Introduction |Objectives |Class Organization |Assessment |Project

Introduction

As corporations attempt to improve their responsiveness to accelerating rates of market change, management teams are focusing on process design as a key component of organizational performance. In this regard systems analysis and database design are becoming increasingly necessary skills for understanding and implementing products and programs within business units. As information systems come to play an increasingly pivotal role in such projects, managers require a more integrated understanding of how management processes, information flows, and information systems interact. This course focuses on the concepts and tools necessary for developing such a perspective. It will provide participants with

• a framework for understanding organizational prototyping projects,
• experience with analysis and design techniques that apply to processes, data flows, and data design, and
• hands-on experience with emerging software tools, including building a database-oriented prototype that supports the redesign of a strategically important business process.

Framework

The framework that we will use to understand business issues refers to concepts of organizational prototyping.

Organizational prototyping extends notions of systems evolution to encompass wider problems of organizational adaptation. For more than twenty years, information technologists have understood the value of building experimental models of information systems, or systems prototypes, as a method for testing solutions for system design problems.

It is well known, however, that more than half of the information systems developed to support business processes are either not used or are not used as their designers envisioned. Often systems are seen as expensive solutions to simple problems that render an organization increasingly inflexible.

Organizational prototyping extends systems prototyping ideas to encourage systematic small-scale process experimentation that leaves an organization more flexible than it otherwise would be. It uses a clear understanding of business processes to link broad issues of strategy with specific details of business data. It uses process design and information systems design, with particular emphasis on databases, to link strategic intent with organized action (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: Organizational prototyping extends traditional database design models

Analysis and Design techniques

To apply the organizational prototyping framework, we will learn and use the following techniques:

• Process design using coordination theory.
• Data flow analysis using data flow diagrams (DFDs).
• Data structure analysis using entity-relationship diagrams (ERDs).
• Database and systems prototyping using a PC-based database management package and integrated software applications (e.g., Microsoft Access95 and Office95).

This course is intended to give you sufficient exposure to these methods and tools so that you can accomplish the following:

• Identify and articulate what aspects of a management initiative that includes both process design and systems design represent major difficulty and risk.
• Develop specific solutions that reduce that difficulty and risk, resulting in faster development times, reduced transition/investment costs, and greater probability of project success.
• Deliver persuasive arguments and examples that demonstrate conclusively the benefits of your proposed solution for the organization and for each organizational participant.

Hands-on experience

Traditional database design courses tend to focus on the technicality of the relational database model and the intricacies of database query languages. We will touch upon these topics, but the emphasis of this course is to give you hands-on, practical experience with the thought processes and tools that you will need to make a difference to the organization(s) in which you participate in the next three to ten years. In keeping with Babson's focus as a management school, we will emphasize the management implications of systems and analysis rather than technical detail alone. We will endeavor to do so, however, with as much direct, tangible experience as we can practically provide.

By the end of the course, you will have had a chance to build three versions of a prototype that articulates your solutions to an important strategic problem. You will have gained experience in thinking about strategy implementation in terms of business process steps rather than merely as business performance results. You will have spent at least 12 weeks gaining facility with software that is likely to be available to you professionally. In particular, you will have experience that will help you to identify strategic consequences, analyze processes, and learn future relevant software applications more rapidly and effectively.