Redesigning the Organization with Information Systems Chapter 12

Change  New environment factors are constantly emerging  Society’s needs are changed accordingly  Way of doing business changes  Business’ information need changes  Old technologies lost competitiveness  Old business SOP lost its competitiveness

Planned organization change  Multiple perspectives  Multiple platforms – Unix, Apple, Microsoft?  Multiple playing field – Work arrangement – Work performance – Human resource development

Methods for creating a new system blueprint  Enterprise analysis  Critical success factors analysis  Both are used to elicit organizational wide information requirements

Four levels of change / Spectrum of Organizational Change  NS, WS, ND, WD  NS  Automation like data processing  WS  Rationalization of procedures  ND  Business process re-engineering  WD  Paradigm shift

Business Process Reengineering  Radical restructuring of business processes – From traditional database systems to web base analytical database systems – From sequential to parallel systems like the new team approach mortgage processing systems

Assumptions outdated by new technologies  Field offices by wireless communications  One at a time by shared database  Fixed inventory system by automatic identification and tracking technology  Just in case inventory by networks, extranets, and EDI

Process Improvement  The earlier in the business cycle a problem is eliminated, the less it costs the company.  In the system development process, the time spent on analysis and design will lower cost on implementation and maintenance.

IS and TQM  Cycle time reduction  Benchmarking  Simplifying the product or production process  Improve the quality and precision of design as in CASE and CAD/CAM

Systems  Parts (components) – new components create new relationships  Purpose – overall purpose stays the same  Power / politics / position – internal as well as power changes  Process – evolving until totally change the business paradigm (see Figure 12-3, page 387)

Building a system  Means to change the four Ps. – Parts – hardware, software, people – Purpose – serve different needs – Power / position / politics – some up and some down – Process – should be seamless; not just process re-engineering

Building a new system  Is a planned organizational change  Conversion – Piloting – Phase out – In parallel – Cold turkey

Core activities in the system development process  System analysis  System design  Programming  Testing  Conversion  Production  Maintenance  System redesign

Systems Analysis  Stakeholders  Feasibility study – Technical feasibility – Economic feasibility – Operational feasibilty  Information requirement

Systems Design  Design specifications – Input, output – User interface – Database design – Processing – Manual operating procedures – Controls and security – Documentation – Conversion and training – Other indirect impacts and changes

Logical vs. physical design  Logical design lays out the components of the system and their relationship to each other as they would appear to users  Physical design actually translate logical design into a functioning system of people and machine.

Testing  Unit testing – conform to design  System testing – function as a whole  Acceptance testing – alpha version, beta version, gamma version, patchset

Conversion  Also called as migration or upgrade if it is from the same vendor  Parallel strategy  Direct cutover  Pilot study  Phased approach  documentation

Production and Maintenance  Test units and production units  Most companies hold two different systems for continuous improvement and maintenance on system

The traditional Systems Life Cycle  Used for medium or large complex system projects  It has six stages (next slide)  Has a formal division of labor  Formal sign-offs or agreements between end users and builders are required as each stage is completed

Stages of system lifecycle  Project definition  System study  Design  Programming  Installation  Post-implementation

End products of different stages of system lifecyle  Project proposal report  System proposal report  Design specifications  Program specifications – code  System performance tests  Post implementation audit

Limitations of the lifecycle approach  Costly, time consuming, and inflexible  It has to freeze specification and thus discourage changes after each stage is completed  Thus it inhibit system-builders from exploring and discovering the problem structure

Prototyping  Consists of building an experimental system rapidly and inexpensively for end users to evaluate  Thus, is best for extract users’ information requirements  It is an iterative process of system development

prototyping  Advantages – Good for requirement uncertainty – Good for extracting users’ idiosyncrasy like end-user interface – It encourages intense end-user involvement throughout the process

prototyping  Disadvantages – It could gloss over essential steps in systems development, that is, it may ignore full documentation and testing – It may prevent management from converting prototypes to a full production version

Application software packages  Is a set of prewritten, precoded application software programs that are commercially available for sale or lease  As simple as creating labels  As complicated as computer-aided design or computer-assisted manufacturing

Application software packages  Need to consider the amount of customization and reprogramming  When the need increases, the cost will also increase “exponentially”  The package evaluation process is based on requested for proposal (RFP)

End-User Development  There are many 4 th generation languages around  It is suitable for low processing and highly customized applications  It tends to create a localized data trap  Management should control the developments by incorporating them into its strategic system plans

Outsourcing  It becomes popular because of its cost effectiveness, eliminating the need of support, upgrade, and maintenance.  Due to control and competitiveness, outsource only those less critical and high cost routines such as payroll. (even in this function, there are some critical information functions)

Application Development for the Digital Firm  Critical Success Factors – Agility – Scalability  Organizations need to be able to add, change, and retire their technology capabilities very rapidly

Object-Oriented SW development  Reusable objects  Change from process oriented development methods to composition oriented development  Need to be able to build up a large object library

Rapid Application Development  Visual programming  Graphical user interfaces  Iterative prototyping  Assembled from prebuilt components

Web Services  Enable one application to communicate with another with no translation required  Microsoft has incorporated Web services tools in its.NET platform  An open “plug and play” architecture rather than a proprietary architecture

Standards / Protocols  XML – standard description of data in Web pages and databases  SOAP – simple object access protocol, allows applications to pass data and instructions to one another  WSDL – Web Services Description Language, allows a Web Services to be described  UDDI – Universal Description Discovery, and Integration, allows Web Services to be listed in a directory of Web Services so that it can be easily located