Review Questions
1) A) The mission, or mission statement of a company is a statement that makes it clear what business a company is in. Objective statements are a series of statements that express an organization’s quantitative and qualitative goals for reaching a desired future position. Competitive strategy is the method by which an organization attempts to achieve its mission and objectives. It is essentially the game plan of the organization for playing in the competitive business world.

b) Corporate strategic planning is the process that defines the mission, objectives and strategies of an organization, which is ongoing. The ISP or information systems planning is an orderly means of assessing the information needs of an organization and defining the systems, databases and technologies that will best satisfy those needs.
c) Top down planning is when the decision making process is kept at the senior level within an organization, deriving its name from the planning being held at the top of the org-chart. These plans tend to have a more strategic and organizational vision/focus. Bottom up planning is the opposite; these plans are often more tactical and involve team members lower on the org-chart. These plans are often faster and less costly.
d) Low-cost producer is the competitive strategy that involves producing your good(s) or services at the lowest cost, to perhaps sacrifice some quality in favor of volume. An example would be Kia automobiles. Product differentiation is when your product offers something that other players in the market do not have to get customers; an example of this would be the simplicity of Apple products. An example of a niche, or narrowly focused point of differentiation within a marketplace would be convertible sports cars or the Chevy Avalanche that swaps between SUV and pickup truck.
2) The process consists primarily of three activities: Identifying potential development projects, which involves simply identifying things that may be feasible to develop. Next there is classifying and ranking IS development projects that were identified in the first step and finally selecting IS development project(s) where the final project(s) are chosen.
3) Some of the criteria used to evaluate projects are: ease of integration, project cost, duration, risk, complexity, resource availability, strategic alignment and scalability.
4) Value chain analysis is the process of analyzing an organization’s activities for making products and/or services to determine where value is added and costs are incurred and finding opportunities to optimize and tune performance. This process is used to “trim the fat” and eliminate unneeded costs or things that add little to no value to the entity.
5) The cost of IS has risen and is up to 40% in some entities, many systems cannot handle applications that cross organizational boundaries. Many systems do not address critical problems of the business or support strategic applications; data redundancy is often out of control or users have little confidence in the quality of data. Systems maintenance costs are out of control as poorly planned systems need constant revision; application backlogs often extend years into the future and end users often create redundant or incompatible systems in the interim.
6) The first step is to develop a mission, and come up with a mission statement. Next the organization must define its objectives and make its objective statements. Once the mission and objectives are defined, the competitive strategy is formed which is how it achieves these missions and objectives.
7) Three generic competitive strategies are to be the low-cost producer, product differentiation, and product focus (creating niche products).
8) Information systems planning is the orderly means of assessing the information needs of an organization and defining the systems, databases and technologies needed to satisfy those needs. The three steps are: describe the