INTEGRATING EDI INTO THE ORGANIZATION\u27S SYSTEMS: A MODEL OF THE STAGES OF iNTEGRATION

The growing importance of Electronic Data Interchange for the rapid transmission of intra- and interorganizational communications is becoming widely recognized. EDI itself is little more than a faster mail service: it is the opportunity to integrate EDI with internal application systems and organizational functions which separates it from other forms of electronic telecommunications - and makes EDI a truly strategic application, offering comparative advantage at the organizational national and international levels. This paper discusses the results of a series of case studies of Australian organizations involved with EDI, undertaken to determine whether integration with internal application systems can be defined as a series of comparatively standard and recurring stages. The results of the analysis indicate that while such integration does, indeed, occur in a relatively standard manner for a large class of EDI-using organizations, there are also three other classes of organization for each of which a different model is appropriate. Although these additional classes are small in terms of the number of organizations of which they are composed, they are significant in terms of their importance and influence on industry in general and on EDI penetration in particular

Understanding requirements engineering process: a challenge for practice and education

Reviews of the state of the professional practice in Requirements Engineering (RE) stress that the RE process is both complex and hard to describe, and suggest there is a significant difference between competent and "approved" practice. "Approved" practice is reflected by (in all likelihood, in fact, has its genesis in) RE education, so that the knowledge and skills taught to students do not match the knowledge and skills required and applied by competent practitioners. A new understanding of the RE process has emerged from our recent study. RE is revealed as inherently creative, involving cycles of building and major reconstruction of the models developed, significantly different from the systematic and smoothly incremental process generally described in the literature. The process is better characterised as highly creative, opportunistic and insight driven. This mismatch between approved and actual practice provides a challenge to RE education - RE requires insight and creativity as well as technical knowledge. Traditional learning models applied to RE focus, however, on notation and prescribed processes acquired through repetition. We argue that traditional learning models fail to support the learning required for RE and propose both a new model based on cognitive flexibility and a framework for RE education to support this model

MASTERS IN SOCIAL WORK STUDENT AND PROFESSOR UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE CONNECTEDNESS OF SOCIAL WORK AND PUBLIC HEALTH IN EDUCATION AND PRACTICE

The purpose of this study is to understand Masters in Social Work (MSW) student and professor perspectives on the connectedness of public health and social work, and inquire about their opinions of barriers and facilitators to further merging these two areas in practice and education. The study was formulated on the knowledge that social well being directly impacts health outcomes, and public health and social work share many target objectives and populations. The study implements a qualitative design using face to face interviews with five advanced year MSW students, and two MSW professors at California State University, San Bernardino. The key findings include the shared sentiment that the connection between public health and social work is under discussed in masters level education, and the majority opinion within the sample group that our education could benefit from bringing in professionals or speakers with backgrounds in public health. Interdisciplinarity in higher education has the potential to better prepare social workers to recognize and address the unique challenges faced by our client population, and advocate for systemic reform

Travelling North: The Differing Research Cultures of Australia and Germany

Summary: This invited paper discusses the discipline of Information Systems in Australia and German. Initially it describes the wide differences between the two academic cultures, endeavouring to identify the causes of these differences, as well as their implications. It then discusses the ways in which these two cultures handle the teaching of Information Systems and finally discusses the similarities and differences of the I.S. research cultures in Australia and Germany.<br /

Managing the requirements engineering process

Process management is a crucial issue in developing information or computer systems. Theories of software development process management suggest that the process should be supported and managed based on what the process really is. However, our learning from an action research study reveals that the requirements engineering (RE) process differs significantly from what the current literature tends to describe. The process is not a systematic, smooth and incremental evolution of the requirements model, but involves occasional simplification and restructuring of the requirements model. This revised understanding of the RE process suggests a new challenge to both the academic and industrial communities, demanding new process management approaches. In this paper, we present our understanding of the RE process and its implications for process management.<br /

Rigour vs. Relevance in IS Research: Perspectives from IS and the Reference Disciplines

We in the Information Systems community often describe our discipline as being of an inherently applied nature. Whether one fully accepts this description or not, what is clear is that the academic IS community faces significant pressure from government, commerce and industry to assist to resolve urgent problems which they face “in the real world”. A community desire for research which might be commercialised is not, of course, restricted to the IS domain—we see similar needs in medicine and engineering, for example. Information Systems is, however, uniquely placed in the following combination of respects: · Low level of development of fundamental theoretic advances · Rapid rate of change of the enabling technology · High relative contribution of the commercial sector to innovations which are similar to those sourced from academe · Rapidly increasing pervasion of Information Technology (and the consequent pervasion of IS need) within Commerce, Government and Society generally · High visibility These characteristics, together with the inherently multidisciplinary nature of Information Systems and the wide range of backgrounds of IS academics have combined to influence the character of research within the discipline. Although the Chair and Panelists now all perceive themselves as members of the Information Systems Community, their backgrounds are diverse. Three members come directly from an IS/Business Administration background, while the other three founded their careers, variously in Software Engineering, Sociology and Psychology. Paul Swatman, in his role as the session chair, will briefly introduce the topic and establish the importance of a multidisciplinary debate. Next, each of the panelists will make a short presentation. The panel members will outline their perspectives on the topic, by reference to their own backgrounds and, where appropriate, by reference to the corresponding debate in their parent discipline. The panelists will illustrate their views with examples and by comparison with the reference disciplines. The diversity of the panelists’ backgrounds itself offers a basis for considerable debate although the format allows significant time for interactions with the audience

Sustainable knowledge management systems: integration, personalisation and contextualisation

Many knowledge management (KM) systems have proven unsustainable to date, exhibiting low quantities and quality of knowledge, with systems falling into disuse. In this paper, we provide and explore a model for sustainable KM systems, focusing on the advantages to be gained from integrating knowledge work with everyday work practices, and enabling sensemaking through personalisation and contextualisation. We employ a discourse analysis of email as an exemplar of a sustainable KM system, thereby identifying a number of key characteristics for sustainable KM systems. Our model for sustainable KM systems adds to existing KM theory and, more immediately, assists companies by providing an understandingof the kinds of characteristics likely to make KM systems more effective, and sustainable in the long term.<br /

Virtual Worlds: The Role of Rooms and Avatars in Virtual Teamwork

Recently, virtual worlds have excited the interest of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) researchers, as potential formal and informal meeting environments for virtual teams. We report an action research study of a locally distributed team of researchers using a dedicated environment within the virtual world Second Life to support their collaboration. We investigate, here, the benefits, challenges and opportunities of virtual worlds as collaboration tools. We found that effective collaboration can take place in virtual worlds but that, in respect of synchronous collaboration, there appears little additional value in the 3D spaces and avatars of virtual worlds over more traditional video-conferencing, The results suggest that the specific benefits of virtual worlds do not fully come into play in a synchronous teamwork context, but there is some evidence of value over longer periods of collaboration – support for projects – and for the looser collaborations which typify communities