The Creativity in Information Systems
Hey all, Inga here. In the intro post I mentioned that along with engineering, I’m interested in the creative use information systems in business decisions. Conor started us off nicely in his post by mentioning some of the many definitions of Information Systems but what interested me was how it is categorised in a slightly broader sense.
the traditional view of information technology as a science rather than an art is due to historical factors rather than any real requirement. (Buckner, 1991)
I think this is an interesting observation as it challenges the way we traditionally view information systems. It can be argued, of course, that the building of any information system is inherently technical but I think building anything innovative and useful requires a certain amount of creativity and lateral thinking.
This view can be taken when assessing how businesses use information systems in their operations. As well as using traditional systems such as management information systems and information systems in the hiring process, using big data and analytics in more creative ways is becoming increasingly important to business.
The capacity of enterprises effectively using information technologies and betting on innovation and creativity is recognized as one important factor on the competitiveness and agility of the enterprises. Santos V (2016)
It’s clear that as information systems advance, companies are going to have to more creative about their uses and applications in order to stay ahead of the curve and have an edge as a business.
As Ciaran mentioned in his post, one large use of information systems for businesses is in marketing and while he looked at the more negative aspects of the uses of large amounts of personal data available, I am going to look at the opportunities this affords the people attempting to find creative ways to market in an increasingly overly saturated space. Micromarketing has been on the rise since the 90s and in recent times, with the huge amounts of data available about people, the targeted advertising has become more and more direct. While I, like any self respecting young, idealistic college student, hate this consumerist society and all that it stands for, I can also appreciate the art of a perfectly targeted youtube ad. How did they KNOW?!?
Personalized advertising can be an effective marketing strategy for social commerce companies. Social commerce companies use personalization to help consumers interact better with a brand to create increasingly stronger consumer–brand relationships (Tran, 2020)
Micromarketing targets the specific interests and needs of individuals by offering customized products or services. It is similar in some ways to niche marketing, but rather than targeting one large niche, it will target a large number of very small niches. Of course, this practice presents issues with data and privacy and so companies are having to become more creative in using the data available to them to infer information that may not be as readily available as more regulations are imposed.
In my future posts I plan to dive deeper into how creative practices are applied to information systems development and uses in business and also how the creative industries (music, theatre etc.) use information systems to make decisions and even create art in some instances.
Bibliography:
Buckner K (1991) Information Technology- Art of Science? Woman into Computing: Selected Papers
Santos V (2016) Creativity as a key ingredient of Information Systems. Trends and Applications in Software Engineering. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 405. Springer, Cham.
Tran TP (2020) Understanding drivers of brand love- the role of personalised ads on social media. Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 38 №1, pp. 1–14.
