Donald McDermid

Issues and recommendations in evaluating and managing the benefits of public sector IS/IT outsourcing

Purpose – The main purpose of this paper is threefold: to understand public‐sector outsourcing in Australia; to examine the linkage between IS/IT outsourcing and the use of evaluation methodologies; and to identify issues that are critical in evaluating and managing IS/IT outsourcing contracts in public‐sector organizations.Design/methodology/approach – A survey of the top 500 Australian organizations and two in‐depth case studies of two Australian public‐sector organizations were conducted.Findings – Several key issues for IS/IT outsourcing were identified – problems in evaluating outsourcing contracts, embedded contract mentality, ability to manage contracts, and staff transition management.Practical implications – Outsourcing organizations need to implement changes carefully and assess their in‐house capabilities. They also need to fully understand and apply the IS/IT investment evaluation and benefits realization processes. In order to reach the magnitude of improvements ascribed to IS/IT outsourcing ...

Integrated business process management: using state-based business rules to communicate between disparate stakeholders

We need to put more emphasis on managing the communication between different types of stakeholders and in particular we need to use diagrammatic constructs that support that communication process. This paper describes a state-based approach to capturing business rules that has been tested with different stakeholders in several business process applications. The examples provided in this paper show the benefits of using this notation as a means of communicating between three different groups of stakeholders.

Factors Affecting the Sustainability of Computer Information Systems: Embedding New Information Technology into a Hospital Environment

This study explores the issues and barriers to developing a sustainable system for the collection of quality of life data in hospitals. A set of sustainability factors was identified and tested in a study that introduced tablet computers to collect questionnaires from cancer patients. These factors are considered a good starting point for practitioners and researchers to use in other IT contexts if they wish to develop sustainable information systems.