Suchergebnisse

PurposeAchieving goals of better integrated and responsive government services requires moving away from stand alone applications toward more comprehensive, integrated architectures. As a result there is a mounting pressure to integrate disparate systems to support information exchange and cross‐agency business processes. There are substantial barriers that governments must overcome to achieve these goals and to profit from enterprise application integration (EAI).Design/methodology/approachIn the research presented here we develop and test a methodology aimed at overcoming the barriers blocking adoption of EAI. This methodology is based on a discrete‐event simulation of public sector structure, business processes and applications in combination with an EAI perspective.FindingsThe testing suggests that our methodology helps to provide insight into the myriad of existing applications, and the implications of EAI. Moreover, it helps to identify novel options, gain stakeholder commitment, let them agree on the sharing of EAI costs, and finally it supports collaborative decision‐making between public agencies.Practical implicationsThe approach is found to be useful for making the business case for EAI projects, and gaining stakeholder commitment prior to implementation.Originality/valueThe joint addressing of the barriers of public sector reform including the transformation of the public sector structure, gaining of stakeholders' commitment, understanding EAI technology and dependencies between cross‐agency business processes, and a fair division of costs and benefits over stakeholders.

AbstractMany information technology projects fail due to problems in requirements definition. Possible leverage points in improving requirements analysis lie in collaborative processes crossing functional and organizational boundaries, in which stakeholders learn about the problem and together identify possible solution requirements. Establishing trust among parties is critical to collaborative work, particularly in the early stages of information systems projects. However, there are few guidelines on how to establish trust among project participants. This paper draws on empirical work from the Center for Technology in Government facilitating interagency groups and system dynamics to generate a simple model of the role of knowledge sharing in building trust during the requirements analysis phase of a complex information systems project. Analysis of the model suggests that trust can depend on the pace of knowledge sharing among participants. More broadly, this examination offers a closer look at some of the "soft" variable dynamics that play critical roles in project progress. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

AbstractThe system dynamics group at the Rockefeller College of the University at Albany has been developing techniques to create system dynamic models with groups of managers during the last 25 years. Building upon their tradition in decision conferencing, the group has developed a particular style that involves a facilitation team in which people play different roles. Throughout these years of experience, the group has also developed several "scripts" to elicit knowledge from experts based on small‐groups research, and well‐established practices in the development of system dynamics models. This paper constitutes a detailed documentation of a relatively small‐scale modeling effort that took place in early 2001, offering a "soup to nuts" description of group model building at Albany. The paper describes in detail nine of the scripts that the group has developed, offering some reflections about their advantages and limitations. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.