The IS History Initiative: Looking Forward by Looking Back

After officially appointing an AIS historian and forming the AIS history task force at the beginning of 2013, the AIS supported a set of systematic efforts, named IS history initiative, to preserve and represent the IS field’s history. From the perspective of the first AIS historian, I provide some background for the IS history initiative. Then I outline a detailed strategic plan and current status of its implementation. Ultimately, the IS history initiative has three goals: (1) to collect, represent, and preserve the IS field’s history; (2) to interpret, write, disseminate, and review the IS field’s history; and (3) to discover/identify IS genealogy, roots, sources, and facets that deserve to be examined from a historical point of view. Correspondingly, the strategic plan contains three parts. Each part has several specific tasks, many of which were already completed at the time of this writing, and several are either in progress or are planned for future efforts. This paper overviews both current efforts and guiding future efforts related to preserving and representing IS history

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

Improving usability outcomes in IS projects: the views of usability practitioners

What are the key aspects to achieving acceptable usability outcomes for information systems being developed? The changing technologies and increased usage across the general population, the impacts of this in our everyday lives, at work and at leisure are exponentially increasing. The interfaces and interaction styles presented as part of these technologies have been challenged to be more intuitive, contextually sensitive, location aware, human centred and aimed at a larger community of stakeholders. Performing usability activities is an increasingly important part of the development of new technologies, applications and websites. This study examined, for Information System projects, what were the key aspects that impacted on the usability outcome of developing Information Systems. This study presents a theory that describes how projects can improve their usability outcomes. This has emerged from interviews with experienced usability practitioners currently working in the usability industry. The transcripts from the qualitative interviews were analysed using a grounded theory methodology, which was an inductive and interpretive process in nature. The result of this analysis produced twenty-seven key concepts. These concepts were compared and contrasted against the literature. The theory that emerged consists of four major themes that included: usability mindset, collaborative approach, project constraints and usability practice. The key contribution to knowledge is the relationship concept between these themes. This is the nurturing of the usability mindset for the project stakeholders through involvement in usability activities throughout the project lifecycle. This engagement provides opportunities to elicit, understand and concord the usability goals, project constraints and the technological limitations with project stakeholders. The involvement of all project stakeholders promotes usability value and acceptance, which ideally progresses to a shared usability vision for the project and ultimately a usability mindset that can be utilised beyond a specific project and across an organisation

Spring 2006 Vol. 9 No. 1

https://surface.syr.edu/ischool_news/1006/thumbnail.jp

Business process modelling in ERP implementation literature review

Business processes are the backbone of any Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation. Business process modelling (BPM) has become essential for modern, process driven enterprises due to the vibrant business environments. As a consequence enterprises are dealing with a substantial rate of organizational and business processes change. Business process modelling enables a common understanding and analysis of the business processes, which is the first step in every ERP implementation methodology (blueprint phase). In order to represent enterprise processes models in an accurate manner, it is paramount to choose a right business process modeling technique and tool. The problem of many ERP projects rated as unsuccessful is directly connected to a lack of use of business process models and notations during the blueprint phase. Also, blueprint implementation phase is crucial in order to fit planned processes in an organization with processes implemented in the solution. However, business analysts and ERP implementation professionals have substantial difficulties to navigate through a large number of theoretical models and representational notations that have been proposed for business process modeling (BPM). As the availability of different business process modeling references is huge, it is time consuming to make review and classification of all modeling techniques. Therefor, in reality majority of ERP implementations blueprint documents have no business process modeling included in generating blueprint documents. Choosing the right model comprise the purpose of the analysis and acquaintance of the available process modelling techniques and tools. The number of references on business modelling is quit large, so it is very hard to make a decision which modeling notation or technique to use. The main purpose of this paper is to make a review of business process modelling literature and describe the key process modelling techniques. The focus will be on all business process modeling that could be used in ERP implementations, specifically during the blueprint phase of the implementation process. Detailed review of BPM (Business process modeling) theoretical models and representational notations, should assist decision makers and ERP integrators in comparatively evaluating and selecting suitable modeling approaches

A conceptual framework for capability sourcing modeling

Companies need to acquire the right capabilities from the right source, and the right shore, at the right cost to improve their competitive position. Capability sourcing is an organizing process to gain access to best-in-class capabilities for all activities in a firm's value chain to ensure long-term competitive advantage. Capability sourcing modeling is a technique that helps investigating sourcing alternative solutions to facilitate strategic sourcing decision making. Our position is applying conceptual models as intermediate artifacts which are schematic descriptions of sourcing alternatives based on organization's capabilities. The contribution of this paper is introducing a conceptual framework in the form of five views (to organize all perspectives) and a conceptualisation (to formulate a language) for capability sourcing modelling

The creation of business architecture heat maps to support strategy-aligned organizational decisions

The realization of strategic alignment within the business architecture has become increasingly important for companies. Indeed, it facilitates business-IT alignment as a well-designed business architecture helps both to identify the appropriate requirements for IT systems and to discover new business opportunities that can be realized by IT. However, there is a lack of alignment techniques that support organizational (re) design decisions during the operation phase as the actual performance of business architecture elements is neglected. Capability heat maps provide a useful starting point in this respect as they focus on the creation of a hierarchy of prioritized capabilities, which are characterized by a performance measure. In this paper, these techniques will be extended to support strategy-aligned decisions within the business architecture. The identification of the relevant business architecture elements is based on state-of-the-art enterprise modelling languages, which enable the development of enterprise models on distinct layers of the business architecture. Strategic alignment between these elements will be realized by using prioritization according to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), while performance measurement will enable the creation of a proper decision support system. Afterwards, the proposed heat map will be applied on a case example to illustrate its potential use. This results in the completion of a first build-and-evaluate loop within the Design Science methodology

Meeting point of strategy and operations: tactical management sense and response framework enhancement

We recognize a problem of work overload in every managerial position nowadays. This is complemented with data overload, and still somehow, information inadequacy. We recognize the problem of rather clear strategic or business plan expectations and inability to meet them. We also recognize the problem of complexity of issues every manager has to deal with in all of their diversity. All of these elements persisting in an uncertain and unpredictable environment of today's business, technology and economy, where planning is trading places with structuring, modularizing and preparing oneself in being adaptive to any given circumstances, especially in terms of tactics, denote longing for multidimensional support. There are various efforts and products to automatize and enrich the data in order to give basis for better decision-making and problem solving. Also, there are frameworks to formalize and verbalize the strategic or business plan expectations and targets with respective performance measurement in order to point out the direction where a business unit/company should be headed. And quite a lot is being done on a subject-specific areas such as: Alignment of IT and Strategy, Business Operations and Strategy,. But the perceived "boiling" zone of tactical management is somehow un-addressed, both in theory and with feasible artifacts. Tactical Management as the managerial function that implements strategies and deploys and utilizes specific resources from the operational level in order to gain that specific advantage prescribed in the strategy has both differentiating and uniting characteristics when compared to operations and strategy. Furthermore, if standing in the shoes of a tactical manager, what one will see as work description, will be overwhelming crossroads of unmatched information flows in structure, depths, sources, manners, complexity, timings, and expectations. How to perceive, organize, handle and utilize all that landscape with what is given, and be able to handle it dynamically, appropriately and with least expenditures, is what we are aiming for. It's neither straightforward, nor an easy, automated task. For anyone. It is both company-and person-dependent task. This research focuses on tactical management, from the perspective of the individual manager. We believe that by Enhancing the Sense-and-Respond Framework on a tactical level we will assist the individual tactical manager with increased adaptability and handling complexity