Strategic IS Planning Practices: A Case of Medium Manufacturing Company in Malaysia

Deployment of Information Technology/Information Systems (IT/IS) has been recognized as one of the potential means to supply information for timely business decision making. Despite growing importance of IT/IS in business, Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) embrace constant challenges to deploy IS effectively, and thus, hardly to optimize the IT/IS strategic values. In such situation, IS planning is getting paramount to promote more effective IT/IS management of the firms. This study reports IS planning practices of a manufacturing-based SME. The face to face interview has been carried out to explore IS planning activities in a chosen firm. The qualitative analysis suggests that the selected company did undergo the four phases of strategic IS planning process namely, planning, analysing, selection, and implementation. The owner act as the champion of the strategic IS planning process. Further, the owner and the employees plays an important role as a decision maker. Specifically, the owner decides mainly on acquiring a new technology related to the firm's core business process whereas the users responsible on the selection of relevant application (s) to be used in their respective departments. Apart from that, the owner also plays a role as a researcher for the new technology acquired whilst the users provide an input on the applications to be acquired.