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

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

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

Investigating information systems analysts\u27 possession of tacit organisational knowledge

Outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) services which are central to business strategy may be risky. Managers have made the outsourcing decision both to concentrate financially on the core competencies and to rid themselves of a troublesome and cost inefficient department. More recent research has, however, cast doubt on the promises of huge savings. In this paper, we consider the likelihood that outsourcing may lead to the loss of organisational knowledge - that organisations outsourcing their total Information Systems operations may also have lost irreplaceable tacit, cross-functional knowledge which subsisted within the minds of the professional systems analysts. The findings of our research revealed that expert systems analysts possess a unique organisational understanding and draw on this knowledge to operate efficiently in their environment. We present a model that will allow future researchers to build on our findings and examine whether outsourcing can lead to a loss of organisational memory.<br /

Informal eCollaboration Channels: Shedding Light on “Shadow CIT”

There is some evidence of the unabated proliferation of employee-autonomous, informal in an enterprise sense, collaborative information technologies (CITs) to perform collaborative activities despite huge investments in CIT enterprise systems. This article will introduce the metaphorical construct of “shadow CIT” (similar to “shadow IT” – Raden, 2005; Schaffner, 2007) to describe the strategic choice to use autonomous CITs instead of formal enterprise CITs. “Shadow IT” has been defined by Raden (2005) as a set of IT tools used “for performing IT functions but not part of the mainstream IT organization” (p.1). Similarly, “shadow CIT” solutions are employee-autonomous: they are not implemented as part of the organisational IT infrastructure, neither have they received any targeted organisational investment. Several research questions are explored in this paper. The existence of “shadow IT” has been argued to imply a failure on the part of enterprise IT to provide all of the services to meet their users‟ needs. Does the existence of “shadow CIT” imply a failure of enterprise CITs of a similar kind? If shadow CITs are found to be [capable of] filling gaps within enterprise CITs, what kind of gaps are these? Often, without being able to articulate why, users appear to shun solutions and good architecture within enterprise CITs in favour of the ability to get their work done through autonomous “shadow” solutions. What kind of motivation may be driving such decisions

Issues in developing e-health systems: an Australian case study

Over the last few years, perceptions of the importance of eHealth have increased rapidly, together with the use of IS&amp;T in the delivery of health and social services. Although &ldquo;e&rdquo; approaches to health and social services have much potential, they are not panaceas, and the use of new technologies in improving the efficiency and effectiveness of such systems cannot be considered in isolation from their wider context. eHealth systems remain complex socio-organisational systems and, as we will argue and illustrate through this case study, require that a balanced approach to feasibility and desirability analysis be taken.The case study in this paper describes a feasibility study into the potential effectiveness of a smartdevice-based electronic data collection and payment system which was proposed for the provision of disability services. A key finding of the study was that the most significant impediment to such a system was the highly diffused, fragmented, interlocking organisational structure of the social service administration itself. Rather than raise issues specific to the implementation or diffusion of new technologies in designing e-health services, it raised issues associated with decision making and control in such an environment, and with the design of the underlying organisational system: for service provision, the level of detail required in the service data, and the locus of decision-making power among the stakeholders.In our account we illustrate the existence of multiple, incommensurate but valid perceptions of the human service provision problem, and discuss the implications for developers or managers of information systems in the arena of e-health or governance. We examine this environment from sociological and information systems perspectives, and confirm the usefulness of socio-organisational approaches in understanding such contexts.<br /