Ulric J. Gelinas

Using learning communities to teach technical communication in accounting

The paper describes the implementation of a learning community involving a technical communication course and an accounting course. Students are simultaneously registered in all the courses constituting the learning community. The learning community approach to writing instruction can be viewed as one way to implement writing across the curriculum with the following distinguishing features. First, students are registered simultaneously for both courses; the communication skills taught in one course are simultaneously reinforced in another course. Second, the faculty of the two courses interact extensively to deliver skills (e.g., communication skills) in a coherent manner across the two courses. We describe the development of a theoretical framework for connecting the two courses. This theoretical framework guided implementation decisions such as the choice of communication skills to be covered in the accounting course, the design of assignments, and the design of evaluation criteria. While we focus on the integration of an accounting course with a communication course, the learning community approach and the implementation steps are applicable to other disciplines.

Managing the Internet Payment Platform project

This case examines issues in the assessment and adoption of Internet technologies in a federal US government context, and describes in detail a pilot project to determine the feasibility of adopting an application service provider solution to support procurement by multiple federal agencies using a variety of different legacy transaction systems. The pilot test of the Internet Payment Platform (IPP) by the eMoney group of the United States Treasurys Financial Management Service involved three federal agencies and subsets of their suppliers. Participants saw many benefits from their use of the IPP, but agreed that for full-scale operation it needed to be modified to better fit the government procurement context. The project manager is weighing the pros and cons of conducting another pilot test using the same commercial software as before, or obtaining and customizing a new commercial package, or building a new system from scratch.

Modelling physical barriers to interorganisational system implementation success

For interorganisational systems to provide benefits to all partner organisations typically requires well designed internal systems and processes and integration between enterprise systems and the IOS. Organisations frequently do not make these investments and the resulting physical implementation details, such as duplicated data storage, manual reentry of data and other workarounds, lead to less than optimal benefits. This paper describes an approach to modelling interorganisational business processes that can be used by process and system designers to diagnose and correct physical barriers to the success of interorganisational system. The modelling approach is illustrated with an example of an actual interorganisational system that exhibited less than optimal benefits owing to physical implementation barriers.