Abstract During the last decade, the development of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has led the world into a new era of innovative technologies that can provide effective responses to human concerns. In developed countries, the profitability motivation has imposed Service‐Oriented Architectures (SOA) in enterprises as a better way to design information systems capable of taking into account inter‐organizational cooperation mechanisms while preserving autonomy of the latter. Those Service‐Oriented Architectures did not stop at the doors of public administrations. Thus, several specifications have been made to adapt them to the peculiarities of public governance. But these models are not always able to respond effectively to the concerns of governments in developing countries particularly when they are structurally and territorially decentralized. Therefore, we propose a more suitable model to this type of e‐governance. We will later see how our model can be more suitable for the organization of remote and secured fairground courts in Cameroon to address constraints related to finance, time and security that these courts currently impose.
Purpose – The aim of this article is to provide strategic insights of how multinational organizations lead IT-enabled change on a global scale. The article summarizes the findings from a three-year case study of the international telecom company Ericsson. This company managed to successfully transform their finance and accounting (F & A) unit from a highly decentralized structure into a so-called shared service center (SSC) structure and the whole change was enabled by enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Design/methodology/approach – The case study data consists of in-depth interviews, archival data, and observations collected during three years. Findings – The article provides rich description of how the transformation was executed together with three key strategic lessons. Originality/value – The article offers unique and novel insights of how strategist drives IT-enabled change on a global scale.
Michael Bansmann, Christian Tschirner, Roman Dumitrescu
Two mega trends in product engineering require a re-thinking of established ways of working: The technical evolution to intelligent technical systems and the re-design of value creation networks, now integrating partners from all over the world. Due to this, there is a growing interest in the Systems Engineering (SE) approach. Yet, the implementation of SE in organizational structures is challenging for enterprises outside aircraft industry. Friedenthal suggests the deployment of a multidisciplinary SE-team responsible for requirements, architecture and analysis of the system as well as integrating and testing. We expect the shared service concept known from administration as promising to generate synergistic effects for a distributed value creation: Shared services centralize a subset of existing decentralized business functions in semi-autonomous business units. This promotes amongst others value generation, quality and improved service for internal customers. We present a first approach for implementing Model-Based Systems Engineering based on Shared Services.
Systems Engineering Methodologies and Applications
This article applies a sociomaterial perspective to IT-enabled change. The empirical data consists of in-depth interviews and internal documents from a longitudinal case study of the telecommunications company Ericsson. They managed to successfully transform their finance and accounting (F&A) unit from a highly decentralized structure into a so-called shared service centre (SSC) structure. The transformation was executed within three years and was enabled by an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The findings consist of a framework with four dimensions that explains that IT-enabled change is a practice that is both social and material: a sociomaterial practice. The contribution of this article is that it shows that it is in the entanglement of the social and material elements across time where we can find a deeper understanding of IT-enabled change.
CASE DESCRIPTION In today's global economy, organizations are faced with many challenges including motivating and rewarding employees; communicating and making effective decisions; evaluating group and team behavior; assessing their organizational structure and determining its effectiveness, assessing its leadership and determining its effectiveness; and evaluating alternative methods to managing change in the newly designed organization. Successful managers must learn the importance of creating functional and effective structures, processes, and understanding and managing the human side of the organization as this will enable people to effectively work together to achieve agreed upon goals. Therefore this term-long group case study, designed to cover multiple aspects of Organizational Behavior and Theory and Organization Design, will give you an opportunity to design an effective organization. The author developed the case for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of the situation. The names including the organization have been disguised. The case, instructor's manual, and synopsis were anonymously peer reviewed and accepted by the Western Casewriters' Association for its annual meeting, March 27, 2008, Oakland, CA. CASE SYNOPSIS Mount Cedar Technologies, Inc. was founded in Los Angeles, California in 1995. It began as an importer and distributor of computer accessories, but by 2000 had evolved into an IT infrastructure integrator specializing in hardware and software products, storage and security solutions, and technical services to Enterprise, Small and Medium Businesses, and to Government, Educational, and Medical institutions. Its employees grew rapidly from 6 in 1995 to more than 170 employees in 2006. The company lacked an organizational structure to improve its operations' effectiveness. Additionally, there were complaints from employees who did not feel equitably treated, resulting in the loss of talented employees. Department managers acknowledged that they were very busy reacting to problems and customer issues, allowing them little time to coordinate and listen to their employees. Decision making was highly decentralized. This resulted in the loss of possible gains to be obtained from cooperation among other managers. The silo effect that resulted from this structure meant that departments were making decisions based on what was best for them. While John Curtis (CEO) had been instrumental in growing the organization, his present leadership style had become increasingly problematic to many including upper management. He liked to surprise people by showing up un-invited to meetings and all employees and managers were expected to provide off the cuff answers to questions he would throw at them during these visits. Managers were asked to focus mostly on financial measures. The culture was described by many people as a task oriented one that did not encourage risk taking or empowerment. Additionally, the organization was lagging in the areas of training and the advancement of women and minorities. Finally, upper management wanted to grow its business by adding new product offerings. INTRODUCTION Sam Farris was hired as the new Vice President of Mount Cedar Technologies, Inc. in December 1998 to work closely with the company's top executives to oversee daily operations, support sales and technical logistics, to be part of the top management team, and to determine, along with other executives, the future strategic direction of the company. During a coffee break, he shared the following advice with his senior management team (John Curtis, President and CEO; Bob Holt, Vice President of Finance and Human Resources; and Frank Mathew, Vice President of Sales) : Revisit your organization and take it to the next level! You have great people, great customers, and great products. You need to build an effective, sustainable business, and be a regional leader in what you do. …
Present-day governments are experiencing a shift towards supplying demand-driven and personalized electronic services. This often requires that government organizations collaborate with each other and their services and processes need to be integrated to act in a coherent manner. In this paper, we take the diversity of government agencies as a starting point and focus on the development of a shared ontology to enable interoperability among heterogeneous business process and services of public agencies. This framework contributes to understanding the key concepts and relations that form the basis for coordinating the activities necessary for integrated public service delivery. The ontology is aimed at capturing the main elements to enable communication among and integration of the activities of decentralized and autonomous agencies. The ontology has been interactively developed by studying organizational processes, by conducting interviews and literature study. The proposed ontology can provide a foundation for an architecture blueprint that can enable demand-driven integrated service delivery in practice without having to pose detailed requirements on organizations. As autonomy is fostered, this research can potentially enable the integration of private organizations.
As enterprises became increasingly information based, making improvements in their information activities is a top priority to assure their continuing competitiveness. A key to achieving these improvements is developing an enterprise information architecture (EIA). An EIA can be viewed as a structured set of multidimensional interrelated elements that support all information processes. The current ad hoc EIA in place within many enterprises cannot meet an organization's future needs because it has an incoherent framework, incompatibilities, missing elements, few and poorly understood standards, uneven quality and unnecessary duplications. This paper discusses the EIA developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as a case study, for other information based enterprises, particularly those with decentralized and autonomous organization structures and cultures. While the technical architecture is important the organization and processes by which it is developed and sustained over time are equally important. This paper outlines the motivation for an EIA and discusses each of the interacting elements identified. It also presents an organization structure and processes for building a sustainable EIA activity.
Politicians and public managers continue to debate over whether to centralize or to decentralize departments, information systems and services. Shared service centers (SSCs) are gaining importance in public administration as a means to innovate, to reduce costs and to increase service levels. The SSC is a business model in which selected government functions are concentrated into a semi-autonomous business unit. Implementing SSCs is not easy, as it often requires several trade-offs and an effective organization and management structure.The discussions about the decision whether to use SSCs seem to be predominantly focused on efficiency and effectiveness aspects, which are rational arguments. In this research-in-progress ongoing research into the design and governance of SSC is presented. We analyze a case study at a municipality and identify factors contributing to success and failure. Our preliminary findings suggest that designing an effective management structure, establishing an architecture capturing central and decentral elements, setting the right expectations, creating a sense of urgency and ensuring that all stakeholders understand the centralization/decentralization aspects of the SSC are important elements resulting in success.