Business Process Elicitation, Modeling, and Reengineering: Teaching and Learning with Simulated Environments

The design of enterprise information systems requires students to master technical skills for elicitation, modeling, and reengineering business processes as well as soft skills for information gathering and communication. These tacit skills and behaviors cannot be effectively taught students but rather experienced and learned by students. This requires a pedagogical shift from teacher-centered teaching approaches towards learner-centered teaching approaches that invite students to more actively participate in the learning experience, and to acquire and enhance such technical and soft skills. This paper introduces “simulated environment” – a combination of role-playing activities to simulate organizational activities and several skills development activities to hone technical and soft skills – as a pedagogical tool in the learner-centered teaching paradigm that immerses students in a controlled learning environment which enables them to more clearly appreciate various aspects related to systems design, business processes, and information sharing, and to acquire and develop the necessary skills

Diffusion of Complex Information Systems across Organizations

Organizations deal with complex information systems innovations such as enterprise resource planning systems to enable and support their operations. While there is considerable research on organizations’ adoption, implementation, and use of such complex information systems, prior literature has not dwelt as much on the diffusion or the spread of such complex information systems across a population of organizations. A limited number of studies have shown different information sources such as external, internal, and mixed influences to drive diffusion, and found variations in the diffusion patterns of different complex information systems. These findings, however, belong to different populations and do not account for organizational or technology characteristics that may be influential in diffusion. This study seeks to expand our understanding by examining the diffusion of several complex information systems within the same population of S&P-500 organizations between 1990 and 2008 by modeling different influence mechanisms and employing event-history analysis

The Effect of Influence Tactics and Contingency Factors on the Adoption and Diffusion of IS/IT Innovations in Social Networks

Despite considerable research on the adoption and diffusion of information systems (IS)/ information technology (IT) innovations by individuals in organizations, very little is known about the processes underlying the adoption of innovations, and how those processes contribute to the diffusion and assimilation of innovations within organizations. Viewing processes as sequences of actions, this research conducted two studies to: a) uncover the adoption and influence processes employed by individuals, and b) identify the factors that influence diffusion and assimilation within social networks. The first study, situated at the individual level, involved field interviews with 27 individuals from ten organizations in a large mid-western city in the United States. Three categories of actions were identified from the interview data: contextual actions, influencer actions, and adopter (pre-adoption) actions. The actions from each interview were used to construct two sequences (for adoption and influence), which were then examined using optimal matching and cluster analysis. Taxonomies of three adoption processes (Conscious Quest, Requisite Compliance, and Piloted Trial) and three influence processes (Directed Assistance, Queried Disclosure, and Logical Persuasion) were empirically developed. These processes provide insights into the adoption of innovations by individuals. The second study, situated at the network level, involved an agent-based simulation. Building on the field interviews, the simulation modeled the behaviors of individuals within 5000 networks adopting multi-feature IS/IT innovations over 50 time periods. Cross-sectional time-series analyses of the resulting data supported 13 of the 20 hypotheses, and revealed that: a) diffusion was facilitated by: a centralized organization structure, an individualistic cultural orientation, and all three actions, b) assimilation was facilitated by: a centralized organization structure and an individualistic cultural orientation during the early periods but by a decentralized organization structure and a collectivistic cultural orientation during the later periods, and c) all three actions facilitated assimilation in the early periods but only contextual and adopter actions influenced assimilation during the later periods. Overall, this study yielded insights into the diffusion and assimilation of innovations within networks. Together, the two studies provided insights into the complex processes by which individuals within networks adopt IS/IT innovations with multiple features

Pedagogy for Business Analytics Courses

Responding to the industry need for professionals to employ data-driven decision-making, educational institutions offer courses in business analytics (BA). Since BA professionals require a unique set of skills different from those found in specific business disciplines, a pedagogical framework to impart such knowledge and skills was developed. The framework encompasses multiple stages related to data – acquisition, preparation, analysis, visualization, and interpretation – and provides an end-to-end learning experience for students. It enables students to gain related knowledge and skills including Python scripting, data cleansing, statistical modeling, visualization, and interpretation, which provide a solid foundation for professional endeavors in BA

Measuring the business value of IT: simplify with caution

Firms should not use single performance or IT metrics, excluding the context, write Rajiv Sabherwal and Anand Jeyara

Embedding Robotic Process Automation into Process Management: Case Study of using taskt

XYZ Company routinely faced penalties imposed by the United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for non-compliance in depositing federal withholding taxes related to the managed benefits plans for its clients. Since the rules for depositing the federal taxes were complex and differed between the benefits plans, it was common for XYZ Company to accrue penalties imposed by the IRS. Desiring to eliminate penalties by complying 100% with the IRS guidelines, XYZ Company considered various solutions. Finally, XYZ Company implemented a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution using the open source tool—taskt—to achieve 100% compliance in depositing federal withholding taxes and eliminate penalties. Discussion of solution improvements, reflection and next steps, technical challenges, lessons learned, and design science retrospective is provided

An Exploration of Timing of Online Surveys on Response Characteristics

This paper conducts a study of responses of a web-based survey of opinion contributors to Amazon.com to explore contextual characteristics of the responses. These include the early versus cumulative response rates, best times to receive a survey request, best times to broadcast a survey request, coordination of the delays before response for different broadcast times. The survey is broadcasted every hour over a 24 hour period to account for respondents differing time zones. This research therefore purports to answer the questions that are often significant to quantitative researchers who need to optimize their data collection based on their needs. For instance: When do most respondents respond? How long do they wait before doing so? What would be the best time to send out a survey so that the email does not get deprioritized for later? Does this time differ for the highest cumulative response rate

Traditional and Modern Methodologies in ERP Systems Implementation Using Microsoft Dynamics-GP

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems implementation is typically viewed as a customization or an integration effort to fit an organization’s business processes or existing systems. However, ERP systems implementation may also be considered as a lifecycle from inception to completion, which is likely to benefit from the use of formal systems development methodologies, including traditional methodologies (e.g. Systems Development Life Cycle, and Object Oriented Analysis and Design) and modern methodologies (e.g. Extreme Programming, and SCRUM). This research examines the use of systems development methodologies in ERP implementations and the extent to which such methodologies aid the successful implementation of ERP systems. The findings are based on reports by multiple project teams adopting different methodologies in implementing Microsoft Dynamics –GP -based ERP systems for real-world organizations

The Bass Model of Diffusion: Recommendations for Use in Information Systems Research and Practice

The Bass Model (TBM), first introduced in 1969, has been used in several fields – including sociology, economics, marketing, and communication studies – to understand diffusion of products and innovations, but has received limited attention in information systems (IS) research and practice. TBM views diffusion as occurring through a combination of innovation (p) and imitation (q). Innovation and imitation describe the extents to which influences external to the population and influences internal to the population respectively affect diffusion. To encourage and enable greater use of TBM in IS research and practice, we describe an application process for using TBM and illustrate potential applications of TBM