Study Guide for Exam 1 - Fundamentals of Systems, Enterprise Integration | IST 420, Study notes of Information Technology

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IST 420

1. Too often, technology is so exciting that we let the “how” crowd out the “what.” Explain. When a customer decides on his requirements, it is up to the technological people to make a properly functioning project as requested by the customer. The technological department has their mind set on how to implement the proper tools and techniques and develop what is required rather than what might benefit the customer. The technology people are more concerned on how they are going to put these requirements together without taking into consideration if it might eventually be useful for the customer. When a project from the business department arrives at the hands of the technology department for coding or other tech related issues, often the case is that more importance is given to how the problem or the project is going to be completed rather than what the project is going to serve. In other words, the technology department looks mainly at “how” rather than looking at “what” is wanted. For example : if a website is to be designed, one concentrates more on how it will be designed instead of looking at what purpose it should serve and if it serves it properly. 2. At some point, the business process expert has to decide on the applications to support the business processes. What are the key considerations of deciding between a pre packaged solution and a custom‐packaged solution and a custom development project? What other choices are there? Pre-packaged solution generally is a sample solution or a broad solution of the wide-ranging problem or requirement. A pre packaged solution rarely meets all the requirements of the customer. It is a readily available solution which is low cost but is less efficient. Custom development projects have to be started from scratch and developed keeping in mind the requirements of the customer or the business. It helps with defining the requirements after proper and complete analysis and proves more efficient. But it’s not that easy. It costs both time and money and there are many points to be taken in consideration with this kind of approach. Like the resources, the cost, the labor, the time put in to come up with the best possible application to make it as efficient 3. Why are standards important for a business process expert? Why is it important for companies to participate in the creation of these standards? The world of standards is vast and complex and full of both positive and negative examples. Business process experts need to be able to interact with and understand standards for business processes at many different levels. From an industry perspective, it is obviously important to understand the applicable standards and employ them in solutions. Companies can also benefit from playing a role in setting or improving standards. Standards are sometimes developed by government, other times by consortia of companies who are interested in improving efficiency, and other times by one powerful player, such as Wal- Mart, which has been pressing for adoption of a standardized approach to RFID by its suppliers. Much of the activity in modern standards-setting is focused on the development of web service APIs that allow business to be transacted safely and securely across company boundaries.

4. Why do many organizations jump to application selection and implementation with little or no business process analysis? How do you convince organizations to “buy into” the BP approach? Integrate Gartner’s recommendations into your answer.
5. How can we document processes in ways that will be understandable by everyone involved?

6. Why is it better to analyze business processes rather than just concentrate on each business function since most business are organized by business functions? Many different business functions come together to form on single business process. It might seem as though paying attention and doing well in each business function will eventually lead to the success of the business process and in turn the company’s growth and profit. But it should also be taken into consideration the flow of information and other such complications. Also, there are fewer business processes to work with as compared to the number of functions. This also gives the people working a broader view and a more overall view of the whole working. It has thus come to light that working on and business process is way more important and fruitful than working on business functions.

7. Amazon and eBay now take in almost as much revenue through their web service APIs as they do from their web sites. What had to be in place for this to occur? Technology standards? BP standards? Explain. 8. What is the gap in the solution creation process and how does IST attempt to fill this gap? What specific knowledge is required to fill this gap? Even a quick look at the processes and activities involved in the solution creation process makes the importance of strong communication skills immediately clear. User requirements must be captured and communicated to technologists. Comments from users must be harvested. Knowledge must be transferred through training. Questions about the capabilities of software must be answered. In most of these cases, there is both a business and a technical aspect to the communication. It is required that business and technology considerations are balanced. Sometimes using standard approaches is not worth the sacrifices that must be made with respect to the optimal process. Other times, new technologies cancel out gaps between the ideal processes and what was possible to implement. But to make these tradeoffs, you must understand both the potential business impact and the associated costs. Too often during solution creation, miscommunication results in a very expensive solution that does not meet business needs and is not technically sound for the long term 9. Both the on line book and the paper book both state that knowledge should be transferred through‐packaged solution and a custom training. How does this affect the analysis and design of a business process? Refer to Question 8
8. From the on line book: “Because the business side lacks the technical language to express requirements‐line book: “Because the business side lacks the technical language to express requirements in sufficient detail, the conversation between business and technology about solutions is dominated by descriptions of functional capabilities leading to solutions that reflect the capabilities of the software at hand but do not solve the business problem. “ How can this problem be fixed? What are some possible solutions? Are there cases when a discussion about possible technical solutions is appropriate during requirements gathering? If so, cite an example. Strong communication skills 11. Many knowledge workers use tacit interactions to complete their work. Is there technology available today to perform tacit interactions? What technology is available to assist and support tacit interactions? Because of their ad hoc nature, tacit interactions are not predictable or automatable in the same way that enterprise processes are, but that does not mean that they cannot be supported or enabled by software. The trend toward service-oriented architecture has unlocked the information inside of enterprise applications, making it more readily available for use in tacit interactions and helping bridge the gap between end-user applications like spreadsheets and enterprise applications like ERP. The rise of Enterprise 2.0 collaboration (blogs, wikis, social networking, search, linking, and others) has also increased support for tacit interactions for those who understand how to use and configure those tools. Adding support for tacit interactions as solutions will be a major challenge for business process experts for many years to come.

12. The on line book defined the business process expert as “… a person with the ability to quickly‐packaged solution and a custom understand business needs and translate that understanding into a form that leads to the creation/composition of better solutions.” Explain this in your own words. The tools for creating solutions have become vast and, because of that, more complex. Business process expert is the specialist in understanding the business potential of the functionality and how to apply the tools in a process-oriented fashion. The business process expert understands the requirements that the business is attempting to meet and communicates those to the technology side. The business process expert uses empathy for technology and for business needs to make sure that communication flows as it should and solutions are built that actually help the business perform better. 13. From the on line book “Without exception, every business process expert and related professional we‐packaged solution and a custom talked to while putting this book together testified that the greatest challenge to success in creating new solutions and optimizing business processes is change management.” Why? How can change management be facilitated? People have the tendency to resist changing their current workflow unless the benefit of change is made obvious. Even if people have a better collective understanding of change management, they don’t entirely trust it. There are four main reasons people resist change: They didn’t know. They weren’t able. They weren’t involved. They weren’t willing.” Change management involves the process of actually transforming an organization once the direction has been set. Business process experts frequently fill gaps that exist in the design and execution of transformation efforts. This can involve anything from aiding in business case development, to helping create a strategy for performing the transformation, to explaining the roles that everyone will play in a transformation, to helping with troubleshooting during project execution. 14. How can prototypes assist with the documentation of requirements? A prototype is a rudimentary working model of a product or information system, usually built for demonstration purposes or as part of the development process. Prototyping Model, a basic version of the system is built, tested, and then reworked as necessary until an acceptable prototype is finally achieved from which the complete system or product can now be developed. You can shorten the requirements gathering phase by making good use of prototypes. Furthermore, prototypes allow the user to validate what is being created at an early stage. In essence, the business process expert can ask the user, “Is this what you need?” and the user can confirm the way forward, speeding development cycles and preventing requirements from being lost in translation in many cases.

• obviates the need to extract requirements from the minds of users into a form that can be understood by product designers. This translation process is seldom accurate. Von Hippel calls the user’s knowledge of their requirements “sticky” because it is not easily extracted. 15. The book states: “Many organizational members are unlikely to admit to problems in their areas. And, if they do, their managers may deny the existence of problems.” Why is this the case and how can this be overcome using business process analysis? Members have work assigned to them and admitting to problems and trying to figure them out is just another add on to the list of work to do. Therefore it is unlikely that they might go to their higher ups with these problems. Even if these organizational members do go with their problem to the managers it is improbable that they may look into it to solve it or even accept it for that matter due to their own work load and fear of changes that it might cause to the system. That is why strong management support is an essential factor. Business process analysis like the name suggests analyzes the business and its working and finds flaws and possible solutions which helps overcome the above stated problems.

16. James Champy’s study reported a 70% failure rate for business process reengineering projects. What caused this high failure rate? One of the main reasons for failure, according to many of these studies is lack of management support. There are many reasons for this; with one of the most important being peoples resistance to change.

• Lack of strong support from the business process owner and the level of management immediately above him/her. -Assigning the wrong people with a problem requiring a high level of expertise, causing serious delays in effective solutions.
• Lack of data integration between different silos 17. What motivates employee resistance to changes brought out by business process redesign? -Lack of management and higher authority support.
• Lack of making the business process redesign project attractive to the employees as a whole, and particularly to key employees who are very influential within the union.
• No views of setting aside a budget for training, financial rewards, flexible time and a variety of benefits for the employees
• No benefits tied to the employees’ participation in the business process redesign project.
• By those employees’ lack of involvement in the change decisions. 18. Business process rigidity is highly correlated to business processes that have a high degree of heterogeneity. Explain. Relate this to question #6. The degree of Functional heterogeneity of a business process can be measured by counting the number of different organizational functions or teams involved in the execution of the process (eg: help desk manager, chief information officer, networking team)
• Functional heterogeneity in organizational processes has been found to be highly correlated with the number of knowledge specialization areas involved in business processes.

19. Why does the book recommend annotating the communication flow with I’s and K’s? What is the significance? 20. Why is it important to represent knowledge flow in business processes? The key reason is that knowledge flow at business process execution time should be minimized in operational business process, which cannot be achieved if we don’t know that it is flowing- hence the need for some representation. The goal is that knowledge acquisition and sharing is essentially to improve the productivity and outcome quality of operational business processes.
20. What is media naturalness and how does it affect information and knowledge transfer? Chap 6 r 7 22. Relate a usability concept to creating good business process diagrams. There are many different kinds of business process diagrams used for different kinds of problems for solutions. Using the usability concept we can judge how well the diagram is made and how suitable it is for the particular problem at hand. There are 5 E’s of usability
    • Ease of Learning
    • Efficiency
    • Effectiveness
    • Error Tolerance
    • Engaging