Alex Yap, assistant professor of management information systems in the Love School of Business, recently published two journal articles.
“Retrofitting Information Processes and Content Standardization in Response to Enterprise-Wide System Planning and Development: Organizational and Socio-Technical Influences as Determining Factors,” will appear in the October-December 2005 edition of the International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems.
Yap’s second article, titled “A System for Teaching MIS and MBA Students to Deploy a Scalable Database-driven Web Architecture for B2C E Commerce,” was co-written with Claudia Loebbecke of the University of Cologne, Germany. It appeared in the August 2005 edition of the Information Systems Education Journal.
Abstracts of both articles appear below:
“Retrofitting Information Processes and Content Standardization in Response to Enterprise-Wide System Planning and Development: Organizational and Socio-Technical Influences as Determining Factors.”
When a large conglomerate initiated the planning and development of an enterprise-wide electronic database system to form part of its growing e-business systems infrastructure, the resulting action called for the reengineering of information processes coupled with the push towards data content standardization across the entire organization. The objective of the system was to help engineers sift through millions of components offered by various suppliers and component manufacturers, where the end-result was to improve the integration and efficiency of the product development, engineering design, e-sourcing and e-procurement processes. This research paper is a qualitative action research study on how different organizational, social, political, and technical forces influenced the social construction of an enterprise-wide information system. Understanding the dynamics and power of these sociotechnical forces in shaping the development environment and change process of enterprise systems is the research contribution of this paper.
“A System for Teaching MIS and MBA Students to Deploy a Scalable Database-driven Web Architecture for B2C E-Commerce.”
The growing need for real-time information and interactive online feedback has shifted the thrust of web development from static websites to dynamic database-driven web applications. ’Ecommerce capable’ or ’transaction-capable’ websites are naturally database-driven due to the simple fact that transaction-related information (customer and order information) needs to be captured or entered into a database. Although database-driven web applications are seen as solutions for automating online transaction processing, optimizing business processing, and improving online customer relations management, Internet statistics reveal that a substantial majority of websites on the Internet are not E-Commerce capable or transaction-capable, and nor are they dynamically scalable in terms of content. To understand how technology is an extension of corporate strategy in the 21st century, it is vital that MIS and MBA students have a certain level of knowledge about how e-commerce systems actually automate web transactions, help optimize business processes, and how web application systems are designed to handle content, data, or information. This paper discusses how a systems blueprint has been developed over time for educating students to build and deploy a database driven e-commerce website. The system has been successfully used for both MIS and MBA students over a period of 4 years. It has been successful in the sense that students who did not have any background in database and web programming were still able to deploy and design a working system in one semester by themselves.