Innovation in Information Systems Education-III Sourcing Management - A Course in the Information Systems Curriculum

The growth in information technology (IT) outsourcing and offshoring redefined the role of the IT manager. The IT professional today is expected to possess many skills besides technical expertise; the IT management job now includes administering contracts and managing relationships across cultures. This article describes a graduate course that was developed to help the IT professional achieve the required knowledge and skills to perform in these new roles. The course addresses various aspects of IT sourcing including sourcing strategies, sourcing options, contract types, stakeholder perceptions, and the sourcing life cycle

Information Systems Skills Differences between High-Wage and Low-Wage Regions: Implications for Global Sourcing

Developing Information Systems (IS) skills for a company’s workforce has always been challenging, but global sourcing growth has caused the determination of needed IS skills to be more complex. The increased use of outsourcing to an IS service provider and from high-wage regions to low-wage regions has affected what IS skills are required globally and how to distribute the workforce to meet these needs. To understand what skills are needed in locations that seek and those that provide outsourcing, we surveyed IS service provider managers in global locations. Results from 126 reporting units provide empirical evidence that provider units in low-wage regions value technical skills more than those in high-wage regions. Despite the emphasis on commodity skills in low-wage areas, high- and low-wage providers value project management skills. Low-wage regions note global and virtual teamwork more than high-wage regions do. The mix of skills and the variation by region have implications for domestic and offshore sourcing. Service providers can vary their staffing models in global regions which has consequences for recruiting, corporate training, and curriculum

Actionable Supply Chain Management Insights for 2016 and Beyond

The summit World Class Supply Chain 2016: Critical to Prosperity , contributed to addressing a need that the Supply Chain Management (SCM) field’s current discourse has deemed as critical: that need is for more academia-­‐industry collaboration to develop the field’s body of actionable knowledge. Held on May 4th, 2016 in Milton, Ontario, the summit addressed that need in a way that proved to be both effective and distinctive in the Canadian SCM environment. The summit, convened in partnership between Wilfrid Laurier University’s Lazaridis School of Business & Economics and CN Rail, focused on building actionable SCM knowledge to address three core questions: What are the most significant SCM issues to be confronted now and beyond 2016? What SCM practices are imperative now and beyond 2016? What are optimal ways of ensuring that (a) issues of interest to SCM practitioners inform the scholarly activities of research and teaching and (b) the knowledge generated from those scholarly activities reciprocally guide SCM practice? These are important questions for supply chain professionals in their efforts to make sense of today’s business environment that is appropriately viewed as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The structure of the deliberations to address these questions comprised two keynote presentations and three panel discussions, all of which were designed to leverage the collective wisdom that comes from genuine peer-­‐to-­‐peer dialogue between the SCM practitioners and SCM scholars. Specifically, the structure aimed for a balanced blend of industry and academic input and for coverage of the SCM issues of greatest interest to attendees (as determined through a pre-­‐summit survey of attendees). The structure produced impressively wide-­‐ranging deliberations on the aforementioned questions. The essence of the resulting findings from the summit can be distilled into three messages: Given today’s globally significant trends such as changes in population demographics, four highly impactful levers that SCM executives must expertly handle to attain excellence are: collaboration; information; technology; and talent Government policy, especially for infrastructure, is a significant determinant of SCM excellence There is tremendous potential for mutually beneficial industry-academia knowledge co-creation/sharing aimed at research and student training This white paper reports on those findings as well as on the summit’s success in realizing its vision of fostering mutually beneficial industry-academia dialogue. The paper also documents what emerged as matters that are inadequately understood and should therefore be targeted in the ongoing quest for deeper understanding of actionable SCM insights. Deliberations throughout the day on May 4th, 2016 and the encouraging results from the pre-­‐summit and post-­‐summit surveys have provided much inspiration to enthusiastically undertake that quest. The undertaking will be through initiatives that include future research projects as well as next year’s summit–World Class Supply Chain 2017

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

OPTIMIZING PERFORMANCE OF THE MARINE CORPS FOR OPERATIONS IN THE INFORMATION ENVIRONMENT

The operating concepts and structure of the Marine Expeditionary Force Information Groups (MIG) evolved constantly over the first four years of its existence. To professionalize the Marine Corps approach to the Information Maneuver field, it recently developed new 17XX Marine Occupational Fields. The primary areas of focus will be command structure, manpower sourcing, training, and operational goals for the MIG. How the Marine Corps sources its manpower for the 17XX Occupational Field and Information Maneuver in general is a crucial piece to its success. The level and quality of training, the types of recruits screened, and the culture subsequently created will be as important to the Marine Corps' success as the equipment it fields. There are many steps required to develop a professional and innovative force that leads from the front in Innovation Maneuver. By reviewing the current Information Operations billets in the Marine Corps, the recent changes to the 17XX field, and best practices from across the military and private sector alike, this thesis seeks to provide recommendations to optimize future training and performance of information operations Marines. Specifically, this thesis suggests courses of action for Skill Enhancement Courses, greater foreign-language involvement in influence operations training, talent retention refinement, and publication of new warfighting and training publications to standardize Information Maneuver across the force.Captain, United States Marine CorpsApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Bringing Global Sourcing into the Classroom: Lessons from an Experiential Software Development Project

Global sourcing of software development has imposed new skill requirements on Information Technology (IT) personnel. In the U.S., this has resulted in a paradigm shift from technical to softer skills such as communications and virtual team management. Higher education institutions must, consequently, initiate innovative curriculum transformations to better prepare students for these emerging workforce needs. This paper describes one such venture between MU, U.S.A. and MDI, India, wherein IT students at MU collaborated with Management Information Systems (MIS) students at MDI on an offshore software development project. The class environment replicated an offshore client/vendor relationship in a fully virtual setting while integrating communications and virtual team management with traditional IT project management principles. Course measures indicated that students benefited from this project, gained first-hand experience in the process of software offshoring, and learned skills critical for conduct of global business. For faculty considering such initiatives, we describe the design and administration of this class over two semesters, lessons learned from our engagement, and factors critical to success of such initiatives and those detrimental to their sustenance

Revising Undergraduate IS Model Curriculum: New Outcome Expectations

This paper outlines and further specifies the key points articulated in an IS Model Curriculum panel presentation at the Americas Conference for Information Systems (AMCIS) 2008. This presentation centered on the major changes to the IS Model Curriculum that is currently being proposed by the joint Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Association for Information Systems (AIS) task force. The goal of this task force is to provide the first major revision of the IS model curriculum since IS ’97. The major modifications to the IS Model Curriculum involve: 1) reaching beyond the business school to include programs housed in other parts of the university (e.g., health informatics); 2) revising the outcome expectations for the IS graduates and proposing subsequent changes to the curriculum topics; 3) revising the curriculum structure by separating the curriculum core from the elective topics; and 4) involving and making relevant the model curriculum to the global IS community. Also, this paper summarizes the key components to the restructuring of the IS Model Curriculum: high-level organizational needs for IS capabilities and graduate knowledge and skills. Finally, future steps in the curriculum revision process are discussed

Developing a supply chain management certification for the Department of Defense

MBA Professional ReportThe purpose of this project is to develop a Supply Chain Management (SCM) certification within the Department of Defense (DoD). The report provides background information on certification and SCM. This report defines SCM and describes some potential benefits of SCM for the DoD. The report discusses what the DoD will gain from a formal SCM certification program that could be outsourced to civilian universities or provided by organizations within the Defense Acquisition University (DAU) consortium. Lastly, the report will provide an initial proposal of what the curriculum could look like based on an analysis of current graduate level SCM curricula at leading U.S. universities.http://archive.org/details/developingsupply1094510200Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Sustainable eLearning in a Changing Landscape: A Scoping Study (SeLScope)

The report begins by exploring the concept of sustainable e-learning - defining it and establishing its characteristics in the context of Higher Education. To ensure a sound and systematic process, the review is informed by a five-phase methodological framework for scoping reviews by Arksey and O'Malley (2005). Examples and perspectives on the concept of sustainable e-learning are summarised and key factors impacting on sustainability are abstracted. highlights potential gaps and suggests directions for further research on the topic

The adoption of open sources within higher education in Europe : a dissemination case study

For some time now, the open-source (OS) phenomenon has been making its presence felt; disrupting the economics of the software industry and, by proxy, the business of education. A combination of the financial pressure Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) find themselves under and the increasing focus on the use of technology to enhance students' learning have encouraged many HEIs to look towards alternative approaches to teaching and learning. Meanwhile, the "OS" has challenged assumptions about how intellectual products are created and protected and has greatly increased the quantity and arguably the quality of educational technologies available to HEIs