Marc N. Haines

Implementation Partner Involvement and Knowledge Transfer in the Context of ERP Implementations

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are difficult and costly to implement. Studies show that a large portion of the overall implementation cost can be attributed to consulting fees. Indeed, hardly any organization has the internal knowledge and skills to implement an ERP system successfully without external help. Therefore, it becomes crucial to use consultants effectively to improve the likelihood of success and simultaneously keep the overall costs low. In this article the authors draw from agency theory to generate a framework that explains how consultant involvement and knowledge of the implementing organization can impact the outcome of the project. Portions of the framework are illustrated by examples from a series of interviews involving 12 companies that had implemented an ERP. It is suggested that choosing the right consultants and using their skills and knowledge appropriately, as well as transferring and retaining essential knowledge within the organization, is essential to the overall success of an ERP system implementation.

Challenges of Adopting Web Services: Experiences from the Financial Industry

Despite the many expected benefits of Web services technology, some organizations are hesitating to adopt Web services on a larger scale and across their organizational boundaries. This article presents the findings from an exploratory study in the financial industry investigating the key factors preventing or slowing down the adoption of Web services technology, why these factors influence the adoption process, and what changes need to occur to promote Web services adoption. The findings are analyzed and discussed in the context of existing theories related to IS adoption and diffusion. The results suggest that the role of Web services is currently limited largely due to environmental factors, while XML based messaging is commonplace in the financial industry. The adoption of Web services is likely to substantially increase once some major players in the industry as well as IT vendors make them their key integration mechanism.

Understanding Enterprise System Customization: An Exploration of Implementation Realities and the Key Influence Factors

Abstract From a strategic alignment standpoint, a clear link is desirable between strategic business goals and the specialization of business assets. The customization of an Enterprise System can be viewed as a specialization of an IT related business asset. Its customization should be driven by these strategic business goals. However, the implementation realities frequently tell a different story. Customizations are often not linked to strategic business goals and at times even run counter to these goals. Experiences have shown that these gaps can be costly and have severe business implications. Thus, it is important to understand how these discrepancies can occur, and subsequently, how to develop approaches to avoid unnecessary customizations. This qualitative study explores key influences on customizations in five major Enterprise System implementations. The analysis of the qualitative data collected in this study reveals key influence factors with their direct, as well as their indirect impacts on customization. The article further discusses how some of these influences can be leveraged by IT managers to guide customizations in a desirable direction.

Horizontal and Vertical Factors Influencing the Adoption of Web Services

Organizations across many industries are implementing or exploring Web services technology. According to recent industry surveys, however, many organizations are still hesitating to adopt Web services on a larger scale. This article explores the challenges organizations are facing and identifies factors that can lead to differences in the adoption of Web services between industries. While Web services at their core are a horizontal or cross-industry technology, the findings of this exploratory study suggest that there are important vertical or industry specific factors that can either promote or inhibit the adoption of Web services in a particular industry.

Service-Oriented Architecture Adoption Patterns

As many organizations are recognizing that their current IT architecture does not provide the business with the needed agility to compete in an ever faster changing business environment, many CIOs and enterprise architects are seeking to improve their overall IT architecture by moving towards a serviceoriented architecture (SOA). While the technology around SOA is maturing, the adoption of a serviceoriented IT paradigm and its organizational consequences are not without challenges. Organizations start their SOA initiatives from diverse baselines, are at different stages in the process, and take varying approaches to accomplish the expected IT and business goals. This research has the objective to identify adoption patterns of SOA and paths of SOA adoption observed in a field study of eight organizations with SOA initiatives.

Service-Oriented Architecture Adoption: A Normative Decision Model for Timing and Approach

Service-oriented architecture SOA have been adopted by organizations in a wide variety of industries, however, best practices have still yet to mature. This article, which is part of a larger study on SOA, develops a normative decision model introducing key factors that influence the timing and approach of adopting a SOA. The decision model is based on the results of multiple case studies of organizations that had either employed or were considering implementing a service-oriented architecture project. The results indicate that there are four main areas an information technology IT manager needs to assess to determine when and how to move towards a SOA: the maturity of relevant standards, the technology gap, the organizational gap, and the nature of the benefits expected from a SOA. Analyzing these results suggest that differences in the business environment need to be considered in the decision of when and how an IT manager should pursue the move to a service-oriented architecture.

Technology and Strategies for Realizing Service-Oriented Architectures with Web Services

Service-oriented architectures and Web services are becoming an integral part of the IT landscape. An increasing number of organizations are building service-oriented architectures, all major application vendors have incorporated Web services interfaces in their products, and Web services are becoming an important mechanism for business-to-business transactions. The technology for realizing service-oriented architectures is maturing, making initial adoption easier. However, with larger deployments of Web services in organizations, new questions related to implementation strategies, governance approaches, and broader organizational impacts need to be considered. This mini-track addresses some of these issues in its two sessions. The first session focuses on the adoption, use, and impact of SOA and Web services technology, whereas the second session focuses on the aspect of software development in the context of SOA and Web services.

Development and Application of Web Services Mini-Track

Web services are a relatively new technology that researchers are taking an increasing interest in. Web services are established on a set of XML-based technology standards used in the context of applicationto-application interaction in a distributed computing environment. A Web service has an interface described in a machine-processable format. Other systems interact with the Web service in a manner prescribed by its description using SOAP messages, typically conveyed using HTTP with an XML serialization in conjunction with other Web-related standards. As with most new phenomenon, several streams of research have sought to identify ways that Web services can be used. Early literature in this area has sought to understand the uses of Web services, its current limitations, and potential solutions to resolve those limitations. For example, while core standards for the interface description and message transport have matured and are being widely implemented, standards relating to other layers of the Web services “technology stack” (e.g., orchestration, security, and reliability) are still emerging. In the 9 papers presented here, the discussion ranges broadly across this domain. The first set of papers can be best categorized as addressing issues related to the management and interaction of Web services. Nasution et al. propose a systems approach to cope with the complexity of an Internet infrastructure utilizing Web services. The researchers both describe and detail implementation results of a proposed development architecture. Sen et al., on the other hand, addresses the issue of fault tolerance for an interorganizational workflow management system. The approach that they employ is a checkpointing scheme to be included in new, higher-level standards. Finally, Tartanoglu and Issarny address the issue of dependability of composite services via a Web services conversion language. In the next set of papers, issues related to the application and adoption of Web services is addressed. In the first article, Ciganek et al. present the findings from an exploratory study in the financial industry investigating key factors preventing or slowing down the adoption of Web services, why those factors influence the adoption process, and identify the changes that need to occur to promote Web services adoption. In the next article, Maamar et al. discuss the way context can be used for Web services personalization. In the final paper of this set, Fung et al. addresses the emerging discipline of FlowService-Quality engineering. Based on a service flow example, the authors illustrate a dynamic evaluation of Computational Quality Attributes (CQA) in the context of BPEL4WS with service-level agreements augmented with CQA operations. The final set of papers relates to Web services security and reliability issues. In the first paper of this set, Matheus introduces a novel approach for declaring information object access restrictions, based on XML encoding. Prasad and Balasooriya propose Web Coordination Bonds to allow Web processes to hook together in a desired structure to enforce automatic information flow, group constraints, and data/control dependencies. In the last paper of this set, Cai and Shankaranarayanan describe an application of Web services for managing data quality in a B2B information exchange context. Accordingly, these authors then propose a framework for managing data quality in interorganizational settings using an information product approach. In summary, the topics examined in these 9 papers reflect the wide range of interests and possibilities within the relatively new domain of Web services research. Collectively these papers take an interesting look across a variety of topics in the Web services area and provide impulses relevant for practitioners and future academic research.