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What Are The Issues and Technical Alternatives To Be Considered When Developing International Information Systems?

Some of the key issues and technical alternatives to consider when developing international information systems include standardizing hardware, software, and networking standards to support global business processes while accounting for country-to-country variation. Core systems must be developed to support distributed and integrated digital processes across borders. Additionally, technical standards around data, interfaces, and network connectivity must be established. Software localization also presents challenges in building interfaces between old and new systems and designing interfaces that can be used across multiple countries and languages.

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Georgia Vasantha
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141 views2 pages

What Are The Issues and Technical Alternatives To Be Considered When Developing International Information Systems?

Some of the key issues and technical alternatives to consider when developing international information systems include standardizing hardware, software, and networking standards to support global business processes while accounting for country-to-country variation. Core systems must be developed to support distributed and integrated digital processes across borders. Additionally, technical standards around data, interfaces, and network connectivity must be established. Software localization also presents challenges in building interfaces between old and new systems and designing interfaces that can be used across multiple countries and languages.

Uploaded by

Georgia Vasantha
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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What are the issues and technical alternatives to be considered when developing

international information systems?

Once firms have defined a global business model and systems strategy, they must select
hardware, software, and networking standards along with key system applications to support
global business processes. One major challenge is finding some way to standardize a global
computing platform when there is so much variation from operating unit to operating unit and
from country to country. Another major challenge is finding specific software applications that
are user-friendly and that truly enhance the productivity of international work teams.

Computing Platforms and Systems Integration

The development of a transnational information systems architecture based on the concept of


core systems has the goal of developing global, distributed, and integrated systems to support
digital business processes spanning national boundaries.

Some central authority in the firm must establish data standards as well as other technical
standards with which sites are to comply. For instance, technical accounting terms such as the
beginning and end of the fiscal year must be standardized (review the earlier discussion of the
cultural challenges to building global businesses) as well as the acceptable interfaces between
systems, communication speeds and architectures, and network software.

Connectivity

Truly integrated global systems must have connectivity—the ability to link together the systems
and people of a global firm into a single integrated network just like the phone system but
capable of voice, data, and image transmissions.

While private networks have guaranteed service levels and better security than the Internet, the
Internet is the primary foundation for global corporate networks when lower security and service
levels are acceptable. Companies can create global intranets for internal communication or
extranets to exchange information more rapidly with business partners in their supply chains.
They can use the public Internet to create global networks using VPNs from Internet service
providers, which provide many features of a private network using the public Internet. However,
VPNs may not provide the same level of quick and predictable response as private networks,
especially during times of the day when Internet traffic is very congested, and they may not be
able to support large numbers of remote users.

The rate of growth in the Internet population has been faster in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East
than in North America and Europe. Therefore, in the future, Internet connectivity will be much
more widely available and reliable in less-developed regions of the world, and it will play a
significant role in integrating these economies with the world economy.

Software Localization

The development of core systems poses unique challenges for application software: How will the
old systems interface with the new? Entirely new interfaces must be built and tested if old
systems are kept in local areas. These interfaces can be costly and messy to build. If new
software must be created, another challenge is to build software that can be realistically used by
multiple business units from different countries given that business units are accustomed to their
unique business processes and definitions of data

There are also problems of human interface design and functionality of systems. For instance, to
be truly useful for enhancing productivity of a global workforce, software interfaces must be
easily understood and mastered quickly. When international systems involve knowledge workers
only, English may be the assumed international standard. But as international systems penetrate
deeper into management and clerical groups, a common language may not be assumed and
human interfaces must be built to accommodate different languages and even conventions. The
entire process of converting software to operate in a second language is called software
localization.

Most of the world’s population accesses the Internet using a mobile device, so apps must be built
for mobile platforms, tiny screens, and low bandwidth. Since many mobile Internet users cannot
read or write, special interfaces using video and audio need to be built to serve this group.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems and supply chain management systems are widely
used by manufacturing and distribution firms to connect to suppliers on a global basis.
Collaboration and enterprise social networking systems, email, and videoconferencing are
especially important worldwide tools for knowledge- and data-based firms, such as advertising
firms, research-based firms in medicine and engineering, and graphics and publishing firms.

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