital assessment of business plans - focus on qualitative factors such as team.
Public Offerings
• in a public offering, potential investors can evaluate perspectives of issuing company
Within Corporations
Fundraising
Fundraising is the primary purpose for many business plans, since they are related to the inherent probable success/failure of the company risk.
Total Quality Management
For more information see Total Quality Management
Total Quality Management (TQM) is a business management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, call centers, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.
Management by Objective
For more information see Management by objectives
Management by Objectives (MBO) is a process of agreeing upon objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization.
Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ) and PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis) or STEER analysis involving Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors and EPISTELS (Environment, Political, Informative, Social, Technological, Economic, Legal and Spiritual)
Education
Business plans are used in some primary and secondary programs to teach economic principles. Wikiversity has a Lunar Boom Town project where students of all ages can collaborate with designing and revising business models and practice evaluating them to learn practical business planning techniques and methodology.
Higher Education
• BA, MBA programs
o integrative team projects
o projects for specific course work
o Business plan contests
Satires of Business Plans
The business plan is the subject of many satires. Satires are used both to express cynicism about business plans and as an educational tool to improve the quality of business plans. For example,
• Five Criteria for a successful business plan in biotech uses Dilbert comic strips to remind people of what not to do when researching and writing a business plan for a biotech start-up. Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, is an MBA graduate (U.C. Berkeley) who sees humor as a critical tool that can improve the behavior of businesses and their managers. He has written numerous critiques of business practices, including business planning. The website Dilbert.com - Games has a mission statement generator that satirizes the wording often found in mission statements. His book The Dilbert Principle – A Cubicle’s Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions discusses the foibles of management and their plans as depicted in the Dilbert comic strips by Scott Adams.
• In the article "South Park's" Investing Lesson, the The Motley Fool columnist "Fool on the Hill" uses the Underpants Gnomes to illustrate the fallacy of focusing on goals without a clear implementation strategy. The Underpants Gnomes episode satirizes the business plans of the Dot-com era.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan

http://viu.eng.rpi.edu/publications/strpaper.pdf

http://www.clarionmag.com/cmag/v3/informationsystemsplanning.pdf

Information system

¼In a very broad sense, the term information system is frequently used to refer to the interaction between people, processes, data and technology. In this sense, the term is used to refer not only to the information and communication technology (ICT) an organization uses, but also to the way in which people interact with this technology in support of business processes.
Some make a clear distinction between information systems, ICT and business processes. Information systems are distinct from information technology in that an information system is typically seen as having an ICT component. Information systems are also different from business processes. Information systems help to control the performance of business processes.
Alter argues for an information system as a special type of work system. A work system is a system in which humans and/or machines perform work using resources (including ICT) to produce specific products and/or services for customers. An information system is a work system whose activities are devoted to processing (capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating and displaying)information.
Part of the difficulty in defining the term information system is due to vagueness in the definition of related terms such as system and information. Beynon-Davies argues for a clearer terminology based in systemics and semiotics. He defines an information system as an example of a system concerned with the manipulation of signs. An information system is a type of socio-technical system. An information system is a mediating construct between actions and technology.
As such, information systems inter-relate with data systems on the one hand and activity systems on the other. An information system is a form of communication system in which data represent and are processed as a form of social memory. An information system can also be considered a semi-formal language which supports human decision making and action.
Information systems are the primary focus of study for the information systems discipline and for organisational informatics.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_system

Assignment 2 (Due: before November 29, 2009, 13:00hrs) - Page 2 Icon_bounce

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Q: What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan?

When we talked about Business Plan according to Tim Berry of his business article, “A business plan is any plan that works for a business to look ahead, allocate resources, focus on key points, and prepare for problems and opportunities.” Business planning is about RESULT.

Is there a standard business plan? A normal business plan (one that follows the advice of business experts) includes a standard set of elements. Plan formats and outlines vary, but generally a plan will include components such as descriptions of the company, product or service, market, forecasts, management team, and financial analysis.
The plan will depend on the specific situation. For example, description of the management team is very important for investors while financial history is most important for banks. However, if you’re developing a plan for internal use only, you may not need to include all the background details that you already know. Make your plan match its purpose.
The most important in Business plan are the following:
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Cash flow is both vital to a company and hard to follow. Cash is usually misunderstood as profits, and they are different. Profits don’t guarantee cash in the bank. Lots of profitable companies go under because of cash flow problems. It just isn’t intuitive.
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Implementation details are what make things happen. Your brilliant strategies and beautifully formatted planning documents are just theory unless you assign responsibilities, with dates and budgets, follow up with those responsible, and track results. Business plans are really about getting results and improving your company.

But of course, it depends on the case, but usually it’s the cash flow analysis and specific implementation details.
Here are some of the qualities of a good business plan, in order of importance:

1. It fits the business need
We simply can't look at business plans as generic. You have to start with whether or not the plan achieved its business purpose. Some plnas exist to get investment. Some are supposed to support loan applications. Those are specialty uses that apply to some business situations, while almost all businesses ought to develop management-oriented business plans that exist to help run the company, not to be presented to outsiders.

Obviously form follows function. The business plan used internally to manage the company doesn't have to polish and present the company to outsiders, so it probably lives on a network, not on paper. But the plan as part of high-end startup looking for VC or angel investment does in fact have to present the business to outsiders. These are very different plans. Some of them have sales objectives, selling an idea, and a team, and a market, to investors. Some have a support objective, reassuring a lender about risk, usually with assets. My favorite business plans are about managing: starting and growing a company. A plan that might be great at selling the company might be bad at supporting a loan application, or for managing a company. So point one, what makes a good business plan, is that it fits the business need. Does it achieve the business objective?

So it's entirely possible to have an excellent business plan that's never been printed, that isn't edited, that contains only cryptic bullet points that only the internal management team understands. And it's also possible to have a well written, thoroughly researched, and beautifully presented business plan that's useless.

2. It’s realistic. It can be implemented.
The second measure of good or bad in a business plan is realism. You don't get points for ideas that can't be implemented. For example, a brilliantly written, beautifully formatted, and excellently researched business plan for a product that can't be built is not a good business plan. The plan that requires millions of dollars of investment but doesn't have a management team that can get that investment is not a good plan. A plan that ignores a fatal flaw is not a good plan.

3. It's specific. You can track results against plan.
Every business plan ought to include tasks, deadlines, dates, forecasts, budgets, and metrics. It's measurable.

Ask yourself, as you evaluate a business plan: how will we know later if we followed the plan? How will we track actual results and compare them against the plan? How will we know if we are on plan or not?

While blue-sky strategy is great (or might be, maybe), good planning depends more on what, when, who, and how much.

4. It clearly defines responsibilities for implementation
You have to be able to identify a single person will be responsible for every significant task and function. A task that doesn't have an owner isn't likely to be implemented. You can go through a business plan and look to see whether or not you can recognize a specific person responsible for implementation at every point.

5. It clearly identifies assumptions
This is very important because business plans are always wrong. They're done by humans, who are guessing the future, and humans guess wrong. So business plans must clearly show assumptions up front because changed assumptions ought to lead to revised plans.

6. It's communicated to the people who have to run it
At this point we leave the discussion of the plan itself, as if it were a stand-alone entity, and get into how the plan is managed. The first five points here are about the plan. You can deal with them as the plan develops. This and the following two are about the management of the plan.
I know that's kind of tough, because it means that a plan that isn't managed isn't a good plan. But I can live with that.

So a good plan is communicated. Up above, where I suggest that the qualities of writing and editing are not essential for all plans, and I reference cryptic bullet points that only the team understands: I stick with that here. If only the team understands them it, it can still be a good plan; but it has to be communicated to that team.

We're judging the plan by the business improvements it causes; in some sense, by the implementation it causes. So people in charge have to know and understand the business plan. Plans in drawers, or locked on a single computer, only work when it's a one-person organization and nobody else has to know the plan.

7. It gets people committed
Here too it's about the process surrounding the plan, more than the plan itself. The plan has to have the specifics in point 3 and responsibilities as in point 4, but the management has to take them to the team and get the team committed. For the one-person business that's easier, but still important.

8. It's kept alive by follow up and planning process
Sadly, you can have all seven of the above points, and if you drop the ball — the plan in the drawer syndrome — then the plan still isn't a good plan. It has to bring the planning process with it, meaning regular review and course correction.

No business plan is good if it's static and inflexible. Planning isn't about predicting the future once a year and then following that predicted future no matter what. Planning is steering and management. It takes a process of regular review and course correction.

In contrast, Information system, “It is an integrated set of components for collecting, storing, processing, and communicating information. Business firms, other organizations, and individuals in contemporary society rely on information systems to manage their operations, compete in the marketplace, supply services, and augment personal lives. For instance, modern corporations rely on computerized information systems to process financial accounts and manage human resources; municipal governments rely on information systems to provide basic services to its citizens; and individuals use information systems to study, shop, bank, and invest.” -Encyclopædia Britannica.
But what is Information System Planning? According to SDLC article (System Design Life Cycle), “the system planning seeks to identify and prioritize those technologies and applications that will return the most value to the business. Synonyms include strategic systems planning and Information resource management.
Information systems (IS) planning is recognized as one of the dominated managerial issues of MIS. Based on prior studies in strategic and IS planning, this study integrates three domains to investigate the effects of organizational contexts and planning system dimensions on the effectiveness of IS planning from a contingency perspective. The model is supported by the empirical data, showing the importance of many contextual factors and planning system dimensions to attaining greater effectiveness of IS planning. In particular, the results demonstrate the pivotal role of an organization’s improved planning capability in mediating the effects of organization contexts and planning system dimensions on IS planning effectiveness. Every phase of IS planning is important. The following are some of the phases that the IS will have.

Study the Business Mission
Although many businesses haven't formally documented their mission, they all have one. If information systems are to truly return value to the business, they need to directly address that mission. Thus, the first phase of systems planning is to study the business mission.

Ideally, the scope of the phase should be the entire business. For some companies, that is much too large. Consequently, the scope might be reduced to a more manageable level-a division, a plant, or some other significant operating unit. For other companies, the scope of the phase is limited by the level of top management support received. Top executives of the organization must be willing to participate in the development of any strategic plan. Otherwise, the phase is useless.

Members of the planning team include information systems managers and the key business executives (system owners). The key facilitator of this phase is a planning analyst.

Planning analysts are specially trained information systems planning professionals. Their job is similar to that of systems analysts; however, they must be even more business-oriented that?.
Planning analysts must be familiar with the planning methodology to be used and the deliverables to be produced. They require a unique blend of skills and experiences, including business management, systems analysis and design, data management, and networking.

Many IS shops have difficulty finding the correct mix of these skills. Particularly, IS professionals tend to be either too applications-oriented, too database-oriented, or too network-oriented. In this case, the business usually hires management consultants to serve as the planning analysts. These consultants are widely available through IS consulting firms (e.g., Ernst & Young, James Martin & Associates, or IBM)

The input to this phase is the business mission, as "discovered" through interviews and group sessions with system owners. The business mission Is usually defined in terms of customers, products and services, material resources, human resources, geographic operating locations, management structures and philosophy, corporate goals and objectives, unavoidable business constraints, critical business success factors, and other management-oriented criteria.
The key deliverable is business plans. Hopefully, those plans already exist; this phase merely translates them into terms or formats that are useful to the system owners and planning analysts in subsequent planning phases. (All too often, that plan does not exist!)
Based on the findings of this phase, the planning effort could be canceled due to a lack of management commitment or funding. It is more likely, however, that the project will continue to the next phase-possibly with a reduced business scope.

Define an Information Architecture
Given an understanding of the business mission, you can now develop a plan for information systems that truly mirrors and supports that business mission. The next phase of systems planning is to define information architecture for information systems.
Information architecture is a plan for selecting information technology and developing information systems needed to support the business mission. Synonyms include information systems plan and master computing plan.
This architecture phase can take six months or longer to complete.

Once again, this phase Is facilitated by planning analysts. The team also includes the same IS managers and business executives included in the previous planning phase. Additionally, the team should normally include at least one database, networks, and applications management representative -the reason will become apparent in a moment.

The key input to this phase is the business plans from the last phase. Other inputs include existing system details and limitations (from the documentation maintained during the Systems Support phase), facts and opinions (from appropriate system owners and system users), and technology forecasts and opinions (from Information systems management and/or consultants).

These inputs are used to build the information architecture. The key components in information architecture are:
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A DATA architecture that identifies and prioritizes the databases that need to be developed. These databases should be highly flexible so that they can support several areas of the business. (Note: A data or database manager usually helps define the data architecture.)
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A NETWORK architecture that identifies and prioritizes computer networks that need to be developed. These networks must optimize information systems support at all appropriate business operating locations. (Note: A networks manager usually helps define the network architecture.)
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An ACTIVITIES architecture (more appropriately called an applications architecture) that identifies and prioritizes business areas for which business processes and/or information systems applications must be redesigned. (Note: One or more applications development managers usually help define the applications architecture.)
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A PEOPLE architecture (actually, an IS organization structure) necessary to develop and support the databases, networks, and applications.
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A TECHNOLOGY architecture that identifies the information technologies that should be used for applications, and possibly for applications development.
The Information architecture is packaged in the deliverable, information systems plans. These plans will ultimately influence the development and support for all future Information systems. Thus, they must be made available to information systems management, any contracted consultants, and all current and future information systems owners.

Some planning methodologies call for other deliverable, distinct business areas (to be passed on to the next planning phase).
Business areas are groups of logically related business functions and activities, independent of organization structure. The term was Invented as part a planning methodology called information engineering.

This definition requires some clarification. Business areas define major functions of the business, for example, PROCESS AND FILL ORDERS. Several organization units may play a role in any given business area. For example, the processing and filling of orders normally requires activity in at least the following organization units: Sales, Order Processing, Accounts Receivable, Warehousing, and Shipping. Ideally, information systems should be built around the integration of these units' activities as they relate to the common business function-in this case, processing and filling orders.

Business areas are usually prioritized according to their perceived importance and value to the business- The next planning phase deals with one business area at a time (in order of priority).
The planning project could be terminated due to a lack of either funds or management commitment. Even if this happens, you still have the information architecture to guide future systems development. Alternatively, the project can continue to the next phase, business area analysis.

Business Area Analysis
The information architecture is a good high-level IS plan. But some IS shops seek to further refine that plan to define specific systems development projects. Thus, the next phase of systems planning is to evaluate business area(s) to identify and prioritize specific development projects. A project may trigger development of any of the following:
1. A network-subsequent projects would build databases and/or applications around that network.
2. A database-subsequent projects would build applications around that database.
3. An information systems application-which may include building an applications-oriented database or network if a network or database Is not completed first.

Business area analysis (BAA) can be a time-consuming phase that takes six months or longer (per business area) to complete. But many companies are willing to spend that time to ultimately develop highly integrated information systems around their business areas. Because BAA takes so long, most businesses analyze only one or two areas at a time, preferably those identified as most crucial in the strategic information architecture.

One challenge facing those organizations that analyze business areas is simply keeping up with application demand. For any given business area, the planing analysts may identify several applications development projects. While Systems analysts and applications programmers tackle those projects, the planning analysts generally move on to another business area, defining still more projects, and so forth. The growth in planned projects can easily exceed resources for those developing the applications. Fortunately, modern systems development technology offers some hope for keeping up with this demand.

Once again, this phase is facilitated by the same planning analysts who facilitated development of the information architecture. Systems analysts who will ultimately develop the applications are also frequently added to the team. Although most executive managers are excused from the phase, all managers in the specific business area must be involved in order to identify the applications needed and prioritize the projects to develop those applications. Some system users may also become involved.

The key inputs are the Information systems plans and business area(s) from the previous phase. Additionally, the analyst collects facts and opinions from appropriate system owners and system users.

The key deliverable of the phase is planned applications development projects that will eventually be passed onto systems analysis. This deliverable will normally include documentation that can serve as a useful first draft for many systems analysis deliverables. The plan often calls for rather dramatic changes to how the business area will conduct business (fewer people, less bureaucracy, etc.).

There is no feasibility/scope checkpoint at the end of the phase. Why? The planning process has defined and prioritized projects. Only one question remains: When do we (can we) commit resources to the development of those planned applications?
This completes our survey of the systems planning phases. As a closing note, detailed coverage of systems planning is not generally included in the first systems analysis and design course. At some point it will probably become mandatory.

The following are the links that makes my resource answer.
http://timberry.bplans.com/2009/02/some-key-questions-on-business-plans.html
http://articles.bplans.com/writing-a-business-plan/what-is-a-business-plan/33
http://newton.uor.edu/Courses/SysAnaDes/planning.html

blog: http://mis2-assignment.blogspot.com/

Subject: Business and IS Plan Wed Dec 16, 2009 11:07 am

Since we are talking about business plan and IS plan here, let us dig deeper the significance of planning in view of the nature of the relationship of each organizational plan and IT plan. To have a better perspective on this matter, I would like to show you some important aspects I have gathered through my researches about business planning.

Planning is something fundamental to anybody or any organization as it is a preparatory measure of some things that need to be done. As plan defines by Encarta, plan works as a system for achieving objective. Consequently, it is a method of doing something that is worked out in advance. clearly stated that it is a method of doing something that is worked out in advance. The way things are arranged or just an outline of items to be included in certain tasks.

In any organization, planning is the most important tool in achieving its objectives and purposes. To earn success, people should have an effective business plan to be carried out. Business planning encompasses all the goals, strategies and actions that an organization envision to ensure the business’s survival and growth. It is an incredibly effective way for individuals to focus on achieving the goals of the organization(Susan Ward).Basically, any form of business and/or establishments has business plans that set out its future strategies and financial development.

Huge, isn’t it? For convenience, let’s think of business planning as being broken into two large sections; profit-making business planning and contingency business planning. Profit-making business planning is all the general business planning that must be done to start and run a successful business. The best known example of this type of business planning is the business plan. The business plan isn’t a do-it-and-forget business planning exercise but a living document that needs to be updated throughout the lifecycle of any business. Once the business has officially started, profit-making business planning will center on setting and meeting goals and targets.

In establishing and managing the affair of state on any businesses, a manager has to set out a layout of his plans which will guide him in doing tasks concerning the achievement of his business goals. This will going to be a great help for him in governing his business colleagues and associates and direct the whole company to its program implementations. Without this solid foundation that serves as a backbone for the organization, no business will be able to have a clear perspective of its accomplishment. As planning guides the organization on the right track keeping it focused and remains relevant to the needs of its community, the reason why it exists. It supply a basis for measuring the results and progress of the business development. The key important thing is to make the organization move into a systematic and orderly way.

Because planning serves as way of proceeding for assessment of progress, most organizations understand the need for annual program objectives. When managers and leaders organize objectives for yearly program implementations, they usually set out goals made strategically to help them set the priorities of the company and organize work. And with the fast-evolving changes in our environment in the presents state of life, plans should likewise be made every now and then a very flexible one that could possibly handle the rapid alteration and transformations of various company programs and objectives intended for longer term plans.

Some definite objectives could not be anymore applicable in a certain period of time or it may be difficult to implement now that several changes are influencing the present status of the organization. Moreover, planning is an important factor to be considered by most of the leaders of an organization since this will assist them in making some of the strategies that will aid in defining ways to administer changes occurred from the internal and external factors in the community.

In most cases, those of higher positions like the Chief Executive Officers are the usual persons who creates and initiates the planning for the business components of the company and the lower rank staff like those in the supervising and control staff and employees are hands-on to the implementation of the plans. But some organizations have these certain offices and divisions which take charge with the business planning strategies. But in common cases, planning are done primarily by the administrative division.

Having realized the competence brought by technology to the corporate world, information technology has long been integrated into the core of every business through managing and supporting its business operations. The information system department will going to be the organization’s most important areas. Information System people are treated as the most critical resources of the company. They can either help the company progress or be a failure to the organization. Thus, it is then very crucial for the company to take high attention on the center of the organization which holds its vital information. Since, information is a very significant data any organization has. The purpose and use of information systems in the beginning, is targeted towards reducing manual labor and increasing efficiency and thus reducing cost of doing business. In this case, the information system processes the essential elements of the company’s day-to-day business processes. In this side of the story, IT planning is somehow align with the Information Systems planning.

IT planning is the organized planning of IT infrastructure done at various levels of the organization. The topic of IT planning is very important for both planners and end users: End-users often do IT planning for their own units, and they also frequently participate in the corporate IT planning. This in turn determines what applications end users can deploy. Thus the future of every unit in the organization could be impacted by the IT infrastructure. These plans would help organizations to reach their business goals and to create competitive advantage.

For this reason, all of the plans of the organization should include not only the outside part of the business components of the company but also the internal structure of the organization as well as the factors comprising the Information Systems. The information systems uses technology to serve the organization in a more better view, the society where it is classified, to perform its mission and vision, to boost the economy and to achieve its goals and objectives through propelling business. Any organization could have a lot of reasons for keeping alive the information systems of the company. As we all know, every organization is striving hard to improve its competitive position in the global and local marketplace. Thus most organizations invest in information technology as it plays a critical supporting role in reaching the organization’s goals. Information Systems consists of the hardware, software and the people ware where any of the organization have. All of these basically support each other in order for the Information Systems aligned with the business processes.

If we are going to specifically look over the components of Information Systems, we could easily see the significance of each element towards each other. Moreover, in most business processes, there are lot of proprietary and open source software being introduced and used by companies that could further enhance the processing of information. Software that are especially made particularly for the certain tasks and programs for a company specialization. Naturally, software elements would not run without the hardware components. All the hardware components of the company are necessary tools for every individual who were using the resources essential for the transactions and business operations of an organization. Indeed, these hardware components are invested by the company to help them in processing large amount of data and will aid in producing more accurate and better outputs with less effort on the labor. Nevertheless, Information Systems would never be completed without the most important ingredient - the people ware or the human resources of the organization. Without them, the hardware and software specifications of any company will become useless for the fact that there will be no person in charge in operating these components for the business operations. The human resources, or the workforce as we kept on saying is the most critical resource of the organization. And as with the information system is concern, these IT people are treated as highly significant beings because all the crucial information about the business of the company is being processed in the information system department which is manned by people who are hands-on to the functionalities of the system.

Since we already mentioned that the information system involves many procedures and functions, it is likely important to engross the organization with Information System Plan or the so-called IS Plan. This is where the classifying, processing, managing, and controlling of the data inputs to yield the necessary output of the business operations. In most companies, it is in the Information Systems department where able to carry out the mission and vision of the company as a whole, and later on each and every subdivisions of it should align with the business strategy. This is where the business plan and information systems plan naturally align. Where all the core processes of the company, or the business plan always inclined with their IS Plan.

The nature of relationship between the business plan and the information systems plan is basically relative to business and Information Technology. Usually, the information system is aligned with the business plans of the organization. Let’s take the Davao Light and Power Company Information System Department as an example: in every suggestions or proposal they have to made for a new system or programs, they would always take the side of the top management who were the business owners. They are not in the right place to easily decide for the company. Thus, with the signal of the higher rank people, that would be the time where they can eventually proceed to their plan. With this the information systems plan always relates to the business plan of any company. The information system is in charge of doing these procedures that is why the IS plan should not be far from the overall business plan of the company. The IT people will be the support group for any operations that needed to be prepare.

Also, because of the technological advance brought by the rapid changes of our generation, the business strategies of the owners were being affected and need to be taken care of. The top management should also look up to how these new trends of technologies will provide betterment for the organization as a whole. Apart from that concerns the company should also consider on how to acquire and manage the firm’s hardware and software assets, and other mediating factors affecting the information technology and the organization. Without intensive business plan and integrated Information System plan, the programs and systems being develop would not be possibly directly implemented and gain beneficial results for the business. The kinds of information systems like the operational, management, and strategic level serves the groups of operational managers, data workers, middle and senior managers. As we can see, these people are also the same persons setting out the company’s vision, mission, goals, and objectives.

In overall reflection, I can say that the continuous use of information technology in business strategies will help achieve competitive advantage of the organization in the society. This is because Information Systems enlightens any organizations in taking responsibility together and sharing the knowledge across business divisions and improving competency towards global marketplace. Information systems aid in automating the manual parts of the businesses, giving efficient and accurate results in processing information. When the manual system adopt threats to security and reliability of the information due to data redundancy, the computerized system can speed up, and give accurate, more reliable outputs which could then be utilized not just by one functional area in the company but to all that is concerned with the information being processed.

These made me realized that both the business plan and IS plan are always been correlated to each other. Because as business strategies being outputted to business plan carry out the outside level of the company while IS plan is concerned with the information system and the company’s core issues.

References:

http://managementhelp.org/plan_dec/bus_plan/bus_plan.htm
http://www.investorwords.com/630/business_plan.html
Feurer, R., et al., “Aligning Strategies, Processes, and IT:
http://www.acf.hhs.gov/nhsitrc/it_planning/index.html

Posts : 55 Points : 58 Join date : 2009-06-19 Age : 32

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? (at least 2000 words)

It is quite complicated to identify the nature of relationship between the business plan and the IS plan because you need time to think some strategies in order to meet your goal. Planning is a process for accomplishing purpose. Good planning helps create communities that offer better choices for where and how people live. Planning helps communities to envision their future. It helps them to find the right balance of new development and essential services, environmental protection, and innovative change.

Nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan:

Business planning is about results. You need to make the contents of your plan match your purpose. Don’t accept a standard outline just because it’s there. And why prepare a business plan and what to avoid in your business plan.

What is a business plan?

A business plan is any plan that works for a business to look ahead, allocate resources, focus on key points, and prepare for problems and opportunities.

Unfortunately, many people think of business plans only for starting a new business or applying for business loans. But they are also vital for running a business, whether or not the business needs new loans or new investments. Businesses need plans to optimize growth and development according to priorities.

What’s a startup plan?

A simple startup plan includes a summary, mission statement, keys to success, market analysis, and break-even analysis. This kind of plan is good for deciding whether or not to proceed with a plan, to tell if there is a business worth pursuing, but it is not enough to run a business with.

Is there a standard business plan?

A normal business plan (one that follows the advice of business experts) includes a standard set of elements, as shown below. Plan formats and outlines vary, but generally a plan will include components such as descriptions of the company, product or service, market, forecasts, management team, and financial analysis.

What is most important in a plan?

It depends on the case, but usually it’s the cash flow analysis and specific implementation details.
Cash flow is both vital to a company and hard to follow. Cash is usually misunderstood as profits, and they are different. Profits don’t guarantee cash in the bank. Lots of profitable companies go under because of cash flow problems. It just isn’t intuitive.
Implementation details are what make things happen. Your brilliant strategies and beautifully formatted planning documents are just theory unless you assign responsibilities, with dates and budgets, follow up with those responsible, and track results. Business plans are really about getting results and improving your company.

Keep in mind that creating a business plan is an essential step for any prudent entrepreneur to take, regardless of the size of the business. This step is too often skipped, but we have made it easy for you by providing this ready format to build your plan as you progress through this course.

Why Prepare A Business Plan?

Your business plan is going to be useful in a number of ways. First and foremost, it will define and focus your objective using appropriate information and analysis. You can use it as a selling tool in dealing with important relationships including your lenders, investors and banks. Your business plan can uncover omissions and/or weaknesses in your planning process.

What to Avoid in Your Business Plan

Place some reasonable limits on long-term, future projections. (Long-term means over one year.) Better to stick with short-term objectives and modify the plan as your business progresses. Too often, long-range planning becomes meaningless because the reality of your business can be different from your initial concept. Avoid optimism. In fact, to offset optimism, be extremely conservative in predicting capital requirements, timelines, sales and profits. Few business plans correctly anticipate how much money and time will be required. Do not ignore spelling out what your strategies will be in the event of business adversities. Use simple language in explaining the issues. Make it easy to read and understand.

Don't depend entirely on the uniqueness of your business or even a patented invention. Success comes to those who start businesses with great economics and not necessarily great inventions.

What is IS Plan?

A process for developing a strategy and plans for aligning information systems with the business strategies of an organization.

The term Information Systems (IS) refers to the interaction between processes and technology. This interaction can occur within or across organizational boundaries. An information system is not only the technology an organization uses, but also the way in which the organizations interact with the technology and the way in which the technology works with the organization’s business processes. Information systems are distinct from information technology in that an information system has an information technology component that interacts with the processes components.

Planning for information systems, as for any other system, begins with the identification of needs. In order to be effective, development of any type of computer-based system should be a response to need--whether at the transaction processing level or at the more complex information and support systems levels. Such planning for information systems is much like strategic planning in management. Objectives, priorities, and authorization for information systems projects need to be formalized. The systems development plan should identify specific projects slated for the future, priorities for each project and for resources, general procedures, and constraints for each application area. The plan must be specific enough to enable understanding of each application and to know where it stands in the order of development.

Information systems are those computer systems that implement business strategies; They are those systems where information services resources are applied to strategic business opportunities in such a way that the computer systems have an impact on the organization’s products and business operations. Strategic information systems are always systems that are developed in response to corporate business initiative. The ideas in several well-known cases came from information Services people, but they were directed at specific corporate business thrusts. In other cases, the ideas came from business operational people, and Information Services supplied the technological capabilities to realize profitable results.
Most information systems are looked on as support activities to the business. They mechanize operations for better efficiency, control, and effectiveness, but they do not, in themselves, increase corporate profitability. They are simply used to provide management with sufficient dependable information to keep the business running smoothly, and they are used for analysis to plan new directions. Strategic information systems, on the other hand, become an integral and necessary part of the business, and directly influence market share, earnings, and all other aspects of marketplace profitability. They may even bring in new products, new markets, and new ways of doing business. They directly affect the competitive stance of the organization, giving it an advantage against the competitors.

All businesses should have both long-range and short-range planning of operational systems to ensure that the possibilities of computer usefulness will be seized in a reasonable time. Such planning will project analysis and costing, system development life cycle considerations, and specific technology planning, such as for computers, databases, and communications. There must be computer capacity planning, technology forecasting, and personnel performance planning. It is more likely that those in the organization with entrepreneurial vision will conceive of strategic plans when such basic operational capabilities are in place and are well managed.

Some characteristics of strategic IS planning are:

• Main task: strategic/competitive advantage, linkage to business strategy.
• Key objective: pursuing opportunities, integrating IS and business strategies
• Direction from: executives/senior management and users, coalition of users/management and information systems.
• Main approach: entrepreneurial (user innovation), multiple (bottom-up development, top down analysis, etc.) at the same time. Strategic Information Systems Planning in the present SIS era is not an easy task because such a process is deeply embedded in business processes. These systems need to cater to the strategic demands of organizations, i.e., serving the business goals and creating competitive advantage as well as meeting their data processing and MIS needs. The key point here is that organizations have to plan for information systems not merely as tools for cutting costs but as means to adding value. The magnitude of this change in perspective of IS/IT’s role in organizations is highlighted in a Business Week article, ‘The Technology Payoff’ (Business Week, June 14, 1993). According to this article, throughout the 1980s US businesses invested a staggering $1 trillion in theinformation technology. This huge investment did not result in a commensurate productivity gain - overall national productivity rose at a 1% annual rate compared with nearly 5% in Japan. Thus, it is obvious that information technology has indeed come a long way in the SIS era, offering unprecedented possibilities, which, if not cashed on, would turn into 4 unprecedented risks. As Keen (1993) has morbidly but realistically pointed out that organizations not planning for strategic information systems may fail to spot the business implications of competitors’ use of information technology until it is too late for them to react. In situations like this, when information technology changes the basics of competition in an industry, 50% of the companies in that industry disappear within ten years.

Strategic Information Systems Planning Methodologies
The task of strategic information systems planning is difficult and often time organizations do not know how to do it. Strategic information systems planning is a major change for organizations, from planning for information systems based on users’ demands to those based on business strategy. Also strategic information systems planning changes the planning characteristics in major ways. For example, the time horizon for planning changes from 1 year to 3 years or more and development plans are driven by current and future business needs rather than incremental user needs. Increase in the time horizon is a factor which results in poor response from the top management to the strategic information systems planning process as it is difficult to hold their attention for such a long period. Other questions associated with strategic information systems
planning are related to the scope of the planning study, the focus of the planning exercise – corporate organization vs. strategic business unit, number of studies and their sequence, choosing a strategic information systems planning methodology or developing one if none is suitable, targets of planning process and deliverables. Because of the complexity of the strategic information systems planning process and uniqueness of each organization, there is no one best way to tackle it.

References:

http://www.myownbusiness.org/s2/#1

http://articles.bplans.com/writing-a-business-plan/what-is-a-business-plan/33

http://viu.eng.rpi.edu/publications/strpaper.pdf

My blog site:

http://neilreyniere.blogspot.com/

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? (at least 2000 words)

BUSINESS PLAN

Business plan is defined as a formal or informal document that serves as a road map for a business. A formal business plan is a detailed document that usually follows a standard format. Formal business plans are a necessity for securing outside funding for a business, including SBA loans and private capital. Formal business plans include an appendix area that contains important supporting documents. In opposition, informal business plan can consist of almost anything. In this case, the definition of a business plan is purely in the eyes of the business owner. Informal business plans may be nothing more than ideas scribbled down on paper. However, the more detailed and accurate the business plan the more useful it is as a guide to conducting business. Informal business plans are not presented to others for they are merely a planning tool for the business owner.

The general notion and old saying of "Those who fail to plan, plan to fail" can hold great meaning for someone who wants to start or operate a business. Even if outside funding is not necessary, it might become necessary as the business grows and if it does not, the business plan would become valuable tool that can help a business owner understand the market and competition, keys to avoiding business failure. That's why understanding the definition of a business plan is so important.
When properly developed and maintained, a business plan can help to keep focused. In that sense, the answer to the question, "What is a Business Plan?" or "What is the definition of a business plan?" is simply that a business plan is a road map for a business: What it does, who's involved, who is included in its market and why the business should be successful against the competition.

By definition, a business plan usually applies to a formal business plan used for securing financing, while in actual practice, business plans may be very informal documents that small business owners use when making decisions about their business and its operations.

A company's business plan is one of its most important documents. It can be used by managers and executives for internal planning. It can be used as the basis for loan applications from banks and other lenders. It can be used to persuade investors that a company is a good investment. For start-up ventures, the process of preparing a business plan serves as a road map to the future by making entrepreneurs and business owners think through their strategies, evaluate their basic business concepts, recognize their business's limitations, and avoid a variety of mistakes.

Virtually every business needs a business plan. Lack of proper planning is one of the most often cited reasons for business failures. Business plans help companies identify their goals and objectives and provide them with tactics and strategies to reach those goals. They are not historical documents; rather, they embody a set of management decisions about necessary steps for the business to reach its objectives and perform in accordance with its capabilities.

"By its very definition, a business plan is a plan for the business, clarifying why it exists, who it exists for, what products and services it provides these client groups, how it intends to develop and deliver these products and services, and where it is headed," Rebecca Jones wrote in Information Outlook. "A business plan is a roadmap for the organization, showing the destination it seeks, the path it will follow to get there, and the supplies and wherewithal required to complete the journey."

Business plans have several major uses. These include internal planning and forecasting, obtaining funding for ongoing operations or expansion, planned divestiture and spin-offs, and restructuring or reorganizing. While business plans have elements common to all uses, most business plans are tailored according to their specific use and intended audience.

When used for internal planning, business plans can provide a blueprint for the operation of an entire company. A company's performance and progress can be measured against planned goals involving sales, expenditures, time frame, and strategic direction. Business plans also help an entrepreneur or business manager identify and focus on potential problem areas, both inside and outside the company. Once potentially troublesome areas have been identified, proposed solutions and contingency plans can be incorporated into the business plan.

Business plans also cover such areas as marketing opportunities and future financing requirements that require management attention. In some instances—such as scenarios in which an entrepreneur decides to turn a favorite hobby into a home-based business enterprise—the business plan can be a simple document of one or two pages. A business proposal of significant complexity and financial importance, however, should include a far more comprehensive plan. A tool and die manufacturer looking for investors to expand production capacity, for example, will in all likelihood need to compose a business plan of greater depth and detail than will a computer enthusiast who decides to launch a desktop publishing business out of his/her home.

Ideally, everyone in the company will use the information contained in the company's business plan, whether to set performance targets, guide decision-making with regard to ongoing operations, or assess personnel performance in terms of the their ability to meet objectives set forth in the business plan. In addition, workers who are informed about the business plan can evaluate and adjust their own performance in terms of company objectives and expectations.

Business plans can also be used in the restructuring or reorganization of a business. In such cases, business plans describe actions that need to be taken in order to restore profitability or reach other goals. Necessary operational changes are identified in the plan, along with corresponding reductions in expenses. Desired performance and operational objectives are delineated, often with corresponding changes in production equipment, work force, and certain products and/or services.

Banks and other lenders use business plans to evaluate a company's ability to handle more debt and, in some cases, equity financing. The business plan documents the company's cash flow requirements and provides a detailed description of its assets, capitalization, and projected financial performance. It provides potential lenders and investors with verifiable facts about a company's performance so that risks can be accurately identified and evaluated.

Finally, the business plan is the primary source of information for potential purchasers of a company or one of its divisions or product lines. As with outside lenders and investors, business plans prepared for potential buyers provide them with verifiable facts and projections about the company's performance. The business plan must communicate the basic business premise or concept of the company, present its strengths as well as weaknesses, and provide indications of the company's long-term viability. When a company is attempting to sell off a division or product line, the business plan defines the new business entity.

The process of preparing and developing a business plan is an interactive one that involves every functional area of a company. Successful business plans are usually the result of team effort, in which all employees provide input based on their special areas of expertise and technical skill. Business owners and managers provide overall support for the planning process as well as general guidelines and feedback on the plan as it is being developed.

Some companies make the planning process an ongoing one. In other cases, such as for a business acquisition, it may be necessary to prepare a business plan on short notice. The process can be expedited by determining what information is needed from each area of a company. Participants can then meet to complete only those plan components that are needed immediately. During the planning process, it is usually desirable to encourage teamwork, especially across functional lines. When people work together to collect and analyze data, they are far more likely to be able to arrive at objectives that are consistent with one another.

A few basic steps can be identified in the planning process. The first step is to organize the process by identifying who will be involved, determining the basic scope of the plan, and establishing a time frame within which the plan is to be completed. Company leaders not only communicate their support for the planning process, they also define the responsibilities of each party involved. Work plans that supplement the general timetable are helpful in meeting deadlines associated with the planning process.

Once the planning process has been fully organized, participants can begin the process of assessment. Internal evaluations include identification of strengths and weaknesses of all areas of the business. In addition, it is generally useful to assess and evaluate such external factors as the general economy, competition, relevant technologies, trends, and other circumstances outside the control of the company that can affect its performance or fundamental health.

Setting goals and defining strategies are the next key steps in the planning process. Using the assessment and evaluation of internal and external factors, fundamental goals for the business are developed. Pertinent areas to be studied include the company's competitive philosophy, its market focus, and its customer service philosophy. Specific performance and operational strategies are then established, based on these goals.

After strategies and goals have been defined, they are translated into specific plans and programs. These plans and programs determine how a company's resources will be managed in order to implement its strategies and achieve its goals. Specific areas that require their own plans and programs include the overall organization of the company, sales and marketing, products and production, and finance. Finally, these specific plans are assembled into the completed business plan.

Business plans must include authoritative, factual data, usually obtained from a wide range of sources. The plans must be written in a consistent and realistic manner. Contradictions or inconsistencies within a business plan create doubts in the minds of its readers. Problems and risks associated with the business should be described rather than avoided, then used as the basis for presenting thoughtful solutions and contingency plans. Business plans can be tailored to the needs and interests of specific audiences by emphasizing or presenting differently certain categories of information in different versions of the plan.

Business plans contain a number of specific elements as well as certain general characteristics. These include a general description of the company and its products or services, an executive summary, management and organizational charts, sales and marketing plans, financial plans, and production plans. They describe the general direction of a company in terms of its underlying philosophy, goals, and objectives. Business plans explain specific steps and actions that will be taken as well as their rationale. That is, they not only tell how a company will achieve its strategic objectives, they also tell why specific decisions have been made. Anticipated problems and the company's response to them are usually included. In effect, business plans are a set of management decisions about how the company will proceed along a specified course of action, with justifications for those decisions.

IS PLAN

Entrepreneurs and business managers are often so preoccupied with immediate issues that they lose sight of their ultimate objectives. That's why a business review or preparation of a strategic plan is a virtual necessity. This may not be a recipe for success, but without it a business is much more likely to fail.

A sound plan should:

• Serve as a framework for decisions or for securing support/approval.
• Provide a basis for more detailed planning.
• Explain the business to others in order to inform, motivate & involve.
• Assist benchmarking & performance monitoring.
• Stimulate change and become building block for next plan.

A strategic plan should not be confused with a business plan. The former is likely to be a (very) short document whereas a business plan is usually a much more substantial and detailed document. A strategic plan can provide the foundation and frame work for a business plan. A strategic plan is not the same thing as an operational plan. The former should be visionary, conceptual and directional in contrast to an operational plan which is likely to be shorter term, tactical, focused, implementable and measurable. As an example, compare the process of planning a vacation (where, when, duration, budget, who goes, how travel are all strategic issues) with the final preparations (tasks, deadlines, funding, weather, packing, transport and so on are all operational matters). A satisfactory strategic plan must be realistic and attainable so as to allow managers and entrepreneurs to think strategically and act operationally.

The preparation of a strategic plan is a multi-step process covering vision, mission, objectives, values, strategies, goals and programs.

The first step is to develop a realistic Vision for the business. This should be presented as a pen picture of the business in three or more years time in terms of its likely physical appearance, size, activities etc. Answer the question: "if someone from Mars visited the business, what would they see (or sense)?" Consider its future products, markets, customers, processes, location, staffing etc.

The nature of a business is often expressed in terms of its Mission which indicates the purpose and activities of the business, for example, "to design, develop, manufacture and market specific product lines for sale on the basis of certain features to meet the identified needs of specified customer groups via certain distribution channels in particular geographic areas". A statement along these lines indicates what the business is about and is infinitely clearer than saying, for instance, "we're in electronics" or worse still, "we are in business to make money" (assuming that the business is not a mint !). Also, some people confuse mission statements with value statements (see below) - the former should be very hard-nosed while the latter can deal with 'softer' issues surrounding the business. When drafting a mission statement, critically examine every noun, adjective and verb to ensure that they are focused, realistic and justified.

The next element is to address the Values governing the operation of the business and its conduct or relationships with society at large, customers, suppliers, employees, local community and other stakeholders.

The third key element is to explicitly state the business's Objectives in terms of the results it needs/wants to achieve in the medium/long term. Aside from presumably indicating a necessity to achieve regular profits (expressed as return on shareholders' funds), objectives should relate to the expectations and requirements of all the major stakeholders, including employees, and should reflect the underlying reasons for running the business. These objectives could cover growth, profitability, technology, offerings and markets.

Next are the Strategies - the rules and guidelines by which the mission, objectives etc. may be achieved. They can cover the business as a whole including such matters as diversification, organic growth, or acquisition plans, or they can relate to primary matters in key functional areas. Use SWOTs to help identify possible strategies by building on strengths, resolving weaknesses, exploiting opportunities and avoiding threats.

Next come the Goals. These are specific interim or ultimate time-based measurements to be achieved by implementing strategies in pursuit of the company's objectives, for example, to achieve sales of $3m in three years time. Goals should be quantifiable, consistent, realistic and achievable. They can relate to factors like market (sizes and shares), products, finances, profitability, utilization, efficiency.

The final elements are the Programs which set out the implementation plans for the key strategies. These should cover resources, objectives, time-scales, deadlines, budgets and performance targets.

It goes without saying that the mission, objectives, values, strategies and goals must be inter-linked and consistent with each other. This is much easier said than done because many businesses which are set up with the clear objective of making their owners wealthy often lack strategies, realistic goals or concise missions.

http://homebusiness.about.com/od/homebusinessglossar1/g/what-is-bizplan.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/business-plan
http://www.planware.org/strategicplan.htm

My Blog: http://etelur.blogspot.com/2009/12/mis2-assignment-2.html

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? (at least 2000 words)

Organizations find some strategies that will help building the name of the company and achieve a competitive advantage as technology is concern. The trend of technology nowadays is fast changing. It would be better if organizations will adapt into these changes and eventually embrace the new technology offered for the businesses to progress. Since business and IT works hand on hand, there relationship will provide a great means in achieving the goals set in for the organization. The business will not just bloom by itself but also those people using the technology as a resource. A business plan and IS plan has a relationship specially nowadays information technology involves more than just computer literacy;

What is a Business Plan??
A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.
For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.
Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."
Presentation formats
The format of a business plan depends on its presentation context. It is not uncommon for businesses, especially start-ups to have three or four formats for the same business plan:
• an "elevator pitch" - a three minute summary of the business plan's executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.
• an oral presentation - a hopefully entertaining slide show and oral narrative that is meant to trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.
• a written presentation for external stakeholders - a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders.
• an internal operational plan - a detailed plan describing planning details that are needed by management but may not be of interest to external stakeholders. Such plans have a somewhat higher degree of candor and informality than the version targeted at external stakeholders.
Typical structure for a business plan for a start up venture[8]
• cover page and table of contents
• executive summary
• business description
• business environment analysis
• industry background
• competitive analysis
• market analysis
• marketing plan
• operations plan
• management summary
• financial plan
• attachments and milestones
Revisiting the business plan
Cost overruns and revenue shortfalls
Cost and revenue estimates are central to any business plan for deciding the viability of the planned venture. But costs are often underestimated and revenues overestimated resulting in later cost overruns, revenue shortfalls, and possibly non-viability. During the dot-com bubble 1997-2001 this was a problem for many technology start-ups. However, the problem is not limited to technology or the private sector; public works projects also routinely suffer from cost overruns and/or revenue shortfalls. The main causes of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls are optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation.[9][10] Reference class forecasting has been developed to reduce the risks of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls.
Uses of Business Plan
Venture capital
• Business plan contests - provides a way for venture capitals to find promising projects
Public offerings
• In a public offering, potential investors can evaluate perspectives of issuing company
Within corporations
Fundraising
Fundraising is the primary purpose for many business plans, since they are related to the inherent probable success/failure of the company risk.
Total quality management
Total quality management (TQM) is a business management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, call centers, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.
Management by objective
Management by objectives (MBO) is a process of agreeing upon objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization.
Strategic planning
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ) and PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis) or STEER analysis involving Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors and EPISTELS (Environment, Political, Informative, Social, Technological, Economic, Legal and Spiritual)
Education
K-12
Business plans are used in some primary and secondary programs to teach economic principles. Wikiversity has a Lunar Boom Town project where students of all ages can collaborate with designing and revising business models and practice evaluating them to learn practical business planning techniques and methodology.

What is an IS plan??

 Information Systems (IS) refers to the interaction between processes and technology. This interaction can occur within or across organizational boundaries. An information system is not only the technology an organization uses, but also the way in which the organizations interact with the technology and the way in which the technology works with the organization’s business processes. Information systems are distinct from information technology in that an information system has an information technology component that interacts with the processes components.

Strategic Information Systems Planning Methodologies
The task of strategic information systems planning is difficult and often time organizations
do not know how to do it. Strategic information systems planning is a major change for
organizations, from planning for information systems based on users’ demands to those based on
business strategy. Also strategic information systems planning changes the planning characteristics
in major ways. For example, the time horizon for planning changes from 1 year to 3 years or more
and development plans are driven by current and future business needs rather than incremental user
needs. Increase in the time horizon is a factor which results in poor response from the top
management to the strategic information systems planning process as it is difficult to hold their
attention for such a long period. Other questions associated with strategic information systems
planning are related to the scope of the planning study, the focus of the planning exercise - corporate
organization vs. strategic business unit, number of studies and their sequence, choosing a strategic
information systems planning methodology or developing one if none is suitable, targets of planning
process and deliverables. Because of the complexity of the strategic information systems planning
process and uniqueness of each organization, there is no one best way to tackle it. Vitale, et al.
(1986) classify SISP methodologies into two categories: impact and alignment. Impact
methodologies help create and justify new uses of IT, while the methodologies in the “alignment”
category align IS objectives with organizational goals.

Characteristics of a Quality ISP

A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

1. Timely - The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.
2. Useable - The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
3. Maintainable - The ISP should be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates; technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.
4. Quality - While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.
5. Reproducible - The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

References: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://www.business-plan-success.com/Articles/BusinessPlanDefinition/

bounce

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan?

Business Plan

There are two ways to start a business. One is on a shoestring; the other, with financial backing. There is no in-between.
Starting on a shoestring means working part-time out of your garage, basement, or kitchen while continuing to work full time at your regular job. For the shoestring operation, a business plan is advisable, but not essential.
Starting with financial backing means obtaining enough money from investors to sustain you for at least one to two years before your business ever earns a profit. For a well-financed operation, the business plan is the means by which capital is acquired.
Starting a business along the in-between path means withdrawing your savings from the bank, mortgaging your house, quitting your job, and going for broke on the new venture. For one out of three entrepreneurs, however, broke and out of business is the result twelve months later. A business plan will not prevent you from failing, but it might make you think twice before taking that fateful first step—such as mortgaging your house or quitting your job.

Why a Business Plan?
Writing a business plan clarifies and concretizes your thoughts about the new venture. It forces you to think explicitly about issues you might not otherwise have considered and makes real to you what up to the time of writing has only been an idea or dream. The business plan objectifies your dream.
In addition, a business plan can be used to persuade prospective investors to give you money. To obtain financial backing—even from friends or relatives—you must prove to your prospective investors that you will be able to make money for them, by proving that you are competent to run a business and that your idea is sound. A business plan is your sales tool for raising debt and equity capital.
Existing firms also need business plans—as control devices to clarify management’s thoughts about what must be done tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and next decade, and as tools for raising capital, for example, for major expansions of the business.

The Components of a Business Plan

I. Cover Page
A cover page goes first. On it are the name of the business, a brief phrase describing the nature of the business, the name of the founder and/or writer of the plan, and the date the plan was written.

II. Executive Summary
The summary also capsulizes your thoughts about the business. The art of summarization is the art of thinking in essentials. The summary, therefore, forces you to separate what is important from what is secondary.
The summary is written after the rest of the plan has been completed.

III. Contents
A table of contents, of course, listing the major sections of the plan and their page numbers should be included.

IV. The Business and Its Mission
This section states the essence of the business—in one sentence. A two- to three-paragraph elaboration follows.
The mission statement answers these questions: What is the nature and scope of your business? or What do you foresee it to be? Who is your prospective customer? What are his needs? and How do you propose to satisfy them? How do you differ from the competition? In what direction do you propose to grow and expand?

V. Market Review
The market review identifies and evaluates the opportunities and problems your business will face on opening day (or on the day your existing firm’s major expansion begins). It describes the past behavior of the market (at least five years’ worth of data), projects its future (for one, five, ten, and even twenty-five years), and states where the market stands in the present. The objective of the market review is to state why, given the nature of the competition and the motivation and behavior of your prospective customer, you think there is a niche in the marketplace for your business.
A. The General Environment
B. Competition
D. Strengths and Weaknesses of the Business
E. Opportunities and Threats Facing the Business

VI. Marketing Plan
The marketing plan states how your business will take advantage of the opportunities and overcome the problems identified in the market review; the marketing plan describes your product and your strategy for selling it.
A. Objectives and Goals
An objective is a general statement of the end result you intend to achieve with your business or with specific strategies.
A goal is a quantified objective; it specifies magnitude and a time frame.
The objectives and goals should be specified in detail for the first year of operation and sketched out for the next two to four years.
B. Strategy
Your marketing strategy is the means by which you will achieve your objectives and goals. The objectives state what you intend to accomplish; the strategies state how you intend to accomplish the objectives.
C. Action Program
Your action program, or tactics, spells out how you will implement the strategies. It states the who, what, when, and how much?

VII. Financial Plan
The financial plan shows in detail how and when your venture will turn a profit. It presents profit and loss, cash flow, and balance sheet projections for three to five years. It predicts the breakeven point and lists the sources of capital that you will use to finance the business.
A. Profit and Loss Statement
The profit and loss statement should give your best estimates of sales and expenses over the first three to five years of operation. The first year should present the numbers on a month-by-month basis. The estimates for the remaining years may be presented by quarters.
B. Cash Flow Statement
This statement is your most important financial projection. The cash flow statement specifies when, and how much, the new business will need cash over the first three to five years. Again, projections should be made on a monthly basis for the first year, quarterly for the remaining years. The cash flow statement tells the entrepreneur how much initial capital he will need, as well as working capital, once the business is going.
C. Balance Sheet
The balance sheet shows what assets are required to start and operate the business and how those assets are to be financed (i.e., through owner’s equity and/or creditors’ loans). Balance sheet numbers should be provided for opening day, the end of each quarter for the first year, and the end of each of the first three to five years.
D. Breakeven Point
The breakeven point is the level of sales at which sales covers all costs; it is the point of zero profit and zero loss.
E. Sources of Capital
This section spells out how your business will be financed. You should give the names of all equity investors, amount invested, and shares of ownership received.

VIII. Operating Plan
The operating plan describes how you will run the business; it can be viewed as the execution of your marketing and financial plans. The operating plan describes your facilities, your method of producing the product, your labor force, and your time schedule for launching the business and implementing the business plan.
A. Geographic Location
B. Facilities
C. Operating Strategy
D. Management
E. Time Schedule

IX. Attachments
This final section of the business plan is where you put the supporting documentation that is required to aid readers in their understanding of your claims. No more, no less.

Rationale for an Information Systems Plan

Every year, $300-700 million dollar corporations spend about 5% of their gross income on information systems and their supports. That's from about $15,000,000 to $35,000,000! A significant part of those funds support enterprise database, a philosophy of database system applications that enable corporations to research the past, control the present, and plan for the future.
Even though an information system costs from $1,000,000 to $10,000,000, and even through most chief information officers (CIOs) can specify exactly how much money is being spent for hardware, software, and staff, CIOs cannot however state with any degree of certainty why one system is being done this year versus next, why it is being done ahead of another, or finally, why it is being done at all.
Enterprises do not have model-based information systems development environments that allow system designers to see the benefits of rearranging an information systems development schedule. Questions that cannot be answered include:

•What effect will there be on the overall schedule if an information system is purchased versus developed?
• At what point does it pay to hire an abnormal quantity of contract staff to advance a schedule?
• What is the long term benefit from 4GL versus 3GL?
• Is it better to generate 3GL than to generate/use a 4GL?
•What are the real costs of distributed software development over centralized development?
•If these questions were transformed and applied to any other component of a business (e.g., accounting, manufacturing, distribution and marketing), and remained unanswered, that unit's manager would surely be fired.

We not only need answers to these questions NOW!, we also need them quickly, cost effectively, and in a form that they can be modeled and changed in response to unfolding realities. This paper provides strategies for developing answers to these questions. Under this same title, Whitmarsh provide a book, course, and ISP software creation components.
Too many half-billion dollar organizations have only a vague notion of the names and interactions of the existing and under development information systems. Whenever they need to know, a meeting is held among the critical few, an inventory is taken, interactions confirmed, and accomplishment schedules are updated.
This ad hoc information systems plan was possible only because all design and development was centralized, the only computer was a main-frame, and the past was acceptable prologue because budgets were ever increasing, schedules always slipping, and information was not yet part of the corporation's critical edge.
Well, today is different, really different! Budgets are decreasing, and slipped schedules are being cited as preventing business alternatives. Confounding the computing environment are different operating systems, DBMSs, development tools, telecommunications (Lan, Wan, Intra-,
Inter-, and Extra-net), and distributed hard- and software.
Rather than having centralized, long-range planning and management activities that address these problems, today's business units are using readily available tools to design and build ad hoc stop-gap solutions. These ad hoc systems not only do not interconnect, support common semantics, or provide synchronized views of critical corporate policy, they are soon to form the almost impossible to comprehend confusion of systems and data from which systems order and semantic harmony must spring.
Not only has the computing landscape become profoundly different and more difficult to comprehend, the need for just the right--and correct--information at just the right time is escalating. Late or wrong information is worse than no information.
Information systems managers need a model of their information systems environment. A model that is malleable. As new requirements are discovered, budgets modified, new hardware/software introduced, this model must be such that it can reconstitute the information systems plan in a timely and efficient manner.

Reference:

http://faculty.ed.umuc.edu/~meinkej/inss690/larock.pdf
http://www.csupomona.edu/~jkirkpatrick/Grad/BusinessPlan.html

Today, enterprise database is deployed on distributed, heterogeneous hardware and systems software environments.2 The hardware platforms are both multiple-vendor and multi-tiered, with different architectures. In short, most businesses have embraced some form of downsizing, decentralization, and distributed processing. Critical to the enterprise database environment is the capture of the business model and the implementation of the enterprise's memory: its data architectures. Once the data architectures are
implemented in a sophisticated, generalized manner, software tools can be quickly and effectively deployed to create the necessary business systems to collect, update, and report critical business data.

The business systems can be implemented through a network of databases across different computing platforms. To make database a success, each must be carefully defined, deployed along with high-quality processing systems, and effectively utilized through high-level natural languages. To have database success is to be organized. And with an organized enterprise, the past can be researched, the present can be mastered, and plans for the future can be set into place.

Before going deeply into the relationship between the business plan and Information System(IS), let us first discuss the description of each parties.

Business Plan

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.

Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.

Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.

Operational plans describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department. Project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project's place within the organization's larger strategic goals.

Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.

The format of a business plan depends on its presentation context. It is not uncommon for businesses, especially start-ups to have three or four formats for the same business plan:

* an "elevator pitch" - a three minute summary of the business plan's executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.

* an oral presentation - a hopefully entertaining slide show and oral narrative that is meant to trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.

* a written presentation for external stakeholders - a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders.

* an internal operational plan - a detailed plan describing planning details that are needed by management but may not be of interest to external stakeholders. Such plans have a somewhat higher degree of candor and informality than the version targeted at external stakeholders.

Typical structure for a business plan for a start up venture[8]

* cover page and table of contents
* executive summary
* business description
* business environment analysis
* industry background
* competitive analysis
* market analysis
* marketing plan
* operations plan
* management summary
* financial plan
* attachments and milestones

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan)

Information System Plan

Characteristics of a Quality ISP

A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

* Timely

The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.

* Useable

The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
Maintainable The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.

* Quality

While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.

* Reproducible

The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

The ISP Steps

The information systems plan project determines the sequence for implementing specific information systems. The goal of the strategy is to deliver the most valuable business information at the earliest time possible in the most cost-effective manner.

The end product of the information systems project is an information systems plan (ISP). Once deployed, the information systems department can implement the plan with confidence that they are doing the correct information systems project at the right time and in the right sequence. The focus of the ISP is not one information system but the entire suite of information systems for the enterprise. Once developed, each identified information system is seen in context with all other information systems within the enterprise.

The following are the steps in Information System Planning:

* Create the mission model

The mission model, generally shorter than 30 pages presents end-result characterizations of the essential raison d=etre of the enterprise. Missions are strategic, long range, and a-political because they are stripped of the who and the how.

* Develop a high-level data model

The high-level data model is an Entity Relationship diagram created to meet the data needs of the mission descriptions. No attributes or keys are created.

* Create the resource life cycles (RLC) and their nodes

Resources are drawn from both the mission descriptions and the high level data model. Resources and their life cycles are the names, descriptions and life cycles of the critical assets of the enterprise, which, when exercised achieve one or more aspect of the missions.

* Allocate precedence vectors among RLC nodes

Tied together into a enablement network, the resulting resource life cycle network forms a framework of enterprise=s assets that represent an order and set of inter-resource relationships.

* Allocate existing information systems and databases to the RLC nodes

The resource life cycle network presents a Alattice-work onto which the Aas is@ business information systems and databases can be Aattached. See for example, the meta model in Figure 2. The Ato-be databases and information systems are similarly attached. ADifference projects between the Aas-is and the Ato-be are then formulated. Achievement of all the difference projects is the achievement of the Information Systems Plan.

* Allocate standard work break down structures (WBS) to each RLC node Detailed planning of the Adifference projects entails allocating the appropriate canned work breakdown structures and metrics. Employing WBS and metrics from a comprehensive methodology supports project management standardization, repeatability, and self-learning.

* Load resources into each WBS node

Once the resources are determined, these are loaded into the project management meta entities of the meta data repository, that is, metrics, project, work plan and deliverables. The meta entities are those inferred by
8.Schedule the RLC nodes through a project management package facilities. The entire suite of projects is then scheduled on an enterprise-wide basis. The PERT chart used by project management is the Resource Life Cycle enablement network.

* Produce and review of the ISP

The scheduled result is predicable: Too long, too costly, and too ambitious. At that point, the real work starts: paring down the suite of projects to a realistic set within time and budget. Because of the meta data environment , the integrated project management meta data and because all projects are configured against fundamental business-rationale based designs, the results of the inevitable trade-offs can be set against business basics. Although the process is painful, the results can be justified and rationalized.

* Execute and adjust the ISP through time.

As the ISP is set into execution, technology changes occur that affect resource loadings. In this case, only steps 6-9 need to be repeated. As work progresses, the underlying meta data built or used in steps 1-5 will also change. Because a quality ISP is Aautomated@ the recasting of the ISP should only take a week or less.
(http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262)

As a summary, any technique employed to achieve an ISP must be accomplishable with less than 3% of the IT budget. Additionally, it must be timely, useable, maintainable, able to be iterated into a quality product, and reproducible. IT organizations, once they have completed their initial set of databases and business information systems will find themselves transformed from a project to a release environment.

The continuous flow environment then becomes the only viable alternative for moving the enterprise forward. It is precisely because of the release environment that enterprise-wide information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained are essential.

Now, the relationship between IS plan and business plan is that IS planning is dependent on the business plan of a firm or company, in which IS plan needs to function as how the firm needs it and how will it able to increase the capacity of the firm. The business plan can also become a guide for the project team in order for them to make an Information System that would be very much close to fit the firm perfectly.

Posts : 56 Points : 58 Join date : 2009-06-20

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? (at least 2000 words) flower

What Is a Business Plan?

A business plan is any plan that works for a business to look ahead, allocate resources, focus on key points, and prepare for problems and opportunities. Unfortunately, many people think of business plans only for starting a new business or applying for business loans. But they are also vital for running a business, whether or not the business needs new loans or new investments. Businesses need plans to optimize growth and development according to priorities.

What’s a startup plan?

A simple startup plan includes a summary, mission statement, keys to success, market analysis, and break-even analysis. This kind of plan is good for deciding whether or not to proceed with a plan, to tell if there is a business worth pursuing, but it is not enough to run a business with.

Business planning is often conducted when:
• Starting a new venture (organization, product or service)
• Expanding a current organization, product or service
• Buying a current organization, product or service
• Working to improve the management of a current organization, product or service

There are a wide variety of formats for a business plan. The particular format and amount of content included in a plan depends on the complexity of the organization, product or service and on the demands of those who will use the business plan to make a decision, eg, an investor, funder, management, Board of Directors, etc.

Overall, the contents of a business plan typically aim to:
1. Describe the venture (new or current organization, product or service), often including its primary features, advantages and benefits
2. What the organization wants to do with it (buy it, expand it, etc.)
3. Justification that the plans are credible (eg, results of research that indicate the need for what the organization wants to do)
4. Marketing plans, including research results about how the venture will be marketed (eg, who the customers will be, any specific groups (or targets) of customers, why they need the venture (benefits they seek from the venture), how they will use the venture, what they will be willing to pay, how the venture will be advertised and promoted, etc.)
5. Staffing plans, including what expertise will be needed to build (sometimes included in business plans) and provide the venture on an ongoing basis
6. Management plans, including how the expertise will be organized, coordinated and led
7. Financial plans, including costs to build the venture (sometimes included in business plans), costs to operate the venture, expected revenue, budgets for each of the first several years into the future, when the venture might break-even (begin making more money overall than it has cost), etc.
8. Appendices (there are a wide variety of materials included in appendices, eg, description of the overall organization, its other products and/or services, its current staff, etc.)

Is there a standard business plan?

A normal business plan (one that follows the advice of business experts) includes a standard set of elements, as shown below. Plan formats and outlines vary, but generally a plan will include components such as descriptions of the company, product or service, market, forecasts, management team, and financial analysis.
Your plan will depend on your specific situation. For example, description of the management team is very important for investors while financial history is most important for banks. However, if you’re developing a plan for internal use only, you may not need to include all the background details that you already know. Make your plan match its purpose.

What is most important in a plan?
It depends on the case, but usually it’s the cash flow analysis and specific implementation details.
• Cash flow is both vital to a company and hard to follow. Cash is usually misunderstood as profits, and they are different. Profits don’t guarantee cash in the bank. Lots of profitable companies go under because of cash flow problems. It just isn’t intuitive.

• Implementation details are what make things happen. Your brilliant strategies and beautifully formatted planning documents are just theory unless you assign responsibilities, with dates and budgets, follow up with those responsible, and track results. Business plans are really about getting results and improving your company.

Business planning, also known as strategic planning or long-range planning, is a management-directed process that is intended to determine a desired future state for a business entity and to define overall strategies for accomplishing the desired state. Through planning, management decides what objectives to pursue during a future period, and what actions to undertake to achieve those objectives.
Successful business planning requires concentrated time and effort in a systematic approach that involves: assessing the present situation; anticipating future profitability and market conditions; determining objectives and goals; outlining a course of action; and analyzing the financial implications of these actions. From an array of alternatives, management distills a broad set of interrelated choices to form its long-term strategy. This strategy is implemented through the annual budgeting process, in which detailed, short-term plans are formulated to guide day-to-day activities in order to attain the company's long-term objectives and goals.
For entrepreneurs and small business owners, the first step in successful business planning involves creating a formal business plan, of the type commonly used to attract investors and secure bank loans. Careful preparation of this document forces a small business owner to examine his or her own goals as well as the market conditions in which the business operates. It also includes a detailed financial analysis, a look at current staffing levels and future needs, and information about management's expertise. "All the elements can be folded together to formulate a strategic plan that focuses on where you want your company to be in the long run, and how you plan to get there," Vince Maietta wrote in The Business Journal. "That also helps entrepreneurs focus on the strengths and weaknesses of the firm, as well as opportunities and threats."

The use of formal business planning has increased significantly over the past few decades. The increase in the use of formal long-range plans reflects a number of significant factors:
• Competitors engage in long-range planning.
• Global economic expansion is a long-range effort.
• Taxing authorities and investors require more detailed reports about future prospects and annual performance.
• Investors assess risk/reward according to long-range plans and expectations.
• Availability of computers and sophisticated mathematical models add to the potential and precision of long-range planning.
• Expenditures for research and development increased dramatically, resulting in the need for longer planning horizons and huge investments in capital equipment.
• Steady economic growth has made longer-term planning more realistic.

Why Prepare A Business Plan?
Your business plan is going to be useful in a number of ways:
• First and foremost, it will define and focus your objective using appropriate information and analysis.
• You can use it as a selling tool in dealing with important relationships including your lenders, investors and banks.
• Your business plan can uncover omissions and/or weaknesses in your planning process.
• You can use the plan to solicit opinions and advice from people, including those in your intended field of business, who will freely give you invaluable advice

Benefits of Planning

Planning provides a means for actively involving personnel from all areas of the business enterprise in the management of the organization. Company-wide participation improves the quality of the plans. Employee involvement enhances their overall understanding of the organization's objectives and goals. The employees' knowledge of the broad plan and awareness of the expected outcomes for their responsibility centers minimizes friction between departments, sections, and individuals. Involvement in planning fosters a greater personal commitment to the plan and to the organization. These positive attitudes improve overall organizational morale and loyalty.
Managerial performance also benefits from planning. Planning focuses the energies and activities of managers in the utilization of scarce resources in a competitive and demanding marketplace. Able to clearly identify goals and objectives, managers perform better, are more productive, and their operations are more profitable. In addition, planning is a mental exercise from which managers attain experience and knowledge. It prepares them for the rigors of the marketplace by forcing them to think in a future- and contingency-oriented manner.

Steps in the Planning Process
The planning process is directly related to organizational considerations, management style, maturity of the organization, and employee professionalism. These factors vary among industries and even among similar companies. Yet all management, when applying a scientific method to planning, perform similar steps. The time spent on each step will vary by company. Completion of each step, however, is prerequisite to successful planning. The main steps in the planning process are:
• Conducting a self-audit to determine capabilities and unique qualities
• Evaluating the business environment for possible risks and rewards
• Setting objectives that give direction
• Establishing goals that quantify objectives and time-frames
• Forecasting market conditions that affect goals and objectives
• Stating actions and resources needed to accomplish goals
• Evaluating proposed actions and selecting the most appropriate ones
• Instituting procedures to control the implementation and execution of the plan.

WHAT is IS Plan?
• ISP is the planning of information systems for an organization.
• Information system planning is assessing the information needs of an organization and defining the systems, databases and technologies that best satisfy those needs.

Why Planning is Important?
• Systematic approach in dealing with future uncertainties.
• It focuses efforts and resources on long-term, general objectives and yet provides a foundation for short-term activities
• Provides a framework for action.

ISP Key Activities
1. Describing current situation: it includes a listing of the manual and automated processes, listing of manual and automated data, technology inventory and human resources inventory.
2. Describing future situation: includes blueprints of manual and automated processes, blueprints of manual and automated data, technology blueprints and human resources blueprints.
3. Describing scheduling of the project: includes scheduling of manual and automated processes, scheduling of manual and automated data, technology of scheduling and human resources scheduling.

ISP Planning Types
• Top-Down Planning: A generic information systems planning methodology that attempts to gain a broad understanding of the information system needs of the entire organization.
• Bottom-up Planning: generic information systems planning methodology that identifies and defines IS development projects based upon solving operational business problems or taking advantages of some business opportunities.

Components of ISP
• The Process of Information Systems Planning
• Strategic Alignment of Business and IT
• Selecting Systems to Invest In
• Project Management Issues

ISP Process
• What is an Information System Plan?
• Challenges in IS Planning
• Principles for IS Planning
• Planning Role of the IS and User Departments
• Allocating Resources between New and Old Information Systems
• Project Roles of IS Professionals

Why do we need to plan for IS?
• To ensure that IS both complements and assists in the achievement of our business goals.
• To ensure that the use of scarce resources are maximized within a business.
• To maximize the benefits of changing technology.
• To take account of the different viewpoints of business professionals and IT professionals.

Who Perform ISP?
• IS Planners / System Analyst
• Variety of stakeholders (i.e. sponsor, users)
• Top management commitment à successful ISP.

Where & When ISP?
• Any organization that has interest in getting the best out of its IT investments.
• Facing problems
• Grabbing opportunities.
• Information Systems (IS) fail to satisfy huge, diverse and complicated information requirements of their users.

HOW?
• Look at business structure, function, processes, culture
• Look at existing IT
• Look at available technology.
• Carry out interviews.
• Develop policies.
• Develop application portfolio.
• Plan schedules for migration, implementation etc.

Characteristics of a Quality ISP

Timely

The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.

Useable

The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.

Maintainable

The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.

Quality

While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.

Reproducible

The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Relationship between the Business Plan and the Information System Plan

Information systems planning is a major change for organizations, from planning for information systems based on users’ demands to those based on business strategy. And it changes the planning characteristics in major ways. For example, the time horizon for planning changes from 1 year to 3 years or more and development plans are driven by current and future business needs rather than incremental user needs. Increase in the time horizon is a factor which results in poor response from the top management to the strategic information systems planning process as it is difficult to hold their attention for such a long period. Other questions associated with strategic information systems planning are related to the scope of the planning study, the focus of the planning exercise – corporate organization vs. strategic business unit, number of studies and their sequence, choosing a strategic information systems planning methodology or developing one if none is suitable, targets of planning process and deliverables. On the other hand, business plan (Business Systems Planning) serves as a blueprint to guide the firm's policies and strategies, and is continually modified as conditions change and new opportunities and/or threats emerge. Its methodology combines top down planning with bottom up implementation. The methodology focuses on business processes which in turn are derived from an organization’s business mission, objectives and goals. Business processes are analyzed to determine data needs and, then, data classes. Similar data classes are combined to develop databases. The final BSP plan describes an overall information systems architecture as well as installation schedule of individual systems. Because BSP combines a top down business analysis approach with a bottom up implementation strategy, it represents an integrated methodology. It requires a firm commitment from the top management and their substantial involvement and also requires a high degree of IT experience within the BSP planning team. Because of this there is a possibility of having a problem of bridging the gap between top down planning and bottom up implementation, especially when it does not incorporate a software design methodology. Thus, business plans and IS plans written primarily for the use of the company that generally stress the benefits that will result from implementation of the plan. Business plan and IS plan generally involves planning of thinking ahead and designing future action.

Reference:
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
http://articles.bplans.com/writing-a-business-plan/what-is-a-business-plan/33
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~nkm/sisp/CONTENTS.html
http://managementhelp.org/plan_dec/bus_plan/bus_plan.htm

Posts : 43 Points : 45 Join date : 2009-06-22

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.
Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.
Operational plans describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department. Project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project's place within the organization's larger strategic goals.
Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.
For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.
Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."
Presentation formats
The format of a business plan depends on its presentation context. It is not uncommon for businesses, especially start-ups to have three or four formats for the same business plan:
• an "elevator pitch" - a three minute summary of the business plan's executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.
• an oral presentation - a hopefully entertaining slide show and oral narrative that is meant to trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.
• a written presentation for external stakeholders - a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders.
• an internal operational plan - a detailed plan describing planning details that are needed by management but may not be of interest to external stakeholders. Such plans have a somewhat higher degree of candor and informality than the version targeted at external stakeholders.
Typical structure for a business plan for a start up venture
• cover page and table of contents
• executive summary
• business description
• business environment analysis
• industry background
• competitive analysis
• market analysis
• marketing plan
• operations plan
• management summary
• financial plan
• attachments and milestones
Revisiting the business plan
Cost overruns and revenue shortfalls
Cost and revenue estimates are central to any business plan for deciding the viability of the planned venture. But costs are often underestimated and revenues overestimated resulting in later cost overruns, revenue shortfalls, and possibly non-viability. During the dot-com bubble 1997-2001 this was a problem for many technology start-ups. However, the problem is not limited to technology or the private sector; public works projects also routinely suffer from cost overruns and/or revenue shortfalls. The main causes of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls are optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation.[9][10] Reference class forecasting has been developed to reduce the risks of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls.
Legal and liability issues
Disclosure requirements
An externally targeted business plan should list all legal concerns and financial liabilities that might negatively affect investors. Depending on the amount of funds being raised and the audience to whom the plan is presented, failure to do this may have severe legal consequences.
Limitations on content and audience
Non disclosure agreements (NDAs) with third parties, non-compete agreements, conflicts of interest, privacy concerns, and the protection of one's trade secrets may severely limit the audience to which one might show the business plan. Alternatively, they may require each party receiving the business plan to sign a contract accepting special clauses and conditions.
This situation is complicated by the fact that many venture capitalists will refuse to sign an NDA before looking at a business plan, lest it put them in the untenable position of looking at two independently developed look-alike business plans, both claiming originality. In such situations one may need to develop two versions of the business plan: a stripped down plan that can be used to develop a relationship and a detail plan that is only shown when investors have sufficient interest and trust to sign an NDA.
Open business plans
Traditionally business plans have been highly confidential and quite limited in audience. The business plan itself is generally regarded as secret. However the emergence of free software and open source has opened the model and made the notion of an open business plan possible.
An Open Business Plan is a business plan with unlimited audience. The business plan is typically web published and made available to all.
In the free software and open source business model, trade secrets, copyright and patents can no longer be used as effective locking mechanisms to provide sustainable advantages to a particular business and therefore a secret business plan is less relevant in those models.
While the origin of the Open Business Plan model is in the free software and Libre services arena, the concept is likely applicable to other domains.
Uses
Venture capital
• Business plan contests - provides a way for venture capitals to find promising projects
• Venture capital assessment of business plans - focus on qualitative factors such as team.
Public offerings
• In a public offering, potential investors can evaluate perspectives of issuing company
Within corporations
Fundraising
Fundraising is the primary purpose for many business plans, since they are related to the inherent probable success/failure of the company risk.
Total quality management
For more details on this topic, see Total quality management.
Total quality management (TQM) is a business management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, call centers, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.
Management by objective
For more details on this topic, see Management by objectives.
Management by objectives (MBO) is a process of agreeing upon objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization.
Strategic planning
For more details on this topic, see strategic planning.
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ) and PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis) or STEER analysis involving Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors and EPISTELS (Environment, Political, Informative, Social, Technological, Economic, Legal and Spiritual)

Characteristics of a Quality ISP
A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

Timely
The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.

Useable
The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.

Maintainable
The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.

Quality
While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.

Reproducible
The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Whenever a proposal for the development of an ISP is created it must be assessed against these five characteristics. If any fail or not addressed in an optimum way, the entire set of funds for the development of an ISP is risked.

References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262

Posts : 61 Points : 62 Join date : 2009-06-20 Age : 33

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

Business planning is often conducted when:

* Starting a new venture (organization, product or service)
* Expanding a current organization, product or service
* Buying a current organization, product or service
* Working to improve the management of a current organization, product or service

There are a wide variety of formats for a business plan. The particular format and amount of content included in a plan depends on the complexity of the organization, product or service and on the demands of those who will use the business plan to make a decision, eg, an investor, funder, management, Board of Directors, etc.

Overall, the contents of a business plan typically aim to:

1. Describe the venture (new or current organization, product or service), often including its primary features, advantages and benefits

2. What the organization wants to do with it (buy it, expand it, etc.)

3. Justification that the plans are credible (eg, results of research that indicate the need for what the organization wants to do)

4. Marketing plans, including research results about how the venture will be marketed (eg, who the customers will be, any specific groups (or targets) of customers, why they need the venture (benefits they seek from the venture), how they will use the venture, what they will be willing to pay, how the venture will be advertised and promoted, etc.)

5. Staffing plans, including what expertise will be needed to build (sometimes included in business plans) and provide the venture on an ongoing basis
6. Management plans, including how the expertise will be organized, coordinated and led
7. Financial plans, including costs to build the venture (sometimes included in business plans), costs to operate the venture, expected revenue, budgets for each of the first several years into the future, when the venture might break-even (begin making more money overall than it has cost), etc.
8. Appendices (there are a wide variety of materials included in appendices, eg, description of the overall organization, its other products and/or services, its current staff, etc.)

Nonprofit readers might notice that a business plan is very similar to a well designed grant proposal. In addition to the above items, a grant proposal might include itemization of any deficits (when expected expenses exceed expected revenues), which indicates the need for funding from the particular funder to which the grant proposal is being submitted. Also, a break-even analysis usually isn't included in a grant proposal.

Quite often, an organization's business planners already know much of what will go into a business plan (this is true for strategic planning, too). However, development of the business plan greatly helps to clarify the organization's plans and ensure that key leaders are all "on the same script". Far more important than the plan document, is the planning process itself.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.

Business planning is usually conducted when starting a new organization or a new major venture, for example, new product, service or program. Essentially, a business plan is a combination of a marketing plan, strategic plan, operational/management plan and a financial plan. Far more important than the plan document, is the planning process itself.

Business planning usually includes a thorough examination of the idea for a new product/service, if there's really a market for it, who the competitors are, how the idea is uniquely positioned to be competitive and noticeable, how the idea will be produced to a product/service, how much it will cost, how it will be promoted, what overall goals must be accomplished, how the development and ongoing operations will be managed and what resources are needed (including money). As noted above, a business plan is a combination of a marketing plan, financial plan, strategic plan and a operational/management plan.

Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.

Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others.[6] It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.[7]

"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."

Information Systems Plan:
The Bet-Your-Business Project

by Michael M. Gorman
Published: September 1, 1999
Published in TDAN.com September 1999
Rationale for an Information Systems Plan
Every year, $300-700 million dollar corporations spend about 5% of their gross income on information systems and their supports. That's from about $15,000,000 to $35,000,000! A significant part of those funds support enterprise databases, a philosophy of database system applications that enable corporations to research the past, control the present, and plan for the future.
Even though an information system costs from $1,000,000 to $10,000,000, and even through most chief information officers (CIOs) can specify exactly how much money is being spent for hardware, software, and staff, CIOs cannot however state with any degree of certainty why one system is being done this year versus next, why it is being done ahead of another, or finally, why it is being done at all.
Many enterprises do not have model-based information systems development environments that allow system designers to see the benefits of rearranging an information systems development schedule. Consequently, the questions that cannot be answered include:
• What effect will there be on the overall schedule if an information system is purchased versus developed?
• At what point does it pay to hire an abnormal quantity of contract staff to advance a schedule?
• What is the long term benefit from 4GL versus 3GL?
• Is it better to generate 3GL than to generate/use a 4GL?
• What are the real costs of distributed software development over centralized development?
If these questions were transformed and applied to any other component of a business (e.g., accounting, manufacturing, distribution and marketing), and remained unanswered, that unit's manager would surely be fired!
We not only need answers to these questions NOW!, we also need them quickly, cost effectively, and in a form that they can be modeled and changed in response to unfolding realities. This paper provides a brief review of a successful 10-step strategy that answers these questions.
Too many half-billion dollar organizations have only a vague notion of the names and interactions of the existing and under development information systems. Whenever they need to know, a meeting is held among the critical few, an inventory is taken, interactions confirmed, and accomplishment schedules are updated.
This ad hoc information systems plan was possible only because all design and development was centralized, the only computer was a main-frame, and the past was acceptable prologue because budgets were ever increasing, schedules always slipping, and information was not yet part of the corporation's critical edge.
Well, today is different, really different! Budgets are decreasing, and slipped schedules are being cited as preventing business alternatives. Confounding the computing environment are different operating systems, DBMSs, development tools, telecommunications (LAN, WAN, Intra-, Inter-, and Extra-net), and distributed hard- and software.
Rather than having centralized, long-range planning and management activities that address these problems, today's business units are using readily available tools to design and build ad hoc stop-gap solutions. These ad hoc systems not only do not interconnect, support common semantics, or provide synchronized views of critical corporate policy, they are soon to form the almost impossible to comprehend confusion of systems and data from which systems order and semantic harmony must spring.
Not only has the computing landscape become profoundly different and more difficult to comprehend, the need for just the right--and correct--information at just the right time is escalating. Late or wrong information is worse than no information.
Information systems managers need a model of their information systems environment. A model that is malleable. As new requirements are discovered, budgets modified, new hardware/software introduced, this model must be such that it can reconstitute the information systems plan in a timely and efficient manner.
Characteristics of a Quality ISP
A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

Timely
The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.
Useable
The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
Maintainable
The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.
Quality
While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.
Reproducible
The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Whenever a proposal for the development of an ISP is created it must be assessed against these five characteristics. If any fail or not addressed in an optimum way, the entire set of funds for the development of an ISP is risked.
Executive and Adjusting the ISP Through Time
IT projects are accomplished within distinct development environments. The two most common are: discrete project and release. The discrete project environment is typified by completely encapsulated projects accomplished through a water-fall methodology.
In release environments, there are a number of different projects underway by different organizations and staff of varying skill levels. Once a large number of projects are underway, the ability of the enterprise to know about and manage all the different projects degrades rapidly. That is because the project management environment has been transformed from discrete encapsulated projects into a continuous flow process of product or functionality improvements that are released on a set time schedule. Figure 3 illustrates the continuous flow process environment that supports releases. The continuous flow process environment is characterized by:
• Multiple, concurrent, but differently scheduled projects against the same enterprise resource
• Single projects that affect multiple enterprise resources
• Projects that develop completely new capabilities, or changes to existing capabilities within enterprise resources
It is precisely because enterprises have transformed themselves from a project to a release environment that information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained on an enterprise-wide basis are essential.
There are four major sets of activities within the continuous flow process environment. The user/client is represented at the top in the small rectangular box. Each of the ellipses represents an activity targeted to a specific need. The four basic needs are:
• Need Identification
• Need Assessment
• Design
• Deployment
The box in the center is the meta data repository. Specification and impact analysis is represented through the left two processes. Implementation design and accomplishment is represented by the right two processes. Two key characteristics should be immediately apparent. First, unlike the water-fall approach, the activities do not flow one to the other. They are disjoint. In fact, they may be done by different teams, on different time schedules, and involve different quantities of products under management. In short, these four activities are independent one from the other. Their only interdependence is through the meta data repository.
The second characteristic flows from the first. Because these four activities are independent one from the other, the enterprise evolves by means of releases rather than through whole systems. If it evolved through whole systems, then the four activities would be connected either in a waterfall or a spiral approach, and the enterprise would be evolving through major upgrades to encapsulated functionality within specific business resources. In contrast, the release approach causes coordinated sets of changes to multiple business resources to be placed into production. This causes simultaneous, enterprise-wide capability upgrades across multiple business resources.
Through this continuous-flow process, several unique features are present:
• All four processes are concurrently executing.
• Changes to enterprise resources occur in unison, periodically, and in a very controlled manner.
• The meta data repository is always contains all the enterprise resource specifications: current or planned. Simply put, if an enterprise resource semantic is not within the meta data repository, it is not enterprise policy.
• All changes are planned, scheduled, measured, and subject to auditing, accounting, and traceability.
• All documentation of all types is generated from the meta data repository.
ISP Summary
In summary, any technique employed to achieve an ISP must be accomplishable with less than 3% of the IT budget. Additionally, it must be timely, useable, maintainable, able to be iterated into a quality product, and reproducible. IT organizations, once they have completed their initial set of databases and business information systems will find themselves transformed from a project to a release environment.
The continuous flow environment then becomes the only viable alternative for moving the enterprise forward. It is precisely because of the release environment that enterprise-wide information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained are essential.

CONCLUSION:
Entrepreneurs and business managers are often so preoccupied with immediate issues that they lose sight of their ultimate objectives. That's why an Information System Plan, business reviews/plan or preparation of a strategic plan is a virtual necessity. This may not be a recipe for success, but without it a business is much more likely to fail. A sound plan should:
• Serve as a framework for decisions or for securing support/approval.
• Provide a basis for more detailed planning.
• Explain the business to others in order to inform, motivate & involve.
• Assist benchmarking & performance monitoring.
• Stimulate change and become building block for next plan.
A strategic plan should not be confused with a business plan. The former is likely to be a (very) short document whereas a business plan is usually a much more substantial and detailed document. A strategic plan can provide the foundation and frame work for a business plan.
A satisfactory strategic plan must be realistic and attainable so as to allow managers and entrepreneurs to think strategically and act operationally.

Posts : 61 Points : 62 Join date : 2009-06-20 Age : 33

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

bounce

Business planning is often conducted when:

* Starting a new venture (organization, product or service)
* Expanding a current organization, product or service
* Buying a current organization, product or service
* Working to improve the management of a current organization, product or service

There are a wide variety of formats for a business plan. The particular format and amount of content included in a plan depends on the complexity of the organization, product or service and on the demands of those who will use the business plan to make a decision, eg, an investor, funder, management, Board of Directors, etc.

Overall, the contents of a business plan typically aim to:

1. Describe the venture (new or current organization, product or service), often including its primary features, advantages and benefits

2. What the organization wants to do with it (buy it, expand it, etc.)

3. Justification that the plans are credible (eg, results of research that indicate the need for what the organization wants to do)

4. Marketing plans, including research results about how the venture will be marketed (eg, who the customers will be, any specific groups (or targets) of customers, why they need the venture (benefits they seek from the venture), how they will use the venture, what they will be willing to pay, how the venture will be advertised and promoted, etc.)

5. Staffing plans, including what expertise will be needed to build (sometimes included in business plans) and provide the venture on an ongoing basis

6. Management plans, including how the expertise will be organized, coordinated and led

7. Financial plans, including costs to build the venture (sometimes included in business plans), costs to operate the venture, expected revenue, budgets for each of the first several years into the future, when the venture might break-even (begin making more money overall than it has cost), etc.

8. Appendices (there are a wide variety of materials included in appendices, eg, description of the overall organization, its other products and/or services, its current staff, etc.)

Nonprofit readers might notice that a business plan is very similar to a well designed grant proposal. In addition to the above items, a grant proposal might include itemization of any deficits (when expected expenses exceed expected revenues), which indicates the need for funding from the particular funder to which the grant proposal is being submitted. Also, a break-even analysis usually isn't included in a grant proposal.

Quite often, an organization's business planners already know much of what will go into a business plan (this is true for strategic planning, too). However, development of the business plan greatly helps to clarify the organization's plans and ensure that key leaders are all "on the same script". Far more important than the plan document, is the planning process itself.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.

Business planning is usually conducted when starting a new organization or a new major venture, for example, new product, service or program. Essentially, a business plan is a combination of a marketing plan, strategic plan, operational/management plan and a financial plan. Far more important than the plan document, is the planning process itself.

Business planning usually includes a thorough examination of the idea for a new product/service, if there's really a market for it, who the competitors are, how the idea is uniquely positioned to be competitive and noticeable, how the idea will be produced to a product/service, how much it will cost, how it will be promoted, what overall goals must be accomplished, how the development and ongoing operations will be managed and what resources are needed (including money). As noted above, a business plan is a combination of a marketing plan, financial plan, strategic plan and a operational/management plan.

Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.

Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others.It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.

"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."

Information Systems Plan

Rationale for an Information Systems Plan

Every year, $300-700 million dollar corporations spend about 5% of their gross income on information systems and their supports. That's from about $15,000,000 to $35,000,000! A significant part of those funds support enterprise databases, a philosophy of database system applications that enable corporations to research the past, control the present, and plan for the future.

Even though an information system costs from $1,000,000 to $10,000,000, and even through most chief information officers (CIOs) can specify exactly how much money is being spent for hardware, software, and staff, CIOs cannot however state with any degree of certainty why one system is being done this year versus next, why it is being done ahead of another, or finally, why it is being done at all.

Many enterprises do not have model-based information systems development environments that allow system designers to see the benefits of rearranging an information systems development schedule. Consequently, the questions that cannot be answered include:

• What effect will there be on the overall schedule if an information system is purchased versus developed?
• At what point does it pay to hire an abnormal quantity of contract staff to advance a schedule?
• What is the long term benefit from 4GL versus 3GL?
• Is it better to generate 3GL than to generate/use a 4GL?
• What are the real costs of distributed software development over centralized development?

If these questions were transformed and applied to any other component of a business (e.g., accounting, manufacturing, distribution and marketing), and remained unanswered, that unit's manager would surely be fired!
We not only need answers to these questions NOW!, we also need them quickly, cost effectively, and in a form that they can be modeled and changed in response to unfolding realities. This paper provides a brief review of a successful 10-step strategy that answers these questions.

Too many half-billion dollar organizations have only a vague notion of the names and interactions of the existing and under development information systems. Whenever they need to know, a meeting is held among the critical few, an inventory is taken, interactions confirmed, and accomplishment schedules are updated.

This ad hoc information systems plan was possible only because all design and development was centralized, the only computer was a main-frame, and the past was acceptable prologue because budgets were ever increasing, schedules always slipping, and information was not yet part of the corporation's critical edge.

Well, today is different, really different! Budgets are decreasing, and slipped schedules are being cited as preventing business alternatives. Confounding the computing environment are different operating systems, DBMSs, development tools, telecommunications (LAN, WAN, Intra-, Inter-, and Extra-net), and distributed hard- and software.

Rather than having centralized, long-range planning and management activities that address these problems, today's business units are using readily available tools to design and build ad hoc stop-gap solutions. These ad hoc systems not only do not interconnect, support common semantics, or provide synchronized views of critical corporate policy, they are soon to form the almost impossible to comprehend confusion of systems and data from which systems order and semantic harmony must spring.

Not only has the computing landscape become profoundly different and more difficult to comprehend, the need for just the right--and correct--information at just the right time is escalating. Late or wrong information is worse than no information.

Information systems managers need a model of their information systems environment. A model that is malleable. As new requirements are discovered, budgets modified, new hardware/software introduced, this model must be such that it can reconstitute the information systems plan in a timely and efficient manner.

bounce

Characteristics of a Quality ISP

A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

drunken

Timely

The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.

drunken

Usable

The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.

drunken

Maintainable

The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.

drunken

Quality

While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.

drunken

Reproducible

The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Whenever a proposal for the development of an ISP is created it must be assessed against these five characteristics. If any fail or not addressed in an optimum way, the entire set of funds for the development of an ISP is risked.

Executive and Adjusting the ISP Through Time

IT projects are accomplished within distinct development environments. The two most common are: discrete project and release. The discrete project environment is typified by completely encapsulated projects accomplished through a water-fall methodology.

In release environments, there are a number of different projects underway by different organizations and staff of varying skill levels. Once a large number of projects are underway, the ability of the enterprise to know about and manage all the different projects degrades rapidly. That is because the project management environment has been transformed from discrete encapsulated projects into a continuous flow process of product or functionality improvements that are released on a set time schedule. Figure 3 illustrates the continuous flow process environment that supports releases. The continuous flow process environment is characterized by:

• Multiple, concurrent, but differently scheduled projects against the same enterprise resource
• Single projects that affect multiple enterprise resources
• Projects that develop completely new capabilities, or changes to existing capabilities within enterprise resources

It is precisely because enterprises have transformed themselves from a project to a release environment that information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained on an enterprise-wide basis are essential.
There are four major sets of activities within the continuous flow process environment. The user/client is represented at the top in the small rectangular box. Each of the ellipses represents an activity targeted to a specific need. The four basic needs are:

• Need Identification
• Need Assessment
• Design
• Deployment

The box in the center is the meta data repository. Specification and impact analysis is represented through the left two processes. Implementation design and accomplishment is represented by the right two processes. Two key characteristics should be immediately apparent. First, unlike the water-fall approach, the activities do not flow one to the other. They are disjoint. In fact, they may be done by different teams, on different time schedules, and involve different quantities of products under management. In short, these four activities are independent one from the other. Their only interdependence is through the meta data repository.

The second characteristic flows from the first. Because these four activities are independent one from the other, the enterprise evolves by means of releases rather than through whole systems. If it evolved through whole systems, then the four activities would be connected either in a waterfall or a spiral approach, and the enterprise would be evolving through major upgrades to encapsulated functionality within specific business resources. In contrast, the release approach causes coordinated sets of changes to multiple business resources to be placed into production. This causes simultaneous, enterprise-wide capability upgrades across multiple business resources.

Through this continuous-flow process, several unique features are present:
• All four processes are concurrently executing.
• Changes to enterprise resources occur in unison, periodically, and in a very controlled manner.
• The meta data repository is always contains all the enterprise resource specifications: current or planned.

Simply put, if an enterprise resource semantic is not within the meta data repository, it is not enterprise policy.

• All changes are planned, scheduled, measured, and subject to auditing, accounting, and traceability.
• All documentation of all types is generated from the meta data repository.

In summary, any technique employed to achieve an ISP must be accomplishable with less than 3% of the IT budget. Additionally, it must be timely, useable, maintainable, able to be iterated into a quality product, and reproducible. IT organizations, once they have completed their initial set of databases and business information systems will find themselves transformed from a project to a release environment.
The continuous flow environment then becomes the only viable alternative for moving the enterprise forward. It is precisely because of the release environment that enterprise-wide information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained are essential.

cyclops

CONCLUSION:

Entrepreneurs and business managers are often so preoccupied with immediate issues that they lose sight of their ultimate objectives. That's why an Information System Plan, business reviews/plan or preparation of a strategic plan is a virtual necessity. This may not be a recipe for success, but without it a business is much more likely to fail. A sound plan should:

• Serve as a framework for decisions or for securing support/approval.
• Provide a basis for more detailed planning.
• Explain the business to others in order to inform, motivate & involve.
• Assist benchmarking & performance monitoring.
• Stimulate change and become building block for next plan.

A strategic plan should not be confused with a business plan. The former is likely to be a (very) short document whereas a business plan is usually a much more substantial and detailed document. A strategic plan can provide the foundation and frame work for a business plan.

A satisfactory strategic plan must be realistic and attainable so as to allow managers and entrepreneurs to think strategically and act operationally.

flower

REFERENCES:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://newton.uor.edu/Courses/SysAnaDes/planning.html
http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Bre-Cap/Business-Planning.htmll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_system

VISIT MY BLOG AT [url]http//florenzie-palma.blogspot.com[/url]

What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? (At least 2000 words)

Assignment 2 (Due: before November 29, 2009, 13:00hrs) - Page 2 Pictur21

Assignment 2 (Due: before November 29, 2009, 13:00hrs) - Page 2 Pictur19

Let me define first a business plan, in its simplest form, will usually define where you want your business to be within a certain period of time (usually five years) and how you plan on getting there. A business plan is as important for starting a business as blueprints are for building your house. A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
When starting a new business, writing a business plan is an important first step to getting started. A business plan will lay out the direction for the future of your company and begin to establish standards for success. A complete business plan should include five-year financial projections. These projections will assist investors with making decisions about your business and help you to know how much funding you will need to get things rolling.
A business plan should define how you would like to operate your business. This includes describing the management team, the marketing strategy, and the methods in which you will interact with customers. A business plan might project a strategy that reflects the management style of the founders of the business. The definition should be clear but flexible.
Business plans are developed for many purposes. One company might be looking for funding from investors. Another company might be looking for a loan from a bank. Your company might just need to plan out the company’s strategy to make sure it is successful. Whatever the case, every business needs a business plan.

Purpose of the Business Plan
It must operate and, ultimately, succeed or fail. For management or entrepreneurs seeking external support, the plan is the most important sales document that they are ever likely to produce as it could be the key to raising finance etc. Preparation of a comprehensive plan will not guarantee success in raising funds or mobilizing support, but lack of a sound plan will, almost certainly, ensure failure.

Importance of the Business Planning Process
Preparing a satisfactory business plan is a painful but essential exercise. The planning process forces managers or entrepreneurs to understand more clearly what they want to achieve, and how and when they can do it. Even if no external support is needed, a business plan can play a vital role in helping to avoid mistakes or recognize hidden opportunities. It is much easier to fold a sheet of paper than a business.
For many, many entrepreneurs and planners, the process of planning (thinking, discussing, researching and analyzing) is just as, or even more, useful than the final plan. So, even if you don't need a formal plan, think carefully about going through the planning process. It could be enormously beneficial to your business.
Anticipate many weeks of hard work and several drafts of the emerging plan to get the job right. A clearly written and attractively packaged business plan will make it easier to interest possible supporters, investors etc. A well-prepared business plan will demonstrate that the managers or entrepreneurs know the business and that they have thought through its development in terms of products, management, finances, and most importantly, markets and competition.

Assignment 2 (Due: before November 29, 2009, 13:00hrs) - Page 2 Pictur23

Assignment 2 (Due: before November 29, 2009, 13:00hrs) - Page 2 Pictur23

WHAT is ISP?
• ISP = IS + P

Why Planning is Important?
• Systematic approach in dealing with future uncertainties. It focuses efforts and resources on long-term, general objectives and yet provides a foundation for short-term activities. Provides a framework for action. Planning involves thinking ahead and designing future action.

Definition.
• ISP is the planning of information systems for an organization. Information system planning is assessing the information needs of an organization and defining the systems, databases and technologies that best satisfy those needs.

ISP Key Activities
1. Describing current situation: it includes a listing of the manual and automated processes, listing of manual and automated data, technology inventory and human resources inventory.
2. Describing future situation: includes blueprints of manual and automated processes, blueprints of manual and automated data, technology blueprints and human resources blueprints.
3. Describing scheduling of the project: includes scheduling of manual and automated processes, scheduling of manual and automated data, technology of scheduling and human resources scheduling.
ISP Planning Types
• Top-Down Planning: A generic information systems planning methodology that attempts to gain a broad understanding of the information system needs of the entire organization.
• Bottom-up Planning: generic information systems planning methodology that identifies and defines IS development projects based upon solving operational business problems or taking advantages of some business opportunities.
Components of ISP
• The Process of Information Systems Planning
• Strategic Alignment of Business and IT
• Selecting Systems to Invest In
• Project Management Issues

Why ISP?
Why do we need to plan for IS?
 To ensure that IS both complements and assists in the achievement of our business goals.
 To ensure that the use of scarce resources are maximized within a business.
 To maximize the benefits of changing technology.
 To take account of the different viewpoints of business professionals and IT professionals.

Who Perform ISP?
 IS Planners / System Analyst
 Variety of stakeholders (i.e. sponsor, users)
 Top management commitment
 successful ISP.

Where & When ISP?
 Any organization that has interest in getting the best out of its IT investments.
 Facing problems
 Grabbing opportunities.
 Information Systems (IS) fail to satisfy huge, diverse and complicated information requirements of their users.

HOW?
 Look at business structure, function, processes, culture
 Look at existing IT
 Look at available technology.
 Carry out interviews.
 Develop policies.
 Develop application portfolio.
 Plan schedules for migration, implementation etc.

Characteristics of a Quality ISP
A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

1. Timely - The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.
2. Useable - The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.
3. Maintainable - The ISP should be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates; technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.
4. Quality - While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.
5. Reproducible - The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Reference:
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~nkm/sisp/CONTENTS.html
http://www.business-plan-success.com/Articles/BusinessPlanDefinition/
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan

You are always welcome to visit on my personal blog: lol!

http://www.megsgang050890.blogspot.com/

Subject: Assignment 2(MIS2) Sun Jan 24, 2010 10:28 pm

What do you think is the relationship between Business and Information System plan? To further discuss let us know what does it mean.

Business Plan

Based on the Wikipedia,A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.

Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.

Operational plans describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department. Project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project's place within the organization's larger strategic goals.
Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.
For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.

Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure

IS Plan
Characteristic Description

Timely -The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is
useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work
than to perform the work planned.

Useable- The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for
each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be
parceled out to project managers and immediately started.

Maintainable -The ISP should be maintainable. New business opportunities, new
computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support
quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even
to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are
accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program
executions away.

Quality- While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first
try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual
project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware
technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As
these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that
supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should
be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than
quarterly.

Reproducible- The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are
performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the
same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

The ISP Steps

The information systems plan project determines the sequence for implementing specific information systems. The goal of the strategy is to deliver the most valuable business information at the earliest time possible in the most cost-effective manner.
The end product of the information systems project is an information systems plan (ISP). Once deployed, the information systems department can implement the plan with confidence that they are doing the correct information systems project at the right time and in the right sequence. The focus of the ISP is not one information system but the entire suite of information systems for the enterprise. Once developed, each identified information system is seen in context with all other information systems within the enterprise.
Information Systems Plan Development Steps
Step Name Description
1. Create the mission model -The mission model, generally shorter than 30 pages presents end-result characterizations of the essential raison d=etre of the enterprise. Missions are strategic, long range, and a-political because they are stripped of the Awho@ and the Ahow.@
2. Develop a high-level data model -The high-level data model is an Entity Relationship diagram created to meet the data needs of the mission descriptions. No attributes or keys are created.
3. Create the resource life cycles (RLC) and their nodes -Resources are drawn from both the mission descriptions and the high level data model. Resources and their life cycles are the names, descriptions and life cycles of the critical assets of the enterprise, which, when exercised achieve one or more aspect of the missions. Each enterprise resource Alives@ through its resource life cycle.
4. Allocate precedence vectors among RLC nodes -Tied together into a enablement network, the resulting resource life cycle network forms a framework of enterprise=s assets that represent an order and set of inter-resource relationships. The enterprise Alives@ through its resource life cycle network.
5. Allocate existing information systems and databases to the RLC nodes -The resource life cycle network presents a Alattice-work@onto which the Aas is@ business information systems and databases can be Aattached.@ See for example, the meta model in Figure 2. The Ato-be@ databases and information systems are similarly attached. ADifference projects@ between the Aas-is@ and the Ato-be@ are then formulated. Achievement of all the difference projects is the achievement of the Information Systems Plan.
6. Allocate standard work break down structures (WBS) to each RLC node -Detailed planning of the Adifference projects@ entails allocating the appropriate canned work breakdown structures and metrics. Employing WBS and metrics from a comprehensive methodology supports project management standardization, repeatability, and self-learning.
7. Load resources into each WBS node -Once the resources are determined, these are loaded into the project management meta entities of the meta data repository, that is, metrics, project, work plan and deliverables.
8. Schedule the RLC nodes through a project management package facilities. -The entire suite of projects is then scheduled on an enterprise-wide basis. The PERT chart used by project management is the APERT@ chart represented by the Resource Life Cycle enablement network.
9. Produce and review of the ISP -The scheduled result is predicable: Too long, too costly, and too ambitious. At that point, the real work starts: paring down the suite of projects to a realistic set within time and budget. Because of the meta data environment (see Figure 1), the integrated project management meta data (see Figure 2), and because all projects are configured against fundamental business-rationale based designs, the results of the inevitable trade-offs can be set against business basics. Although the process is painful, the results can be justified and rationalized.
10. Execute and adjust the ISP through time. -As the ISP is set into execution, technology changes occur that affect resource loadings. In this case, only steps 6-9 need to be repeated. As work progresses, the underlying meta data built or used in steps 1-5 will also change. Because a quality ISP is Aautomated@ the recasting of the ISP should only take a week or less.
Collectively, the first nine steps take about 5000 staff hours, or about $500,000. Compared to an IS budget $15-35 million, that's only about 3.0% to 1.0%.
If the pundits are to be believed, that is, that the right information at the right time is the competitive edge, then paying for an information systems plan that is accurate, repeatable, and reliable is a small price indeed.
Executive and Adjusting the ISP Through Time
IT projects are accomplished within distinct development environments. The two most common are: discrete project and release. The discrete project environment is typified by completely encapsulated projects accomplished through a water-fall methodology.
In release environments, there are a number of different projects underway by different organizations and staff of varying skill levels. Once a large number of projects are underway, the ability of the enterprise to know about and manage all the different projects degrades rapidly. That is because the project management environment has been transformed from discrete encapsulated projects into a continuous flow process of product or functionality improvements that are released on a set time schedule. Figure 3 illustrates the continuous flow process environment that supports releases. The continuous flow process environment is characterized by:
•Multiple, concurrent, but differently scheduled projects against the same enterprise resource
•Single projects that affect multiple enterprise resources
•Projects that develop completely new capabilities, or changes to existing capabilities within enterprise resources

In summary, any technique employed to achieve an ISP must be accomplishable with less than 3% of the IT budget. Additionally, it must be timely, useable, maintainable, able to be iterated into a quality product, and reproducible. IT organizations, once they have completed their initial set of should apply databases and business information systems will find themselves transformed from a project to a release environment.
The continuous flow environment then becomes the only viable alternative for moving the enterprise forward. It is precisely because of the release environment that enterprise-wide information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained are essential.

RELATIONSHIP between the 2

We know that both of them have a Deeper analization, it means each of them should follow steps but in the case of IS plan it is more detailed. when we say planning, it is in organizations and public policy is both the organizational process of creating and maintaining a plan; and the psychological process of thinking about the activities required to create a desired goal on some scale. As such, it is a fundamental property of intelligent behavior. This thought process is essential to the creation and refinement of a plan, or integration of it with other plans, that is, it combines forecasting of developments with the preparation of scenarios of how to react to them.

Blog blog blog:
http://shecapacillo.blogspot.com/

References:
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262

Let me first define what business plan is based on my research.

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.

Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.

Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to bemeasured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.
Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.

Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others.I t can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.

"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."

Next i will define what is Information System based on my references.

An information System plan is a a process for developing a strategy and plans for aligning information systems with the business
strategies of an organization. The systems planning function of the life cycle seeks to identify and prioritize those technologies and applications that will return the most value to the business. Synonyms include strategic systems planning and Information resource management. Study the Business Mission with Information System Although many businesses haven't formally documented their mission, they all have one. If information systems are to truly return value to the business, they need to directly address that mission. Thus, the first phase of systems planning is to study the business mission.

Some make a clear distinction between information systems, ICT and business processes. Information systems are distinct from information technology in that an information system is typically seen as having an ICT component. Information systems are also different from business processes. Information systems help to control the performance of business processes.

Alter argues for an information system as a special type of work system. A work system is a system in which humans and/or machines perform work using resources (including ICT) to produce specific products and/or services for customers. An information system is a work system whose activities are devoted to processing (capturing, transmitting, storing, retrieving, manipulating and displaying)information.

Part of the difficulty in defining the term information system is due to vagueness in the definition of related terms such as system and information. Beynon-Davies argues for a clearer terminology based in systemics and semiotics. He defines an information system as an example of a system concerned with the manipulation of signs. An information system is a type of socio-technical system. An information system is a mediating construct between actions and technology.

Information System Planning (ISP) is a structured approach developed by IBM to assist organizations in establishing a plan to satisfy
their short and long term information requirements. The ISP methodology was implemented at Tel-Aviv University. A comprehensive plan for the development of a Management Information System (MIS) was derived. This paper presents a review of the process by which the plan was obtained, a discussion of the methodology, and its ramifications. information system is frequently used to refer to the interaction between people, processes, data and technology. In this sense, the term is used to refer not only to the information and communication technology (ICT) an organization uses, but also to the way in which people interact with this technology in support of business processes .

REFERENCES:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262

VISIT MY BLOG Assignment 2 (Due: before November 29, 2009, 13:00hrs) - Page 2 Icon_arrow

http://fujiwarayumi.blogspot.com/

Posts : 46 Points : 47 Join date : 2009-06-19

Sir Gamboa,

Due to the accident that I had in the school for the past few months, I wasn’t able to pass my assignments on time. In regards to this, our class Mayor, Ms. Marren Joy Pequiro and I had a conformity that allows me to submit and posts my assignments in this forum with consideration.

Posts : 46 Points : 47 Join date : 2009-06-19

What should be the relationship between the business plan and information system plan is basically a homework assigned by my professor for me to really work hard on. Honestly, I am not born a business entrepreneur nor an information technology expert yet I have to try to present my views in this regards as possible as I can but by way of quoting some experts' minds and ideas about these issues that I have to deal with. Defining what a plan is, might be of great help to develop my upcoming statements about this matter. What is a Plan therefore? In my own definition and understanding, I simply define "plan" as a product of my thoughts on how to go about with something that I have in my mind. How to make it realized must be considered so I have to definitely write down the steps on how should I do it, what materials do I need, consider the procedure and eventually record some hypothesis and observations gathered from what I have done, try and maybe retry the process until I succeed or get what I expect to get out from what I intend to do. Making suggestions and recommendations might also be helpful in doing so.

Now, what about business? what does it mean? Thanks God for Wikipedia for it defined the term explicitly as
"A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan. " Wikipedia also displays the contents of a business plan as follows..

"Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.

Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are calledstrategic plans.

Operational plans describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department. Project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project's place within the organization's larger strategic goals.

Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.

Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management,intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.
"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure."

Presentation formats
The format of a business plan depends on its presentation context. It is not uncommon for businesses, especially start-ups to have three or four formats for the same business plan:
• an "elevator pitch" - a three minute summary of the business plan's executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.
• an oral presentation - a hopefully entertaining slide show and oral narrative that is meant to trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.
• a written presentation for external stakeholders - a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders.
• an internal operational plan - a detailed plan describing planning details that are needed by management but may not be of interest to external stakeholders. Such plans have a somewhat higher degree of candor and informality than the version targeted at external stakeholders.

Typical structure for a business plan for a start up venture
• cover page and table of contents
• executive summary
• business description
• business environment analysis
• industry background
• competitive analysis
• market analysis
• marketing plan
• operations plan
• management summary
• financial plan
• attachments and milestones

Revisiting the business plan

Cost overruns and revenue shortfalls

Cost and revenue estimates are central to any business plan for deciding the viability of the planned venture. But costs are often underestimated and revenues overestimated resulting in later cost overruns, revenue shortfalls, and possibly non-viability. During the dot-com bubble 1997-2001 this was a problem for many technology start-ups. However, the problem is not limited to technology or the private sector; public works projects also routinely suffer from cost overruns and/or revenue shortfalls. The main causes of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls are optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Reference class forecasting has been developed to reduce the risks of cost overruns and revenue shortfalls.

Legal and liability issues

Disclosure requirements

An externally targeted business plan should list all legal concerns and financial liabilities that might negatively affect investors. Depending on the amount of funds being raised and the audience to whom the plan is presented, failure to do this may have severe legal consequences.

Limitations on content and audience

Non disclosure agreements (NDAs) with third parties, non-compete agreements, conflicts of interest, privacy concerns, and the protection of one'strade secrets may severely limit the audience to which one might show the business plan. Alternatively, they may require each party receiving the business plan to sign a contract accepting special clauses and conditions.

This situation is complicated by the fact that many venture capitalists will refuse to sign an NDA before looking at a business plan, lest it put them in the untenable position of looking at two independently developed look-alike business plans, both claiming originality. In such situations one may need to develop two versions of the business plan: a stripped down plan that can be used to develop a relationship and a detail plan that is only shown when investors have sufficient interest and trust to sign an NDA.

Open business plans

Traditionally business plans have been highly confidential and quite limited in audience. The business plan itself is generally regarded as secret. However the emergence of free software and open source has opened the model and made the notion of an open business plan possible.

An open business plan is a business plan with unlimited audience. The business plan is typically web published and made available to all.

In the free software and open source business model, trade secrets, copyright and patents can no longer be used as effective locking mechanisms to provide sustainable advantages to a particular business and therefore a secret business plan is less relevant in those models.

While the origin of the open business plan model is in the free software and Libre services arena, the concept is likely applicable to other domains.

Uses

Venture capital
• Business plan contests - provides a way for venture capitals to find promising projects
• Venture capital assessment of business plans - focus on qualitative factors such as team.

Public offerings
• In a public offering, potential investors can evaluate perspectives of issuing company

Within corporations

Fundraising
Fundraising is the primary purpose for many business plans, since they are related to the inherent probable success/failure of the company risk.

Total quality management
Total quality management (TQM) is a business management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, call centers, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs.

Management by objective
Management by objectives (MBO) is a process of agreeing upon objectives within an organization so that management and employees agree to the objectives and understand what they are in the organization.

Strategic planning
Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ) and PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological analysis) or STEER analysis involving Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors and EPISTELS (Environment, Political, Informative, Social, Technological, Economic, Legal and Spiritual)

Now, what about the information system? My deep appreciation for Wikipedia is extended to this avenue for helping me make my search and my work so easy to understand, exact and meaningful as I quote.. " Information Systems (or IS) is historically defined as a 'bridge' between the business world and computer science, but this discipline is slowly evolving towards a well-defined science. Typically, Information Systems (or IS) include colleagues, procedures, data, software, and hardware (by degree) that are used to gather and analyze information. Specifically computer-based information systems are complementary networks of hardware/software that people and organizations use to collect, filter, process, create, & distribute data. Today, Computer Information System(s) or CIS is often a minor track within the computer science field pursuing the study of computers and algorithmic processes, including their principles, their software & hardware designs, their applications, and their impact on society. Overall, an IS discipline emphasizes functionality over design.

In a broad sense, the term Information Systems refers to the interaction between algorithmic processes and technology. This interaction can occur within or across organizational boundaries. An information system is not only the technology an organization uses, but also the way in which the organizations interact with the technology and the way in which the technology works with the organization’s business processes. Information systems are distinct from information technology (IT) in that an information system has an information technology component that interacts with the processes components.

An Information System consists of four parts which include: procedures, software, hardware, and information or data, which are essentially the same. There are various types of information systems, for example: transaction processing systems, office systems, decision support systems, knowledge management systems, database management systems, and office information systems. Critical to most information systems are information technologies, which are typically designed to enable humans to perform tasks for which the human brain is not well suited, such as: handling large amounts of information, performing complex calculations, and controlling many simultaneous processes.

Information technologies are a very important and malleable resource available to executives. Many companies have created a position of Chief Information Officer (CIO) that sits on the executive board with the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Chief Operating Officer (COO) and Chief Technical Officer (CTO).The CTO may also serve as CIO, and vice versa. The Chief Information Security Officer(CISO), who focuses on information security within an organization, normally reports to the CIO.

In this regard, information system professionals and their associates have strong analytical and critical thinking skills to implement large-scale business models within any organization. Although solving problems within an organization is a common practice, IS professionals have the ability to automate these solutions via programmable technologies without violating ethical principles. As an end-result, IS professionals must have a broad business and real world perspective to implement technology solutions that enhance organizational performance.

Now that I have at least presented some facts and ideas about the business plan and information system as quoted from reliable source, it is hoped that a comprehensive grasp between the two concerns could at least be attained. Knowing some basic facts and nature about these two aspects could at least lead us to identify or point out what should be the relationship between them. In my own understanding, I could say that an information system plan is very important in going about the business plan. The way I look at it...the business plan is the body while the information system is the blood of the whole system.

The question was what should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan? To answer the question I will need information that would answer the question and thus ill be able to decide in my own understanding what should be the relationship between the business plan and the information systems plan. So first we should gather enough information in relation to the said topic so that we could answer it correctly. To start, I will define what a business plan and what is information systems plan or also called strategic planning.

According to wikipedia.org a business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.

While strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal).

Strategic planning is the formal consideration of an organization's future course. All strategic planning deals with at least one of three key questions:

1. "What do we do?"
2. "For whom do we do it?"
3. "How do we excel?"

In business strategic planning, the third question is better phrased "How can we beat or avoid competition?". (Bradford and Duncan, page 1).

In many organizations, this is viewed as a process for determining where an organization is going over the next year or more typically 3 to 5 years, although some extend their vision to 20 years.

In order to determine where it is going, the organization needs to know exactly where it stands, then determine where it wants to go and how it will get there. The resulting document is called the "strategic plan."

It is also true that strategic planning may be a tool for effectively plotting the direction of a company; however, strategic planning itself cannot foretell exactly how the market will evolve and what issues will surface in the coming days in order to plan your organizational strategy. Therefore, strategic innovation and tinkering with the 'strategic plan' have to be a cornerstone strategy for an organization to survive the turbulent business climate.
So for me the relationship between business plan and strategic plan is this:

• Why plan?
– To obtain resources
• Financial
• Facilities – “Capacity planning”
• Staff
– To align IS with the business
– To identify needed applications
– To establish goals, schedules, and milestones in order to track progress
– To provide an opportunity for communication with top management and user management
• Outcomes vs. process?
• Reactive vs. proactive?
• Planning vs. forecasting?
– Forecasting is predicting the future
– Planning is being prepared for that future

Information Systems Strategic Planning
• Establish a mission statement
• Assess the environment
• Set goals and objectives
• Derive strategies and policies
• Develop long-, medium-, and short-range plans
• Implement plans and monitor results

Establish a mission statement
• These are the services that you are responsible for; it is your place in the organization
• It is not what you are supposed to achieve, it is who you are and what you do in the company

Assess the environment(s) . . .
1. The capabilities of the IT department
2. The readiness of the company to use IT
3. The status of our customers, our industry
4. The status of the economy, government regulations, environment, society, etc.
5. Technology

This is similar to a SWOT analysis – Strengths and Weakness – items no. 1 & 2; and Opportunities and Threats – items no. 3, 4, & 5

Goals and Objectives
• Set goals – what do you want to achieve?
• Set objectives – what are your specific, measurable targets?

Derive strategies and policies
• Strategies for
– Technology focus
– Personnel and career development
– Aligning with the company
– Others . . .
• Policies for
– Funding criteria; how much to spend on IT?
– Allocation criteria; priority setting
– Organizational arrangements
– Use of outside IT services, outsourcing
– Selling IT services to outside organizations
– Others . . .

Short-, medium-, and long-range plans
• Short-range – the next year, the next budget period; developing and operating current systems
• Medium-range – committing to development efforts for applications that will take more than one year to complete; meeting management’s current information needs, projected into the future for as many years as needed to complete them. This is what most organizations call “Long-Range Planning.”
• Long-range planning – preparing for management’s future information needs. These are not application specific; they are investments in infrastructure; it is creating an information architecture.

And finally, implement plans and monitor results.

Business planning and strategic planning are very closely interrelated. Business planning can be seen as an aspect of the overall strategic planning of a company, minutely following in written form all the sides of the business. Also, the strategic planning can be seen from the perspective of the business plan of a company as a delineator of main rough, undetailed aspects.

Strategic planning implies general directions of a business, main strategies, a long-term perspective, for about 2-4 years.

Business plans, on the other hand, state in detail the data of the business from the marketing point of view, from the management and personnel point of view and from the financial point of view. They also contain stipulations for contingencies. They offer a shorter term perspective, for about 1 year.

In a world of an ever increasing competition, less stable and predictable, planning has become more important for managers, conditioning business existence. Times are for thorough analysis of a business from all its perspectives, the difference between an evolving business and a failure depends on this.

Even if inclined to base their actions on immediate-gain grounds, successful business managers have learned to take their time for a prospective analysis. Even if initially starting off their business on a gut feeling, successful talented managers have learned that they have to go beyond the gut feeling, putting together a concrete plan of action, meant to enhance more stability and reduce the tendency of working at random.

Although there are voices saying that most successful businesses did not need a plan to begin with, I would not minimize the importance of a business plan, integrated within the strategic business planning, as every business, be it small or "oversized" will need a plan in a certain stage of its growing. The reason might be not necessarily its founding, but the need to communicate in the business environment — be it raising some money or hiring quality personnel.

Basically we can refer to the strategic business planning through the SWOT analysis used for marketing: analysis and identification of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths and weaknesses are internal factors of the business, while opportunities and threats are external factors.

The strength analysis requires a look at the advantages of a business, its strong points and all its resources and capabilities that can be used as a basis for developing a competitive advantage.
Weakness may be absence of certain strengths. Weaknesses' analysis must reveal where there is room for improvement, what is there to avoid.

Opportunities and threats are triggered by environmental occurrences such as unexplored marketing niche, new technologies, new loosened regulations, identifiable as opportunities or, on the contrary, threats such as consumers' change in tastes away from the firm's products, new regulations, debt or cash-flow problems, etc.

The business plan treats in detail the main directions that the strategic planning settles. If strategic planning provides general directions for the next 2 years, the business plan analysis what the business' characteristics are, how to implement the directions, what will the impact on the market and the potential customers be, the financial side of the action etc., generally all the ins and outs of the matter.
When starting a business online there are some things you certainly want to know and be able to put in place to offer yourself a much higher chance at success.

The first draft of a business plan for an online venture must include the means and targets you are going to use to drive customers to your business that are more inclined to buy.
It makes sense that just being able to send random people to your business is not going to lead to a high percentage of buyers. This is why we target and the internet gives us the easiest way to find our potential customers and put our products or services in front of them without spending a dime.

Advertising online has much more to do with knowing than it does with spending. There are certainly ways you can spend money online advertising and make a very good return. When starting a business and putting together that first draft of a business plan you want to consider these as well if you can afford them.

You key is going to be spending time looking at the searches people are making every day online as they relate to whatever it is your are trying to use as your online business.

If you are selling bird cages you would want to know what searches people are making and in what frequency in order to craft your website and content to attract those people. This is the key to making money online regardless of what type of product or services your new online business is offering.

So basically, the relationship between the business plan and IS plan is that the IS plan is inclined to what the organization or business is aiming at. They should be related to each other to meet a common goal. So basically that’s it.

References:
Wikipedia.org
http://www.businessplanning.ws/learn/business-strategic-planning.html
http://ezinearticles.com/?Starting-a-Business---First-Draft-of-a-Business-Plan&id=3868596

please visit my blog @ www.franzcie.blogspot.com

afro

Subject: Business and IS plan.. Thu Mar 11, 2010 9:03 pm

Today information technology involves more than just computer literacy; it also takes into account how computers work and how these computers can further be used not just for information processing but also for communications and problem solving tasks as well. Information has emerged as an agent of integration and the enabler of new competitiveness for today’s enterprise in the global marketplace. It has been widely used in many business operations since it would play a very crucial part in the development of the business. Competition is there and with that, organizations find some strategies that will help building the name of the company and achieve a competitive advantage as technology is concern. The trend of technology nowadays is fast changing. It would be better if organizations will adapt into these changes and eventually embrace the new technology offered for the businesses to progress. Since business and IT works hand on hand, there relationship will provide a great means in achieving the goals set in for the organization. The business will not just bloom by itself but also those people using the technology as a resource.

Business varies in character, as in being simpler or more complex. The varying complexity entails that the parties need different amounts of information from each other. Thus, it also inflicts on the possibilities and outcome of how information technology can be employed as well as how it impacts on business.

Information technology has certain distinguishing characteristics in a business setting, mainly as it provides the ability to increase efficiency due to the reduction of time needed to get information, the facilitation of rapid response and reaction, and the ability to handle both simple and complex content.

For companies involved in business of higher complexity, information technology can provide many solutions that can be used to enhance the flow or management of data and information. It can be anything from making orders on email to systems for order-delivery-payment or product development through shared databases.
Before an organization achieves the direction they wanted for their business, it all started with setting up some plans. That exist a business plan. A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals. Setting up goals really takes the companies go up high. Being globally competitive is just one of those goals they set in. But thinking of the current status of business companies over the world, it’s clear that technology advancement plays a big part in their success. There exists a relationship between businesses into information systems. It involves planning as it was the first step. Since business plan is about the goals of the organization and it may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals while internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. It was mentioned of having a new IT system. So what would be the role of IT as information systems are being used? What is Information System Plan? Information System brings life to the overall operation of the business. Organisations typically develop rolling business plans, they are constructed by taking into account the current business, the external influences on the business (e.g. the economy, government policy and technological advances), and the aims and objectives of the most senior levels of management. The strategic business plan describes how the organisation will strive to move from the current business to the target business.Information Systems support is necessary to achieve the strategic business plan, so the business plan feeds into a Strategic Information Systems Plan (SISP), which describes how the current IT systems are intended to evolve into the target IT systems. A 'big bang' approach is infeasible, therefore a project based approach is used. The output of the SISP is a series of development projects which will either involve modifying existing systems or developing new systems which are likelty to have to interface or integrate with exisiting systems. Information systems were developed simply to improve the efficiency of specific business functions. More recently information systems have been viewed as tools for obtaining competitive advantage.

Reference:
http://www.comp.glam.ac.uk/pages/staff/tdhutchings/chapter1.html

Management Information System (MIS) requires understanding about the subject contents and components, and its essentiality in the society, and how it works and affects human life. Starting our journey about the MIS environment, we must first know what the stuffs we must consider in introducing MIS are Business Industries and Information Technology (IS) itself, and how they are correlate each other. This first step will give us the idea that IS is one of the elements in the business world, that is why as an IT students we have to adopt and considered the business industry, and how to link IT into its prospect industry. Based on the learning’s that I’ve learned in this past few years of studying as an IT students, I’ve known that IT is an helping tool for the business industry to progress and prosper .
All of the success in the business and in the field of technology is not by luck but with the proper, appropriate and correct management and planning. But as of this moment we will tackle about essentiality of having a good plan in both the business and in the Information Systems area. When we talks about planning it is a crucial task. Its because of some factors to be considered such as long time for hardware delivery, the difficulty of software development and the preparation needed for training and implementation have all demanded advance planning. This planning task has been primarily technical, specifically focuses on hardware and software and its relationship into the business industry. It is a preparation of one business or one system how to improve one's organization for the days or years to come. It is trying to respond in the changes and challenges that blocks the way of success. It is strategical approach of new ideas, new techniques, new business strategies and new systems, which intentionally gives a positive impacts in the business and organizations. For instance, the business makes a plan first before implementing something, like purchasing the new system for the new accounting system. Before the system may come in to reality it must to pass through different and formal process, the request must be done in the sequential and documentary way, like stating the purpose, the benefits, people involve , cost and many more to consider just to be approved. And for some like small business before they have a new machine it would be studied first if the cost would be worth to take the risk, and become the cause of the delay. After the evaluation if it really not approved, the owner would ask for any alternative that is low cost but functional though not so good in quality and performance as long as it fits on the budget, they will go for it, but still before it come to reality it passed to a long process and studied well by all concern. What I want to say is that planning done properly to find its effectiveness and usefulness in any organization. The way to success is the proper way f planning , predicting the problems that may result destruction and failure of the organization by having strategical solutions and plan to fight it up.
However, to elaborate and make a clearer view about the topic, we must first define and expose its real meaning that define by the author.
-Information System (IS) Today, James O'Brien,2003.McGraw Hill Company Inc.,
Information System can be any organized combination of people, hardware, software, communication networks and data resources that collects, transforms and disseminate information in an organization. While Business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reason why they are believed attainable and the plan reaching those goals.
-www.wikipedia.com
Business is first established than Information Technology (IT). Filipino started trading through barter system until such time that we learned to use for business transaction. In regards on the widely spread of business throughout the globe, managing information files was done manually until during 1970’s. In part of this year, information workers exceeded 50% of the work force. This is due of bigger and longer the company operates the larger documentation files stored and processed, although in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. “IT” hardly exist still its compatibility and usability was not yet disseminated well. They were started using computer for data processing applications, their impact was comparatively modest. This was all because this change could not come too quickly to satisfy user needs. But, still people tried so hard to make things possible in which after late 1960’s, Information work grew rapidly. Through this responds we now make use IT resources effectively and efficiently.
Nowadays, proper designation and implementation of the Information Systems (IS) will become a big factor to the business prosperity. That is why Business plan correlates with Information System Plan.
The both elements are very important and specials in an organization. With the aid of this two, the business will prosper. Proper handling of information system will help in decision making while having a good business plan that will lead you where your business is going, it will be your map in your journey to successful business. It might be the road to taken be not so smooth but having a good business plan to address and overcome the circumstances that comes along the way. That is the main purpose of the planning, planning for the future.

How does IS help the business world?
1. It help in company's decision-making. Because it gives an accurate, timely and usable output of all financial statement of account and other financial reports and ledger. It also provide a more comprehensive graph that identifies the growth and downfall of the business operations and profit. The graph also see to it what period is the peak season and when it is not, when and where to produce and reproduce a product.
2. It makes the nature of job simplified and categories into specific job description. With regards on the job specification in the company in regards to Information System, it makes the nature of job for one personnel to furnish a more precise and a better performance in regards to its job, it will minimize multi-tasking. This will keep time the personnel to focus in one specific job.
3. Making use of latest technological trends. The newest technology you have the coolest, this is the motto of all the techie people says but in business not at all times, why? Is is because in the business world making use or purchasing new system would be very costly and complicated. Acquiring new system needs a proper preparation and planning. But we should not regard the facts that a having new systems will help addressing the company problems when regards to company transactions.
Components of IS Plan
1. Equipment 6. Financial Projections
2. Software System 7. Staff Development
3. Development Projects 8. Alternative Technology Projections
4. Database Plans 9. Organizational Design
5. Telecommunications Plan 10. Alternative Business Projection

Differentiate Information System Plan into Business Plan
Business plan has been identified as a summary of how a business owner, manager, or entrepreneur intends to organize an entrepreneurial endeavor and implement activities necessary and sufficient for the venture to succeed. Business plan is being used as Venture capital, Public offerings, while within corporations it includes Fundraising, Total quality management, Management by objective and Strategic planning.
When we talk about Venture Capital it denotes about two things: Business plan contests which provide a way for venture capitals to find promising projects while venture capital assessment of business plans focus on qualitative factors such as team. This entire collective investment scheme is a way of investing money with others to participate in a wider range of investments than feasible for most individual investors, and to share the costs and benefits of doing so. However, venture capital fund refers to a pooled investment vehicle which means that, primarily invests the financial capital of third-party investors in enterprises that are too risky for the standard capital markets or bank loans. Other capitalist are invested into small and less mature companies but expect so much in return, this happen because its one way of taking over the management or another way around but with purely the reason on investments return. Furthermore, venture capital investments are generally made as cash in exchange for shares in the invested company. It is typical for venture capital investors to identify and back companies in high technology industries such as biotechnology and ICT (information and communication technology).
Aside from being a business-minded you have a responsibility to have a public offerings which makes potential investors evaluation on perspectives of issuing company. IT is having informed the public of the issues that mainly concern on the people's involvement. Example of it is fund raising is the primary purpose for many business plans, since they are related to the inherent probable success/failure of the company risk. It fails when the number of availing the service are availed the fund raising but the return of investment is not sufficient nor never achieve in their target sales this is means company lose which mean that the strategy is not so effective. Total quality management

Total quality management (TQM) is a business management strategy aimed at embedding awareness of quality in all organizational processes. TQM has been widely used in manufacturing, education, call centers, government, and service industries, as well as NASA space and science programs. The basis of TQM is to reduce the errors produced during the manufacturing or service process, increase customer satisfaction, streamline supply chain management, aim for modernization of equipment and ensure workers have the highest level of training. Less error means near into perfection and so closes in to the peak of success and satisfaction.

Information System Plan corporate with three Framework:
1. Stage of Growth
Identification and initial investment it is somewhat the beginning use of the new system. Experimentation and learning will follow. All of this steps help the corporation categorizing the stages of growth, how the business grow.

2. Critical Success Factors (CSF) is the term for an element that is necessary for an organization or project to achieve its mission. It is a critical factor or activity required for ensuring the success of your business. The term was initially used in the world of data analysis, and business analysis. For example, a CSF for a successful Information Technology (IT) project is user involvement.
3. Business Systems Planning

Business System Planning (BSP)

It is another popular methodology for system planning which developed and marketed by IBM. The basic philosophy of BSP is that data is a corporate resource. As such, it should be managed from an overall organizational view point, that it can be best serve the organization’s objectives and support its decision making activities.

The steps in the BSP study

1. Gaining commitment. Commitment is actually having people willing to commit themselves for the project they are the: a study sponsor (who are the top executive of the organization), team leader (one of the top executive who is assigned to lead the project) and members of the team. The team leader and members commits themselves to build the project. The final study recommendation would be presented into study sponsor, for further reviews and ask approval to proceed.

2. Preparing for the Study. This preparation involves crating the study schedule, making out the list of executives to be interviewed, gathering reference materials, location and equipping a meeting room, and so on.

3. Starting the Study. First, objectives must be presented by the sponsor. It reviews initial preparations. To established technical environment, the overview of the company’s information Systems is presented by the chief Information Systems executives.

4. Defining Business Process. Identifies and describes all the processes of the business, such as product development, purchasing, marketing and receiving.

5. Defining Business Data. The data used in the company will be categorized into logical data classes. The latter is the information needed to be tracked such as vendors, customers, parts, machines, and so on.

6. Designing Business Data. Defining information architecture of the organization. The architecture shows the relationship between data classes processes and IS. Data created in one system used in another is identified that the subsystems can be identified either “create” subsystem or “usage” subsystem.

7. Analyzing Current System Support. From the study and information gather above, the team can discover which processes receive no formal systems support which receives support, where possible redundant system exist, where shared information systems are possible.

8. Interviewing Executives. The purposes of interview are: to verify the organization; to determine the needed information by these executives; to uncover their problems and priorities.

9. Defining Findings and conclusions. The huge amount of material gathered from research and organizational information, interviews, summarized relationship of processes and data classes and so forth. This all summarized information help in determining the corporate information architecture.

10. Determining architecture Priorities. The team describes the order in which sales are to be developed the highest priority systems or subsystems are then described in considerable detail for evaluation by the study sponsor.

11. Reviewing Information Resource Management. Having a thorough probing and scrutinizing the business process, the team now study the company's information systems management policies in order to identifies objectives, financial, applications and data.

12. Developing Recommendations And an Action Plan. This step is producing the final set and recommendation and action plan.

13. Reporting Results. In this stage the team hopes to gain approval from the study sponsor to proceed with this recommendation and action plan.

14. Overview of follow-up activities. BSP manual stresses the importance various people including the users. The manual also describes various aspects of the follow-up activities such as implementing changes, maintaining and refining the architecture developing the first system.

4. Investment Strategy Analysis
This is all about having a planning where the money should be invested which at the same will make the turn-over double or more. This is thinking all possible event that might in the business, and tried to address it.

Significant of Strategic Planning

Strategic planning is an organization's process of defining its strategy, or direction, and making decisions on allocating its resources to pursue this strategy, including its capital and people. Various business analysis techniques can be used in strategic planning, including SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats ), PEST analysis (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological), STEER analysis (Socio-cultural, Technological, Economic, Ecological, and Regulatory factors), and EPISTEL (Environment, Political, Informatic, Social, Technological, Economic and Legal). All possible factors are being held together and tried to come a solution to address all of this. This is the way of having a strategize action on the future that held to shield the company for the possible circumstances that brings the company at stake. Strategic Plan is your wiping tool in cleansing up your way in the future.

Characteristics of a Quality ISP

A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

a.) Timely- The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.

b.) Useable- The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.

c.) Maintainable -The ISP should be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.

d.) Quality- While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.

e.) Reproducible The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Business Plans and IS Plan written primarily for use within the company generally stresses the benefits that will result from implementation of the plan. These may include improved and more consistent performance, improved coordination and consistency among various segments of the company, greater ability to measure performance, empowerment of the work force, and a better motivated and educated work force. The plan provides a comprehensive framework and direction for ongoing operations.

It is also use to identify the company's strengths and weaknesses, potential problems, and emerging issues. They set forth performance standards on which expectations will be based, and clearly define goals and objectives to allow for coordination and better communication between all company areas. All these elements are taking impart in the industry because it is their map for giving a clearer view about the future struggles and difficulties. All of this is commonly use by the organization, because without this is like putting yourself in war without bringing any weapon to defend yourself, it surely kills you without a fight. Having no Strategic Plan and business Plan is a suicidal, you are putting the company at stake. Therefore, always be vigilant and always be prepared, by doing this will be key to succeed.

Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262

Before we discuss further,lets define first what is Business Plan, its purposes and objectives..
It is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.
The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.
According to the unknown author, a business plan can be difficult, as the definition might be different for every organization. A business plan, in its simplest form, will usually define where you want your business to be within a certain period of time (usually five years) and how you plan on getting there. A business plan is as important for starting a business as blueprints are for building your house. When starting a new business, writing a business plan is an important first step to getting started. A business plan will lay out the direction for the future of your company and begin to establish standards for success. A complete business plan should include five-year financial projections. These projections will assist investors with making decisions about your business and help you to know how much funding you will need to get things rolling. A business plan should define how you would like to operate your business. This includes describing the management team, the marketing strategy, and the methods in which you will interact with customers. A business plan might project a strategy that reflects the management style of the founders of the business. The definition should be clear but flexible. Business plans are developed for many purposes. One company might be looking for funding from investors. Another company might be looking for a loan from a bank. Your company might just need to plan out the company’s strategy to make sure it is successful. Whatever the case, every business needs a business plan.
Business Plan also defines as a detailed description of a new or existing business, including the company's product or service, marketing plan, financial statements and projections and management principles, require a plan to be implemented. A document that spells out a company's expected course of action for a specified period usually includes a detailed listing and analysis of risks and uncertainties. For the small business, it should examine the proposed products, the market, the industry, the management policies, the marketing policies, production needs and financial needs. Frequently, it is used as a prospectus for potential investors and lenders.
A business plan has three primary functions:

1. To serve as an Action Plan
2. To serve as a Road Map
3. To serve as a Sales Tool

Action Plan. A business plan can help to move you to action. You may have been thinking for years about starting a business or engaging in some venture, but the process may seem too daunting, too large and too complicated. A business plan will help you to pull apart the pieces of starting a business and examine each piece by itself. So instead of one large problem, you have a sequence of smaller problems. And by solving the small problems, the large problem is automatically solved. So writing a business plan can help to move you to action by breaking down a seemingly insurmountable task (starting a business) into many smaller, less intimidating tasks.

Road Map. Once you have started your business, a business plan can be an invaluable tool to help keep you on track and moving in the direction you want to go. In the hurley-burley of daily business, it is very easy to lose sight of your objectives and goals -- a business plan can help to keep you focused. A business plan can also serve to help others to understand your vision, including suppliers, customers, employees, friends, and family.

Sales Tool. Perhaps most importantly, a business plan can serve as a sales tool. You will probably need outside financing to start your business, and a business plan is the tool you need to convince investors to come on board. You may also want and need concessions from suppliers or customers -- a business plan can help you get them. Finally you may need to convince family members, or even yourself, that your ideas will bear fruit. A well-written business plan can serve to sell people close to you on the benefits of proceeding with your concept.

What is Information System Planning?

According to Somendra Pant and Cheng Hsu, Information Systems Planning, or Planning for information systems, as for any other system,it “begins with the identification of needs. In order to be effective, development of any type of computer-based system should be a response to need--whether at the transaction processing level or at the more complex information and support systems levels. Such planning for information systems is much like strategic planning in management. Objectives, priorities, and authorization for information systems projects need to be formalized. The systems development plan should identify specific projects slated for the future, priorities for each project and for resources, general procedures, and constraints for each application area. The plan must be specific enough to enable understanding of each application and to know where it stands in the order of development. Also the plan should be flexible so that priorities can be adjusted if necessary. King (King, 1995) in his recent article has argued that a strategic capability architecture - a flexible and continuously improving infrastructure of organizational capabilities – is the primary basis for a company's sustainable competitive advantage. He has emphasized the need for continuously updating and improving the strategic capabilities architecture.” -

I can say that the use of information technology in business strategies helps achieve competitive advantage of the organization in the global marketplace. This is because IS encouraging the sharing of knowledge across business units enhances competency. Information systems achieve great efficiencies by automating parts of the business processes. When the manual system poses threats to security and reliability of data due to redundancy, the automated system can bring fast, accurate, more reliable outputs which could then be utilized not just by one functional area in the company but to all that is concerned with the information being processed..From the definitions stated above, since that Information System Planning is a process for developing a strategy and plans for aligning information systems with the business strategies of an organization, and that business plan is formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. Both are essential to the development of an organization. It can make or break an organization. And as during our lectures, with proper business planning in lined with proper strategic IS plan, an organization may bloom. And as to what the both are naturally related with, well, both deals with proper Time Management and Planning for the betterment of an organization.

Reference:
http://www.business-plan-success.com/Articles/BusinessPlanDefinition/
http://ezinearticles.com/?Business-Plan---Purpose-and-Objectives&id=445062

Posts : 39 Points : 51 Join date : 2009-06-23

1.What should be the nature of the relationship between the business plan and the IS plan?

Before we discuss further, let’s define first what is a business plan and an ISP plan..

Business plan?

A business plan is a formal statement of a set of business goals, the reasons why they are believed attainable, and the plan for reaching those goals. It may also contain background information about the organization or team attempting to reach those goals.

The business goals may be defined for for-profit or for non-profit organizations. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals, such as profit or creation of wealth. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on organizational mission which is the basis for their governmental status or their non-profit, tax-exempt status, respectively—although non-profits may also focus on optimizing revenue. In non-profit organizations, creative tensions may develop in the effort to balance mission with "margin" (or revenue). Business plans may also target changes in perception and branding by the customer, client, tax-payer, or larger community. A business plan having changes in perception and branding as its primary goals is called a marketing plan.

Business plans may be internally or externally focused. Externally focused plans target goals that are important to external stakeholders, particularly financial stakeholders. They typically have detailed information about the organization or team attempting to reach the goals. With for-profit entities, external stakeholders include investors and customers. External stake-holders of non-profits include donors and the clients of the non-profit's services. For government agencies, external stakeholders include tax-payers, higher-level government agencies, and international lending bodies such as the IMF, the World Bank, various economic agencies of the UN, and development banks.
Internally focused business plans target intermediate goals required to reach the external goals. They may cover the development of a new product, a new service, a new IT system, a restructuring of finance, the refurbishing of a factory or a restructuring of the organization. An internal business plan is often developed in conjunction with a balanced scorecard or a list of critical success factors. This allows success of the plan to be measured using non-financial measures. Business plans that identify and target internal goals, but provide only general guidance on how they will be met are called strategic plans.

Operational plans describe the goals of an internal organization, working group or department. Project plans, sometimes known as project frameworks, describe the goals of a particular project. They may also address the project's place within the organization's larger strategic goals.

Business plans are decision-making tools. There is no fixed content for a business plan. Rather the content and format of the business plan is determined by the goals and audience. A business plan should contain whatever information is needed to decide whether or not to pursue a goal.

For example, a business plan for a non-profit might discuss the fit between the business plan and the organization’s mission. Banks are quite concerned about defaults, so a business plan for a bank loan will build a convincing case for the organization’s ability to repay the loan. Venture capitalists are primarily concerned about initial investment, feasibility, and exit valuation. A business plan for a project requiring equity financing will need to explain why current resources, upcoming growth opportunities, and sustainable competitive advantage will lead to a high exit valuation.
Preparing a business plan draws on a wide range of knowledge from many different business disciplines: finance, human resource management, intellectual property management, supply chain management, operations management, and marketing, among others. It can be helpful to view the business plan as a collection of sub-plans, one for each of the main business disciplines.

"... a good business plan can help to make a good business credible, understandable, and attractive to someone who is unfamiliar with the business. Writing a good business plan can’t guarantee success, but it can go a long way toward reducing the odds of failure.

Presentation formats

The format of a business plan depends on its presentation context. It is not uncommon for businesses, especially start-ups to have three or four formats for the same business plan:

• an "elevator pitch" - a three minute summary of the business plan's executive summary. This is often used as a teaser to awaken the interest of potential funders, customers, or strategic partners.

• an oral presentation - a hopefully entertaining slide show and oral narrative that is meant to trigger discussion and interest potential investors in reading the written presentation. The content of the presentation is usually limited to the executive summary and a few key graphs showing financial trends and key decision making benchmarks. If a new product is being proposed and time permits, a demonstration of the product may also be included.

• a written presentation for external stakeholders - a detailed, well written, and pleasingly formatted plan targeted at external stakeholders.

• an internal operational plan - a detailed plan describing planning details that are needed by management but may not be of interest to external stakeholders. Such plans have a somewhat higher degree of candor and informality than the version targeted at external stakeholders.

Typical structure for a business plan for a start up venture

• cover page and table of contents
• executive summary
• business description
• business environment analysis
• industry background
• competitive analysis
• market analysis
• marketing plan
• operations plan
• management summary
• financial plan
• attachments and milestones

Every business starts with a strong business plan – it is the foundation and the building block of every company. A good business plan will not only be the blueprint of your business, it will also provide you with a good entry into many doors, including the door of investors and financial institutions.

Outlining Operational Strategies in a Business Plan

The Operational Strategies section of a business plan describes a business's operations. It includes plans for ordering, storing, selling, and producing. A service company describes how its services are offered and performed. Essentially, the objective of this section is to walk the reader through the process of daily business operations.
The operations plan should include:

• Responsibilities for handling specific tasks
• The physical setup for the business
• Inventory details
• Manufacturing details
• Pricing details
• Safety precautions
• Outsourcing to subcontractors or freelancers

The key to the operations section of your business plan, however, is not only to explain how you will do business but to explain your strategies and how they best facilitate the type of business you plan to do. Your reasoning behind the operations plan is as important, if not more so, than the actual description of how business will be conducted.
Your business methods should show:

• The benefit to your customers
• How the methods expedite transactions
• The delivery of quality customer service
• Its positioning to give you a competitive advantage

Almost every business has a need to interact with other companies. You should include the other companies, vendors, partners, and distributors that your business will rely on to complete transactions. If, for example, you are taking sales orders online and using a fulfillment house, you should include a description of the fulfillment house that you are working with and how they benefit your operation. Again, the listing of vendors or outside services with which you do business is less significant than why you have made specific choices.

Additionally, a contingency plan of action should also be included if your business is highly sensitive to weather conditions or factors that are beyond your control. For example, the owner of a vendor-driven weekly flea market or carnival might include the business plan contingency arrangements in the event of inclement weather.

Over the life of the business, the manner in which you do business changes significantly, as you address competitors and changes in technology, the economy, and marketing trends. In addition, your business may grow from a small one- or two-person operation into a larger scale business with the need for additional space and staffers. Businesses evolve. A business plan written 10 to 15 years ago, for example, did not include sales efforts via the Internet or the need for computer-savvy employees to handle such sales. For this reason, you should include some general projections of your expectations in the operational plans of your business to change and grow over time to meet the demand for increased sales.

Ten elements of a good business plan

A business plan is a comprehensive description of your business, the environment in which it operates, and how you will run it over the next three to five years. Preparing one takes effort, but forces you to think critically about the viability of a new venture. Besides, most bankers and venture capitalists won't even talk to you if you don't have one.
Typically, a business plan includes at least the following ten elements, which are described in some detail below:

* Executive summary
* Description of the company
* Market and competitors
* Marketing strategy
* Design and development plans
* Manufacturing and operations
plans
* Management team
* Overall schedule
* Critical risks and problems
* Financial plan

Executive summary

Potential investors read this first to see if the plan merits a complete reading. The summary should be concise (one to two pages) and compelling. Briefly describe the basics of your business plan: market opportunity, management team, financial returns, and terms of the investment you're seeking.

Description of the company

Described how and when the company (or idea) got started, and what stage it is in the development process. Briefly delineate the firm's product and services, how the major players go involved, and what the current opportunity is. Your company's general strategy also should be included here. Strategic elements include the company's growth stages over the next several years; primary advantages over competitors; tactics you'll use (i.e., cost leadership, differentiation, focus); plans for raising; and personal goals for the business.

Information System Planning?

Information Systems Plan described the sequence for implementing specific information systems. The goal of the strategy is to deliver the most valuable business information at the earliest time possible in the most cost-effective manner.

The task of strategic information systems planning is difficult and often time organizations do not know how to do it. Strategic information systems planning is a major change for organizations, from planning for information systems based on users’ demands to those based on business strategy.

Strategic information systems are those computer systems that implement business strategies; They are those systems where information services resources are applied to strategic business opportunities in such a way that the computer systems have an impact on the organization’s products and business operations. Strategic information systems are always systems that are developed in response to corporate business initiative. The ideas in several well-known cases came from information Services people, but they were directed at specific corporate business thrusts. In other cases, the ideas came from business operational people, and Information Services supplied the technological capabilities to realize profitable results.

Most information systems are looked on as support activities to the business. They mechanize operations for better efficiency, control, and effectiveness, but they do not, in themselves, increase corporate profitability. They are simply used to provide management with sufficient dependable information to keep the business running smoothly, and they are used for analysis to plan new directions. Strategic information systems, on the other hand, become an integral and necessary part of the business, and directly influence market share, earnings, and all other aspects of marketplace profitability. They may even bring in new products, new markets, and new ways of doing business. They directly affect the competitive stance of the organization, giving it an advantage against the competitors.

Most literature on strategic information systems emphasizes the dramatic breakthroughs in computer systems, such as American Airline’s Sabre System and American Hospital Supply’s terminals in customer offices. These, and many other highly successful approaches are most attractive to think about, and it is always possible that an equivalent success may be attained in your organization. There are many possibilities for strategic information systems, however, which may not be dramatic breakthroughs, but which will certainly become a part of corporate decision making and will, increase corporate profitability. The development of any strategic information systems always enhances the image of information Services in the organization, and leads to information management having a more participatory role in the operation of the organization.

The three general types of information systems that are developed and in general use are financial systems, operational systems, and strategic systems. These categories are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, they always overlap to some. Well-directed financial systems and operational systems may well become the strategic systems for a particular organization.

Financial systems are the basic computerization of the accounting, budgeting, and finance operations of an organization. These are similar and ubiquitous in all organizations because the computer has proven to be ideal for the mechanization and control or financial systems; these include the personnel systems because the headcount control and payroll of a company is of prime financial concern. Financial systems should be one of the bases of all other systems because they give a common, controlled measurement of all operations and projects, and can supply trusted numbers for indicating departmental or project success. Organizational planning must be tied to financial analysis. There is always a greater opportunity to develop strategic systems when the financial systems are in place, and required figures can be readily retrieved from them.

Operational systems, or services systems, help control the details of the business. Such systems will vary with each type of enterprise. They are the computer systems that operational managers need to help run the business on a routing basis. They may be useful but mundane systems that simply keep track of inventory, for example, and print out reorder points and cost allocations. On the other hand, they may have a strategic perspective built into them, and may handle inventory in a way that dramatically impacts profitability. A prime example of this is the American Hospital Supply inventory control system installed on customer premises. Where the great majority of inventory control systems simply smooth the operations and give adequate cost control, this well-know hospital system broke through with a new version of the use of an operational system for competitive advantage. The great majority of operational systems for which many large and small computer systems have been purchased, however, simply help to manage and automate the business. They are important and necessary, but can only be put into the "strategic" category it they have a pronounced impact on the profitability of the business.

All businesses should have both long-range and short-range planning of operational systems to ensure that the possibilities of computer usefulness will be seized in a reasonable time. Such planning will project analysis and costing, system development life cycle considerations, and specific technology planning, such as for computers, databases, and communications. There must be computer capacity planning, technology forecasting, and personnel performance planning. It is more likely that those in the organization with entrepreneurial vision will conceive of strategic plans when such basic operational capabilities are in place and are well managed.

Operational systems, then, are those that keep the organization operating under control and most cost effectively. Any of them may be changed to strategic systems if they are viewed with strategic vision. They are fertile grounds for new business opportunities.

Strategic systems are those that link business and computer strategies. They may be systems where a new business thrust has been envisioned and its advantages can be best realized through the use of information technology. They may be systems where new computer technology has been made available on the market, and planners with an entrepreneural spirit perceive how the new capabilities can quickly gain competitive advantage. They may be systems where operational management people and Information Services people have brainstormed together over business problems, and have realized that a new competitive thrust is possible when computer methods are applied in a new way.

There is a tendency to think that strategic systems are only those that have been conceived at what popular, scientific writing sometimes calls the "achtpunckt." This is simply synthetic German for "the point where you say ‘acht!’ or ‘that’s it!’" The classical story of Archimedes discovering the principle of the density of matter by getting into a full bathtub, seeing it overflow, then shouting "Eureka!" or "I have found it!" is a perfect example of an achtpuncht. It is most pleasant and profitable if someone is brilliant enough, or lucky enough, to have such an experience. The great majority of people must be content, however, to work step-by-step at the process of trying to get strategic vision, trying to integrate information services thinking with corporate operational thinking, and trying to conceive of new directions to take in systems development. This is not an impossible task, but it is a slow task that requires a great deal of communication and cooperation. If the possibilities of strategic systems are clearly understood by all managers in an enterprise, and they approach the development of ideas and the planning systematically, the chances are good that strategic systems will be result. These may not be as dramatic as American Airline’s Sabre, but they can certainly be highly profitable.

There is general agreement that strategic systems are those information systems that may be used gaining competitive advantage. How is competitive advantage gained?. At this point, different writers list different possibilities, but none of them claim that there may not be other openings to move through. Some of the more common ways of thinking about gaining competitive advantage are:

1. Deliver a product or a service at a lower cost. This does not necessarily mean the lowest cost, but simply a cost related to the quality of the product or service that will be both attractive in the marketplace and will yield sufficient return on investment. The cost considered is not simply the data processing cost, but is the overall cost of all corporate activities for the delivery of that product or service. There are many operational computer systems that have given internal cost saving and other internal advantages, but they cannot be thought of as strategic until those savings can be translated to a better competitive position in the market.

2. Deliver a product or service that us differentiated. Differentiation means the addition of unique features to a product or service that are competitive attractive in the market. Generally such features will cost something to produce, and so they will be the setting point, rather than the cost itself. Seldom does a lowest cost product also have the best differentiation. A strategic system helps customers to perceive that they are getting some extras for witch they will willingly pat.

3. Focus on a specific market segment. The idea is to identify and create market niches that have not been adequately filled. Information technology is frequently able to provide the capabilities of defining, expanding, and filling a particular niche or segment. The application would be quite specific to the industry.

4. Innovation. Develop products or services through the use of computers that are new and appreciably from other available offerings. Examples of this are automatic credit card handing at service stations, and automatic teller machines at banks. Such innovative approaches not only give new opportunities to attract customers, but also open up entirely new fields of business so that their use has very elastic demand.

Almost any data processing system may be called "strategic" if it aligns the computer strategies with the business strategies of the organization, and there is close cooperation in its development between the information Services people and operational business managers. There should be an explicit connection between the organization’s business plan and its systems plan to provide better support of the organization’s goals and objectives, and closer management control of the critical information systems.

Many organizations that have done substantial work with computers since the 1950’s have long used the term "strategic planning" for any computer developments that are going to directly affect the conduct of their business. Not included are budget, or annual planning and the planning of developing Information Services facilities and the many "housekeeping" tasks that are required in any corporation. Definitely included in strategic planning are any information systems that will be used by operational management to conduct the business more profitably. A simple test would be to ask whether the president of the corporation, or some senior vice presidents, would be interested in the immediate outcome of the systems development because they felt it would affect their profitability. If the answer is affirmative, then the system is strategic.

Strategic system, thus, attempt to match Information Services resources to strategic business opportunities where the computer systems will have an impact on the products and the business operations. Planning for strategic systems is not defined by calendar cycles or routine reporting. It is defined by the effort required to impact the competitive environment and the strategy of a firm at the point in time that management wants to move on the idea.
Effective strategic systems can only be accomplished, of course, if the capabilities are in place for the routine basic work of gathering data, evaluating possible equipment and software, and managing the routine reporting of project status. The calendarized planning and operational work is absolutely necessary as a base from which a strategic system can be planned and developed when a priority situation arises. When a new strategic need becomes apparent, Information Services should have laid the groundwork to be able to accept the task of meeting that need.

Characteristics of a Quality ISP

A quality ISP must exhibit five distinct characteristics before it is useful. These five are presented in the table that follows.

Characteristic

Timely - The ISP must be timely. An ISP that is created long after it is needed is useless. In almost all cases, it makes no sense to take longer to plan work than to perform the work planned.

Useable - The ISP must be useable. It must be so for all the projects as well as for each project. The ISP should exist in sections that once adopted can be parceled out to project managers and immediately started.

Maintainable - The ISP must be maintainable. New business opportunities, new computers, business mergers, etc. all affect the ISP. The ISP must support quick changes to the estimates, technologies employed, and possibly even to the fundamental project sequences. Once these changes are accomplished, the new ISP should be just a few computer program executions away.

Quality - While the ISP must be a quality product, no ISP is ever perfect on the first try. As the ISP is executed, the metrics employed to derive the individual project estimates become refined as a consequence of new hardware technologies, code generators, techniques, or faster working staff. As these changes occur, their effects should be installable into the data that supports ISP computation. In short, the ISP is a living document. It should be updated with every technology event, and certainly no less often than quarterly.

Reproducible - The ISP must be reproducible. That is, when its development activities are performed by any other staff, the ISP produced should essentially be the same. The ISP should not significantly vary by staff assigned.

Whenever a proposal for the development of an ISP is created it must be assessed against these five characteristics. If any fail or not addressed in an optimum way, the entire set of funds for the development of an ISP is risked.
In summary, any technique employed to achieve an ISP must be accomplishable with less than 3% of the IT budget. Additionally, it must be timely, useable, maintainable, able to be iterated into a quality product, and reproducible. IT organizations, once they have completed their initial set of databases and business information systems will find themselves transformed from a project to a release environment.

The continuous flow environment then becomes the only viable alternative for moving the enterprise forward. It is precisely because of the release environment that enterprise-wide information systems plans that can be created, evolved, and maintained are essential.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_plan
http://www.allbusiness.com/business-planning-structures/business-plans/2524-1.html
http://www.tdan.com/view-articles/5262
http://www.monografias.com/trabajos7/chaof/chaof.shtml?monosearch

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