The purpose of this research is to grasp the development, change, and transformation of MIS in the marketing and business world over the time. To this end, changes and trends that likely have an impact on MIS concepts, processes, and implementation were determined by reviewing the articles published in business and marketing journals. Specifically, a content analysis was conducted to (1) identify the possible trends and changes in MIS concepts and themes over the past three decades, (2) detect prevalently used research types, and (3) compare the publishing productivity of business and marketing journals about the subject of IS.
In today's dynamic world everything is changing very radically; and as the 21st century dawns, revolutionary changes are also beginning to challenge the business and marketing world. To cope with the increasing competition and uncertainty, companies need to take advantage of the information technology (IT) and information systems (IS). IS offer firms new ways of improving efficiency. Thus, the need for management of information is becoming the heart of marketing for the firms in order to survive in highly competitive markets.
Traditionally a marketing information system (MkIS) has been seen as a system to support the marketing management in its decision making. Talvinen classified MkIS into six groups based on the type of primary use (Talvinen, 1995). These classes are data gathering, data analysis, marketing planning, marketing decision making, implementation of marketing activities, and control. The use of MkIS allows companies external control (control of marketing environment and activities) and internal control (control of marketing effectiveness, performance against plans and personnel).
As the significance of management information systems (MIS) has been increasing, marketing and business environments have been revolutionizing through the applications of IT. Hence, the role of MIS in business and marketing has been also changing continuously due to rapid advancements in technology. The purpose of this research is to grasp the development, change, and transformation of MIS in marketing and business over time. This change in the management and implementation of IS can be examined over time through several ways. Content analysis is one of the ways to capture the change in MIS and to understand the effect of this change on marketing and business implementations.
The field of MIS has been changing in response to the needs of the business and marketing environment. The purpose of this study is to understand the development, change, and transformation of MIS in the marketing and business over time. Reviewing the content of the articles that is published in professional and academic journals can be helpful to see the evolutionary change in the field of MIS. Thus, in this study, content of the articles was analyzed to capture the changes and trends that likely have an impact on MIS concepts, processes, and implementation.
The results of the content analysis indicate a change in the themes and concepts of IS over the past three decades. Between the years 1970 and 1979, most of the articles have concentrated on the development of IS design and they have underlined critical factors in achieving successful and effective IS design. In the first ten years, IS has been used predominantly to support the managers in their decision making. Besides, it is evident that implementation of IS into sales management has been popular and widespread in this era. However, IS implementations in the sales management have been limited to make forecasting about the sales and to take feedback from the sales persons.
However, in the second ten years, IS implementations have disseminated into different domains of business such as maritime industry, industrial markets, motor carrier markets, banking sector, etc.. The roles and responsibilities of the managers in the MIS began to change, and the significance of user involvement (such as involvement of executive managers, managers, and line managers) in the management processes of IS has increased during 1980s. As the need of interaction among executives, users, and IS managers has increased for the success of MIS operations, the decentralization of IS departments has become a dominant issue during the period of 1980–1989.
Similarly, the significance of collaboration and interaction among the high-level executives, users, and information system managers has also continued to be mentioned during the period 1990–2002. However, in contrast to the period of 1980–1989, in the period of 1990–2002 the changing role of CIO has been discussed. Practitioners of the period 1990–2002 have discussed whether CIO is adding value or not. As the firms began to outsource their IS, a discussion of whether to outsource IS or use in-house IS also started at that time.
As the market growth slows down and markets become more competitive, companies have changed the way they do business; the evidence is the shift of business focus from transactional marketing to relationship marketing (Grönroos, 1994; Gummesson, 1997). Customer retention and loyalty have been becoming the strategic mandate in today's business environment. Since in today's markets, firm's competitive advantage derives its ability from maintaining long-term relationships with its customers, maintaining customer retention is one of the main motivation for a firm to implement customer-centric business strategies in consumer markets (Kandampully, 1997; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 2000). Customer relationship management allows the firms to become more knowledgeable about their customers’ needs/wants; and in turn allows the firms to satisfy their customers. Thus, IS has been considered as an important tool that helps firms understand the needs and expectations of their customers in order to deliver greater value to them. As a result, a specific application of IS, which is called customer IS, has gained momentum during the 1990s. Firms have believed the significance of establishing communication channels among different departments (building cross-functional IS) in order to serve their customers more efficiently and effectively. Furthermore, firms have also accepted the importance of building inter-organizational IS with their suppliers in favor of sustaining cost efficiency during the 1990s.
In the recent era, variety of specific sub-concepts about IS implementations have been emerging such as: cross-functional IS, chief information officer, executive IS, chief technology officer, chief privacy officer, inter-organizational IS, service quality IS, IS management of virtual communities, etc. The emergence of new and specific concepts in the literature supported the change in IS implementations and structures of the firms over the past years. As time passes, specification of IS applications has also increased, and it is expected to continue in the future. In conclusion, this content analysis provides the picture of the past and present of IS applications.
