The Complexity of Business Information System

Abstract

A great deal of controversy exists about the impact of information systems on a firms performance. While some authors have reported positively that today's business success is solely built on a business's information system, others argue that information systems are gradually taking over and making businesses to lose their control. Business Information systems appear to be a dream come true to solve the increasing demand by customers for efficient and quality delivery of goods and services. This has necessitated many businesses and organizations in the 21st century to go through a radical transformation in building quality and highly integrated information systems to cater for and solve all the needs of the customers whilst keeping track of internal and external business processes and records. These information systems packages which are currently tailored to suit organizational purposes promise the all-in-one amalgamation of all the information curving through an organization. Different literatures admit information systems development (ISD) to be a complex activity. This complexity is magnified by the daily and continuous changes in user requirements due to changing business needs which are triggered by the speed of customer needs in a fast-changing external competitive environment. Many researchers have concluded that if this increasing complexity is not managed appropriately, information systems may fail and turn to impact organizations more than it's anticipated benefits. Writers of various kind of literature have proposed various methods of assessing and measuring the complexity of an organizations information system. The main aim of this thesis was to identify the current ways of assessing the complexity of business information systems and using that as a basis to measure the complexity of the information system of Foxconn - a manufacturing company in the Czech Republic. The thesis uses the function point method mainly in measuring the information system of Foxconn. From the analysis, the derived level of complexity of the company and its impacts are shown.