Public and private organizations are entering in the digital world where real time data is available about their operations, their operating environments, third-party services offered to increase their performance as well as chances in the demands of their customers. This data abundance offers new opportunities but also raises new challenges for information systems. The systems have to exploit these data to help (networked-) organizations to decide and conduct appropriate business transformations necessary to guarantee their survival in a continuously changing world.
The digitalization of the world, the availability of the data in real-time and the increasing connections of things, IT-systems and organizations significantly increase the role of information systems in the organizations during the last decades. Historically, enabled by databases and file systems technologies supporting data storage and retrieval facilities, information systems have been proven instrumental in supporting management issues associated with the optimization and partial automation of processes and document flows in more efficient organizations.
With the internet and web technologies, together with an increased quality of the information, information systems have started to progressively be considered as a centre of profit, rather than as a centre of costs. The transformation of data into information intensive services creating new customer/client value has led organizations to reshape their business value proposition. Architecture of information systems has evolved to enable increasingly interconnected service systems.
Today, technologies (like IoT and natural interfaces) are becoming more and more pervasive allowing to sense and always more data on all the facets of an organization and of its environment. The collection of data is no longer limited to its processes and information flows. Data is available about almost any relevant aspect of the organization. With the support of new computational and cognitive technologies for managing this abundance of data, the key challenge is to evolve information systems into smart systems. These systems have to be sufficiently agile to rapidly analyse, predict and manage the needed disruptive and incremental business transformations of operations. From a centre of profit, information systems are now becoming the centre for sustainability of the organizations.