Effects of system integration in an organization : A case study carried out in the photo and home electronics branch

Abstract: Organizations often have information systems belonging to different computer generations. These systems contain much valuable data to the organizations concerned. However, these systems are often unable to communicate with each other, due to incompatibilities. Moreover, replacing these systems with new systems is also very costly. Therefore the latest trend is integrating the existing systems with each other with the help of different system integration technologies. When the systems are integrated with new technology they bring about various effects to the organizations in concern. The purpose of this thesis is to find out how system integration affects an organization in the photo and home electronics branch, namely Expert. The questions that will be raised in this thesis are how does system integration affect the organization’s work processes and how does system integration affect the organisation’s employees. I have studied how system integration has affected the work processes and employees of the retail stores. In order to find answers to these questions three qualitative interviews were carried out. One interview took place in the central organization and the rest in retail stores in Linköping. There are many reasons, which led Expert towards using system integration. Some of the main reasons are increased profitability and decreased costs for maintenance and upgrading of different systems. Further, the retail stores required better information channelling and streamlining of work processes in order to provide salesmen at retail stores possibility to concentrate more on customers by minimising administrative work. I have found that system integration has affected the organization’s work processes and its employees both positively and negatively, in other words system integration has helped Expert to decrease administration work, provided salesmen at retail stores more time to deliver better service to customers, has automated key work processes saving time and reducing redundancy of work. Even if, the organization is quite satisfied with the benefits the existing system integration technologies have rendered to them, there are many more privileges, which can be achieved.