Gail Corbitt

Service Oriented Architecture: Challenges for Business and Academia

Today, the means for attaining competitive advantage with information technology (IT) has shifted from efficiently managing the organizations operations to discovering ways to collaborate with industry partners to provide products and services to markets that are otherwise uneconomical to pursue. Current IT challenges center on ways to integrate diverse systems into function rich business processes that span organizational boundaries. Though service oriented architecture (SOA) is poised to become a mainstream technology, its success may hinge on a meeting of the minds between the architects and developers of Web services and business process modelers who map out corporate requirements. This paper defines SOA, discusses how SOA relates to business process management, and provides an illustration of enterprise SOA applied in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) environment. The paper also describes how SOA motivates change in IT governance, enumerates the fundamentals of SOA success, and reflects on implications for IT education.

Integrating SAP R/3 into a College of Business curriculum: Lessons learned

In the Fall semester of 1996, California State University Chico was the first school in the U.S. to implement the SAP ERP system into its College of Business curriculum. While the effort so far has been very successful by almost any means of measurement, many challenges still remain. This paper presents the problems encountered by the college and the approaches taken to overcome these problems.Five major areas of concern are identified. They include:forming a faculty team and then getting them to agree on how the ERP system should be incorporated into the curriculum, including the order of introducing courses into the curriculum; acquiring adequate funding to support all of the resources needed to implement a system of this magnitude, including funding for equipment, faculty training, new teaching facilities, etc.; setting up a technical infrastructure and a corresponding support team to install, monitor and administrate the ERP systems; properly managing the recruiting activities of companies recruiting the students, and retaining the faculty that have SAP experience in a competitive market that offers financial rewards well in excess of academic salaries.All of these issues must be addressed to successfully implement an ERP system. However, our experience has been overwhelmingly successful and all of the hard work has had a significant academic return on our investment.

Program Assessment: Getting to a Practical How-To Model

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) Internationals assurance of learning (AoL) standards require that schools develop a sophisticated continuous-improvement process. The authors review various assessment models and develop a practical, 6-step AoL model based on the literature and the authors’ AoL-implementation experiences. The model creates a sound foundation for compliance with AACSB standards as well as regional accreditation and likely future assessment requirements. The authors present suggestions for successful implementation of each AoL step as well as cautions on possible pitfalls.

A comparison of team developmental stages, trust and performance for virtual versus face-to-face teams

This study is an empirical analysis that compares virtual with face-to-face teams on team trust, performance issues and team developmental stages. The study uses data collected both before teams were formed and after teams completed their project deliverable. Pre-task measures include individual disposition to trust and initial team trust. Upon completion of their deliverable, team members responded to post-task measures on motivation, team trust and teamwork dynamics. In addition to these attitudinal comparisons, we investigate how teams spent their time during the completion of their team task. We examine potential differences in the percentage of time spent in each of the classic team formation stages (forming, storming, norming and performing). Team members also reported the total time spent completing the deliverable as well as time spent using various communication tools. In addition, we evaluate and compare team performance in terms of the deliverable quality. Our results indicate that both virtual and face-to-face teams bring relatively high initial trust to the team experience. More enduring trust, however, must be maintained by positive, task-oriented team dynamics. Team mates need to meet work expectations in order to maintain the trusting environment. We confirm that trust is important to team performance for both virtual and face-to-face teams. Higher trust teams do tend to perform better. We also found that both virtual and face-to-face teams spend similar proportions of time in each team formation stage. Finally, there is no significant difference in results produced by face-to-face and virtual teams, though in this study the direction of effectiveness leans towards the virtual teams. This is potentially good news since many believe that face-to-face groups produce better results than their virtual counterparts.

Is business process integration feasible

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether business process integration is feasible.Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs a single case study strategy to research the aforementioned research question. The case study is exploratory.Findings – Based on the findings and within the context of the case organisation, it appears that enterprise application integration (EAI) technology can integrate business processes. However, since it is not possible to generalize from a single case study, further research is suggested to investigate this area. From the case study, it appears that EAI can easily integrate the business processes when it is combined with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.Research limitations/implications – This is a single case study and thus the results cannot be generalized.Practical implications – The empirical date suggest that organisations may combine ERP with EAI to integrate their business processes in a more flexible way.Originality/value – The cont...

New Approaches to Business Process Redesign: A Case Study of Collaborative Group Technology and Service Mapping

Whether it is called reengineering, quality function deployment, quality circles, continuous improvement or total quality management, business process redesign (BPR) is occurring in many organizations. In the broadest sense, BPR includes nearly any kind of systematic effort by companies to realign their business processes so that they are more competitive. Successful business process redesign can lead to dramatic improvements in productivity and quality. But BPR typically requires vast amounts of time and money to implement, since extensive employee input is necessary during the redesign process. Group Decision Support Software (GDSS) provides a viable alternative to the traditional BPR approach. GDSS is defined as “computer-based information systems used to support intelligent, collaborative work.”This technology allows multiple users to meet and discuss topics simultaneously via a computer network, thus increasing employee commitment while decreasing time and cost.This paper describes a business process redesign project that was conducted for a division within a large government agency fall of 1993. The BPR was done using a type of Group Decision Support Software called Group Systems V. A services marketing tool called service mapping was also used to identify customer needs and interfaces. Data were collected throughout the project to measure employee attitudes about the redesign process and the GroupSystems technology. Time to complete tasks was also recorded. The results of the study showed that the business process redesign was accomplished more effectively in a shorter period of time than with traditional BPR methods previously used. Participants also indicated that the service mapping tool provided a perspective that is missing from many BPR approaches: an understanding of the service from the customers perspective.

Groupware case studies: trust, commitment and the free expression of ideas

The use of teams and groups in the workplace continues to grow and trust and commitment to decisions remain desirable characteristics for team members. Group Support Software (GSS) or groupware software has been developed to automate the basic activities of group meetings and thus, help groups. This study combines the two sets of interests; specifically, it looks at the changes in trust and commitment to decisions exhibited by five teams using groupware. The data set was collected from five real‐world (federal, state and commercial) groups as they undertook their actual (Business Process Re‐engineering (BPR) and Joint Application Development (JAD)) projects using groupware. Using a case‐based research methodology, the data set was collected over a series of 41 meetings and organized around group characteristics such as commitment, trust, openness to express ideas, etc. The analysis hints at positive changes in desirable group characteristics over time when using GSS or groupware. However, the groupware characteristic of “more open expression of ideas” does not seem to be the source of the changes. Finally, based upon these findings, the authors suggest that GSS can impact the social components of a group as well as the production components but the cause of the impact resides deeper than a simple idea of providing an environment for more open expression of ideas.

ERP data archiving – a critical analysis

ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems run on top of database systems, like Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. The longer these systems are in place within organizations the larger the databases are. Some sources estimate that corporate databases double or triple in size every year. As these databases grow, performance, the time it takes to complete transactions, is adversely affected. This implies that limiting the amount of data stored on an ERP system is an essential element of proper storage and data management. However, removing data from an ERP system can be a complex and risky task. Archiving ERP data is an area of academic and professional research that has had minimal attention. This paper examines the issues and provides insight into solutions associated with archiving ERP data. The issues are explored by summarizing the limited background and research in the archiving area, followed by an overview of the methodology used to arrive at the case study approach used to gather the data. Case data are presented from three different large corporate environments and the results of the data are used to recommend an archiving strategy that other companies can follow. A discussion of the implications of the proposed archiving strategy for future use and research concludes the paper.

ERP/EAI System Issues and Answers: A Research Journey

Information Technology (IT) is being increasingly used to automate business processes at strategic, tactical and operational levels. However, traditionally these applications have not developed or been implemented in a coordinated way, but increasingly evolved as a result of technological innovation and business needs. As a result, the IT infrastructure in many organizations consists of autonomous and in many cases heterogeneous solutions that have often been unable to evolve with the business needs of the organization. The effect of this has caused various integration problems as applications can not co-operate, and disparate IT solutions can not be integrated together.

Project Progress Tracking Template — Using a Repeatable GSS Process to Facilitate Project Process Management

This article presents the findings of an action research study in which a repeatable GSS (Group Support System) process was adopted by project teams to track their progress. The repeatable GSS process, implemented by means of a GSS template, was employed and evaluated in both face-to-face and distributed group interactions. The study results indicate that use of a GSS template can facilitate project progress tracking by providing structural support for team interaction and serving as an electronic repository or permanent memory of team interaction. The results also suggest that existing GSS software could be improved though various feature enhancements and additions.