Sarmad Alshawi

Integrating diverse ERP systems: a case study

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) went through many development cycles since its beginning in the 1970s until it established itself as a backbone of most major enterprises in the world. In spite of its countless advantages, most ERP implementations require heavy customisation to achieve their proclaimed advantages. This paper represents an endeavour to investigate, through a case study, the feasibility of minimising the heavy customisation required by most ERP implementations by selecting the best modules from each vendor and integrating them using enterprise application integration technologies, to form one (integrated) system. In doing so, the paper provides a description of a way to implement a suggested integrated solution, as well as a discussion of how minimising customisation enables enterprises to upgrade their ERP software effortlessly and cost‐effectively.

Critical Success Factors of E-Government: A Proposed Model for E-Government Implementation

This paper draws on the extant literature on e-government policy formulation, implementation and execution. The purpose of the synthesis of this literature is to advance our understanding of the factors leading to success and failure and to elaborate on the underlying enabling and inhibiting conditions. This exercise is significant with respect to research and practice to avoid the pitfalls of imposing universal approaches to research and policy practices. Rather, it draws a distinction between generic (general) and specific (context-contingent) factors. With this fundamental understanding, we can suggest the kind of factors that have strategic importance and which are irrelevant in terms of e-government policy formulations. The paper, further, provides a model for successful e-government implementation

Benchmarking information technology investment and benefits extraction

Despite the fact that many companies are increasing their expenditure on information technology (IT) to obtain or even sustain a competitive advantage in their respective marketplaces, many studies show that the benefits from IT systems have been considerably less than expected. Managers are often left with the quandary of how to evaluate investments and realise maximum benefits in IT. Reasons for this difficulty have been suggested in the normative literature centring around the socio‐technical (human and organisational) dimensions associated with IT deployment. The inability of managers to determine the true costs of deploying IT are considered attributable to a lack of knowledge and understanding of IT‐related costs and benefits measurements. This paper discusses from a critical point of view the evaluation of IT/IS investment and best practices in benefits extraction from such investment. The discussion is based on relevant literature and information from ongoing research by the authors involving companies in the construction, pharmaceutical and computer hardware sectors.

Logistics in the Internet age: towards a holistic information and processes picture

It is unquestioned that the growth of the Internet is a significant phenomenon. Not only is there an exponential growth in the exchange of goods and services over the Internet, but the Internet has changed the way information can be accessed and used. This short paper posits that the Internet has made a fundamental change in the nature of the supply chain information within an organisation. It also describes how Internet technologies have changed the visibility of the processes in the organisation’s supply chain. Visibility concerns both information about processes and the capability for interacting with these processes. We conclude by asserting why a horizontal wide‐view picture of all partners in a supply chain has to be taken in order to reap the commercial advantages offered by the new technology.

Healthcare information management: the integration of patients’ data

In a dynamic and uncertain business environment, with increasingly intense competition and vibrant globalisation, there is a growing demand by healthcare businesses for both internal and external information, to analyse patients’ information quickly and efficiently, which has led healthcare organisations to embrace customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Data quality and data integration issues facilitate the achievement of CRM business objectives. Data quality is the state of completeness, validity, consistency, timeliness and accuracy that makes data appropriate for CRM business exploitation. A good integration strategy begins with a thorough data assessment study, and relies upon the quality of these data. A framework is proposed for evaluating the quality and integration of patient data for CRM applications in the health care sector. Even though this framework is in an early stage of development, it intends to present existing solutions for evaluating the above issues.

Case study: Data warehousing in decision support for pharmaceutical R&D supply chain

The expanding technology of data warehousing is providing organisations with a powerful decision support utility that can be effectively used to support supply chain activities throughout a business or industry. Pharmaceutical Research and Development (R&D) activity represents a unique type of information-based supply chain that utilises a huge amount of data and involves a large number of decision-making points along its stages. By analysing the processes of drugs R&D in a pharmaceutical case study (company unnamed), the authors identify the main types of internal and external information sources utilised by the principle decision-making levels within the drug R&D supply chain. A classification of the information sources and the decision-making levels is then presented. The paper also discusses how by integrating these information sources, data warehouse technology can facilitate effective decision support leading to a shortening of the drug development life cycle.

Why CRM Efforts Fail? A Study of the Impact of Data Quality and Data Integration

This paper reports the results of a study into the implementation of data-driven customer relationship management (CRM) strategies. Despite its popularity, there is still a significant failure rate of CRM projects. A combination of survey and interviews/case studies research approach was used. It is found that CRM implementers are not investing enough efforts in improving data quality and data integration processes to support their CRM applications.

Managing knowledge in business requirements identification

This paper reflects on experiences when traditional IT approaches were used to design large IT systems and ended in failure. The main reflections focus on the reasons for system failure and how they relate to the diversity of knowledge, managing knowledge, and the understanding gaps that may exist between the business and the system developers. The study reveals that the understanding gaps mainly result from lack of knowledge of business operations on the developer side, matched by lack of technical appreciation and knowledge on the user side. To help address the knowledge‐gap problem, a practical approach employing soft‐systems, diagramming and set mapping techniques is proposed and described.

The impact of knowledge management processes on organisational performance

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate knowledge management (KM) processes and to investigate their impact on organisational performance (OP) within the context of the airline industry (AI). Design/methodology/approach – An inductive and deductive qualitative approach was used based on a preliminary study. A pilot study was conducted which involved the use of interviews as a primary data collection method. Content analysis was used to extract and analyse themes from the data. Findings – The study showed that knowledge usage is the most influential aspect of KM in terms of the impact on OP. Moreover, the study revealed that knowledge transfer is a common KM process employed by organisations. Research limitations/implications – This study outlined the findings of a pilot study which aimed to test a proposed conceptual model and to provide an initial understanding of the interrelationships between KM processes and OP. To this end, a number of interviews were conducted in order to consolidate a co...

Negotiating and Understanding Information Systems Requirements: The Use of Set Diagrams

A major contributor to the failure of information technology-based systems is the problem of understanding user or customer requirements in the initial analysis and requirements identification stage of development. This paper identifies and describes an approach to help overcome some of these problems, particularly the mismatch or understanding gap between the customer and the developer. The approach is intended to be used at the early stages of requirement determination and introduces techniques from operational research into the process. In particular set theory and Venn diagrams are used as a way of graphically representing the relationships and gaps in understanding that may exist. The benefit obtained from the use of the technique is partly in the graphical representations themselves but mainly in the dialogue and negotiation that result from the construction of the diagrams. The technique has been developed in a research study of retail organisations’ use of information technology in the UK and an example case study from the sector is used to illustrate and discuss the technique.