Beyond enterprise resource planning projects: innovative strategies for competitive advantage

ABSTRACT A rapidly changing business environment and legacy IT problems has resulted in many organisations implementing standard package solutions. This 'common systems' approach establishes a common IT and business process infrastructure within organisations and its increasing dominance raises several important strategic issues. These are to what extent do common systems impose common business processes and management systems on competing firms, and what is the source of competitive advantage if the majority of firms employ almost identical information systems and business processes? A theoretical framework based on research into legacy systems and earlier IT strategy literature is used to analyse three case studies in the manufacturing, chemical and IT industries. It is shown that the organisations are treating common systems as the core of their organisations' abilities to manage business transactions. To achieve competitive advantage they are clothing these common systems with information systems designed to capture information about competitors, customers and suppliers, and to provide a basis for sharing knowledge within the organisation and ultimately with economic partners. The importance of these approaches to other organisations and industries is analysed and an attempt is made at outlining the strategic options open to firms beyond the implementation of common business systems

Focus Issue on Legacy Information Systems and Business Process Change: Introduction

This editorial is an introduction to a focus issue on legacy information systems research that has been conducted under the aegis of the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) research programme into systems engineering and business process change. An overview of the legacy information systems problem is presented in terms of its scale, definition, and relevance to practicing managers and academics. It is shown that legacy systems represent a critical area of study in both software engineering and strategic information systems. The legacy system issues include the software methods and costs of maintaining and evolving existing systems, the technical problems of migrating complex legacy systems to new technology, and the difficulties of designing and implementing novel business processes in the context of existing structures, strategies and systems. In addition to the problems associated with legacy systems, the strategic opportunities of exploiting legacy systems are also outlined. Six related papers, which together cover the identification of the problem, planning and modelling of change, and the implementation of new systems and business processes, are described

Seeking the Goal in the Process, the Process for the Goal: Organizational Learning in a Public Sector Change Project

This paper describes how a combination of process modelling and goal modelling techniques has been used to facilitate organizational learning. The case study comes from the public sector in the UK. The modelling techniques have helped users to rationalise about the existing processes and then to design how they would like the process to work. The paper describes how the users have been able to confront the complex issues involved. The experience suggests that the combination of the modelling techniques is important to the learning experience of the users involved

Investigating the flow of organisational obstinacy in collaborative balanced scorecard : an ethnographic action research in public service

Developing a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) for a network of public-private institutions requires interdependent connectivity and information sharing to set commonly agreed performance standards. Such a Collaborative BSC (CBSC) reflects a high degree of socially constructed organizational values, rules, and procedures. In doing so, organizational changes take place to reach to equilibriums among varying (sometimes conflicting) organizational powers. Our research tends to draw a deep understanding of the systemic nature of organizational obstinacy that shapes the success of organizational a change and raises contested values in the provision of public services. The evidence of our findings has been drawn from the local councils in the Metville region that recorded low performance in their public service delivery. The change actors in this project are a team of public-private executives who were responsible for developing an inclusive CBSC where different stakeholder groups contribute to the perceived performance. The above mentioned area of concern raises two research questions that led our research:The first question is; “How organisational obstinacy evolves in organisations undertaking major change for CBSC?” This quest helps map the events of inter-dependencies in Metville’s change programme and identify the extent to which a conceptual understanding of the need to change is or is not shared. The second question is; “What is the impact of organisational obstinacy on the change dynamics associated with building the CBSC?” Answering such a question helps in identifying the dual (positive & negative) impact of organisational obstinacy on the organisational change and its dynamics. It sheds the light on organisational obstinacy as values- laden as well as a restraining factor. Answering these two questions led to three levels of contribution; Theoretical, Methodological, and Practical

Defining user perception of distributed multimedia quality

This article presents the results of a study that explored the human side of the multimedia experience. We propose a model that assesses quality variation from three distinct levels: the network, the media and the content levels; and from two views: the technical and the user perspective. By facilitating parameter variation at each of the quality levels and from each of the perspectives, we were able to examine their impact on user quality perception. Results show that a significant reduction in frame rate does not proportionally reduce the user's understanding of the presentation independent of technical parameters, that multimedia content type significantly impacts user information assimilation, user level of enjoyment, and user perception of quality, and that the device display type impacts user information assimilation and user perception of quality. Finally, to ensure the transfer of information, low-level abstraction (network-level) parameters, such as delay and jitter, should be adapted; to maintain the user's level of enjoyment, high-level abstraction quality parameters (content-level), such as the appropriate use of display screens, should be adapted

In search of a model for assessing CRM demand in the government context

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