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Happy Endings: A Potential Result from Business
Process Re-Engineering
Edgardo
Donovan
ITM 508
Dr. Kathleen
M. Hargiss
Module 3 –
Case Analysis
Monday, February 19, 2007
Happy Endings: A Potential Result from Business
Process Re-Engineering
"Many organizations today have un-integrated and
brittle legacy data systems. This makes it difficult to adapt them to meet
changing business needs. Organizations must analyze and integrate their data
before efficiently sharing it across the organization and with external
partners." (Aiken)
Despite
the precarious nature of implementing massive IT change Frito Lay and RTA, an
Australian Insurance company, were able to successfully negotiate the high
costs and risks involved with large IT overhauls into successful completion
resulting in significant tangible returns on investment. Part of their success
was their determination to sensibly leverage components of their existing
architecture thus reducing costs of a complete IT overhaul and providing value
added services already in demand by their customers.
Frito Lay
and RTA both were involved in comprehensive knowledge management infrastructure
overhauls which differed in size, scope, and methodology. Frito Lay was confronted
with issues pertaining to customer/prospect information available through
different disparate systems. Their project consisted in bringing the
information together into a new database system accessible through their
corporate intranet so as to more effectively manage customer and prospect
relationships. RTA needed to render its insurance information database
information tag ready via XML so that it could be manipulated at will through a
variety of future web applications for internal and external use.
"Data reverse engineering (DRE) is a relatively new
formulation of systems reengineering technologies that addresses situations
where organizational understanding and/or the physical condition of its data
systems has deteriorated or become confused. This has occurred when
organizations develop stand alone, or 'stovepiped' systems. Because these
systems weren't developed to easily exchange data, they don't." (Aiken)
Frito Lay’s
problem was typical of companies that over the years grew with disparate
unconnected information repositories. This is understandable. It is natural for
each department to organize information according to their own preferences. As
for the case of Frito Lay, the sales team had its own customer database system
and the marketing team had its own prospect marketing database. Obviously, by
cross-referencing the information in the two databases it would have been
possible to more effectively manage customer/prospect communication without
overlap between the marketing and sales departments. Additional benefits to the
database integration and the new interactivity available through the corporate
Intranet allowed geographical and time constraints concerning access to the
data to cease being an issue.
Obviously,
Frito Lay was successful in implementing their project. They did not attempt to
setup a costly web-centric system that gave them more than what they needed
with significant developmental time increases. The solutions they brought to
their company were one of the many corporate transformations that happened in
the late 90s as companies were forced, due to communicational competitive
advantages being available, to upgrade
their IT infrastructure leveraging the ubiquitous nature of web technology. In
my opinion rendering their database information via XML tags for greater
freedom for later real-time browser-based-instant-data-manipulation would have
been unnecessary. Generally, you need to make sure that your customer and
prospect information is managed effectively and do not need to build
applications that do anything more than that. Companies like RTA or Experian
whose chief service is information management and secure distribution among a
network of partners and clients had a different core competency to fulfill. The
process Frito Lay engaged can sometimes be referred to as data warehousing
and/or customer relationship management system.
RTA, an
Australian insurance company, also needed to consolidate information for ready
online access. Their project seemed much larger in scope. First of all, RTA
like Experian are involved in a completely different type of business whose
chief service is information management and secure distribution among a network
of partners and clients. RTA must enable online access to detailed customer
insurance related information in an online format that would allow it the
maximum flexibility in creating new information applications to be used through
secure online connections. The best way to do that was to use XML on the legacy
source. XML involves putting tags around particular types of fields within
information generated from a database so that those tags can then be later
referenced in ASP, JSP, and other web application development languages so as
to be able to create information applications that query, sort, manipulate,
update, add, and/or delete information as required by the business rules of
that particular application. This work is mostly done in the back end (legacy,
servers, etc.) and through the middle tier (ASP, JSP, HTML, etc.). This project
also included an extensive front end design process than included content
developers, technical writers, web/graphic designers, as well as information
designers. These groups of people heavily interacted with the business managers
of RTA to ensure that the initial systems as well as the generations of secure
online applications they were creating were on par with expectations. Usability
specialists were on hand throughout the development process as well as
throughout project completion. It is assumed that usability testing would be
maintained throughout the full life cycle of the new system. There were
additional features included in the project ranging from self service web
publishing capabilities and web statistics.
"The
answer, Marino's group realized, was to build a knowledge management portal on
the corporate intranet. A KM portal is a single point of access to multiple
sources of information and provides personalized access. Companies are starting
to pay attention to portals because they offer an efficient way to capture
information, says Carl Frappaolo, executive vice president and cofounder of the
Delphi Group, a consultancy in
I
am not sure that there was a clean synchronization between the RTA legacy
systems and web server was implemented according to reliable security
standards. It seems to me that the overall result was a semi-automated system.
I believe that the project should have been successfully completed without too
many unnecessary costs while achieving real-time updateability between the
legacy systems and the web. It did not seem that the first generation of this
project had too may calculators or other interactive content that would have
demanded very skillful middle tier-programming. This project could have been of
the magnitude of Experian which shares confidential credit information online through
a variety of channels and that has developed a suite of online analytical
applications for its network. Regardless, unlike prior to project completion
the porting of information into the browser based world has made it possible
for RTA to develop a variety of customer applications fairly cheaply with low
cost of ownership for the foreseeable future.
Despite
the precarious nature of implementing massive IT change Frito Lay and RTA, an
Australian Insurance company, were able to successfully negotiate the high
costs and risks involved with large IT overhauls into successful completion
resulting in significant tangible returns on investment. Part of their success
was their determination to sensibly leverage components of their existing
architecture thus reducing costs of a complete IT overhaul and providing value
added services already in demand by their customers.
I. Works Cited
Girling,
Bill, Aiken, Peter. Presenting:
An Integrated Data, Systems, and Process Reengineering Case Study. VCU.edu 2007
Robertson,
James.
Knowledge
management project for Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA)., 2001.
Shein,
Esther
The
Knowledge Crunch. CIO Magazine, 2001.
II. Works Consulted
Girling,
Bill, Aiken, Peter. Presenting:
An Integrated Data, Systems, and Process Reengineering Case Study. VCU.edu 2007
Robertson,
James.
Knowledge
management project for Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA)., 2001.
Choo,
Chen Wei. The
Knowing Organization. 1999.
Shein,
Esther
The
Knowledge Crunch. CIO Magazine, 2001.
Eveland,
JD. Glue, Lube, and Money:
Alternative Metaphors for Making Sense of Organizational Information and
Communication.
Cunningham,
Darren.
The Burden
of Trusted Information. DM Review Magazine 2005
Anonymous. The politics of information
- Logistics Information Management.
Schuman,
Evan.
The CIO Who
Admitted Too Much. Ziff Davis 2005
Finney,
Russ.
The Politics
of Information and Projects. Itmweb.com 2007
Strassmann,
Paul.
The Politics
of Information Management Policy Guidelines. Infoeconomics.com 2004
Iacocca,
Lee.
Iacocca – An
Autobiography. Bantam Books 1984
Ansoff,
Igor.
Corporate
Strategy. McGraw Hill, 1963
Alfred, Alfred. My Years with General Motors. Currency
Doubleday, 1963.
Jackson,
Tim.
Inside Intel. 1997.
Gates,
Bill
Business at
the Speed of Thought. Warner Books, 1999.