Business Information Systems

Markets and enterprises have changed throughout history. Since computing power and interconnectivity have increased in the course of the process generally known as “globalisation”, a different kind of market and a different type of enterprise have emerged:

• Greater dependency on exports in many countries.
• Emergence of global consumers and global brands
• 24/7 execution of trade operations.
• Globalised production and transnational outsourcing.
• Knowledge-based or knowledge-intensive products services (often delivered via the web).
• Global consumers and global brands.
• International labour ressource markets (favoring outsourcing, too).
• Firms and organisations are flatter, more decentralised (or virtual).
• Employees tend to be generalists depending on fast information access working in flexible teams.
• The organisation as a whole becomes more customer-centric (instead of product-centric)
• Customers become partners or co-creators of value (web 2.0 paradigm).

All of these trends above are facilitated, or even initiated by, information technology (IT), and executed by information systems.

The application worldmapper impressively illustrates the trends by means of over 300 anamorphic maps based on large global data sets: the following two maps show the development of Internet usage between 1990 and 2002. The original maps allow to interactively home in on individual countries.

Exercise: find your own image(s) of globalisation on the Internet!

Internet Users world-wide 1990. Source: worldmapper.org

Internet users world-wide 2002. Source: worldmapper.org