To understand further the nature of the relationship between the business plan and information system plan lets just define each one of them to know their functions and to relate them
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 being attempted may be for-profit or non-profit. For-profit business plans typically focus on financial goals. Non-profit and government agency business plans tend to focus on service goals, although non-profits may also focus on maximizing profit. 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.
An information system plan (ISP) is also a formal statement but as of a set of the systems goal, in other words it is a plan that determines the sequence for implementing specific information systems. The goal of the strategy is to have more beneficiary features to the user or to a company.
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.
There are a lot of steps involved to consider in following or making an ISP. You should follow it in order to avoid further distractions and confusions.
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! The price however, for traditionally accomplished ISPs is not small. A fair sized IBM’s Business, Business Systems Plan (BSP), or a James Martin’s System’s Data Planning (SDP) or Finkelstein’s Strategic Management Planning n (SMP) can take up to 40,000 staff hours ($4,000,000). Traditional ISPs are also inaccurate, can't afford to be repeated, and are out of date well before they are completed. Most ISPs, done the expensive and traditional way are never completed!
Now we already understand the meaning of each plan we can now tell the nature of relationship between BP and ISP. For a short recall business plan is composed of the company’s plan including its goal that should be for-profit or not-profit.
Today, enterprise database is deployed on distributed, heterogeneous hardware and systems software environments. 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. In order to attain such needs business plan should be merging to information system plan to develop a project that will affect the business survival. ISP will fetch the BP problems and conduct it. We can call it Business Information Systems the exact and complete details about the information needed about the systems and the business itself.
Business information systems change at a rate different from database objects or business missions. It is because of these different rates that each column is independent from each other. The goal is to encapsulate the internal designs of columns and to insulate them from the effects of design changes to other columns. Because of encapsulation, only when the business organizations change to the extent that they need additional or different business functions are business functions impacted. The most common changes are those that cause business functions to be either transferred from or into different business organizations. Those changes seldom ever impact business information systems. The only business organization changes that impact business information systems are those that typically occur after there has been a business mission change. Finally, database objects change only when missions change.
There are a lot of things that we will consider such as enterprises do not have models of information systems development that allow system designers to see the benefits of rearranging an information systems development schedule. In making an IS plan there are five major questions that cannot be answer:
1. What effect will there be on the overall schedule if an information system is purchased versus developed?
2. At what point does it pay to hire an abnormal quantity of contract staff to advance a schedule?
3. What is the long term benefit from 4GL versus 3GL?
4. Is it better to generate 3GL than to generate/use a 4GL?
5. 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!
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www.wikipedia.com
Whitemarsh - Information Systems Plan Book.pdf
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