Information Systems Research, Integration And Build Competitive Advantage

With the rapid development of the economic globalization andinformation technology and the changing competition mode among theenterprises, the exchanging and sharing of information has become more andmore important. Under the traditional organization structure, the existinginformation systems lack effective way to communicate with each otherwhich leads to many problems: no comprehensive cross-departmentinformation is provided;the on-time information access and the perspectiveinto the business process cannot be achieved;the management of theenterprises' resources as a whole cannot be realized. These problems haveseriously limited the upgrade of the competitive capacity and the developmentof the enterprises. Therefore, the enterprises have to adjust their informationstrategy in time, re-examine the internal structure, and integrate their innerinformation systems with the information resources of their supply-chainpartners. Maximizing the value of information resources based on therealization of fully sharing of the information so as to acquire the competitiveadvantages of the enterprises and the whole supply-chain.Beginning with the review of the history of the development ofinformation systems, this paper discusses the reasons, the purpose, theprinciples and the models of the information system integration, introducesthe popular methods of the information system integration and analyzes theintegration of the three popular systems: ERP, SCM and CRM based on thecase study of Lenovo. Then the paper presents the research on the competitiveadvantages of information system integration and the problems that should bepaid attention during the integration process by using the "value-chain"theories and the competitive model of Michael Porter.