Management Challenges
- Agreeing requirements. These need to be formally agreed
to prevent misunderstandings and project creep. Requirements will
be informed by business plans.
- Changes in business processes.
- Co-ordination of development and releases.
Some key terms:
Core Systems: Systems
supporting the core business processes.
Cooptation: Bringing
opponents into the design process, giving them an emotional stake
in the success of the plan.
Legitimacy: The
extent of one’s authority.
Interoperability:
The ability of different systems to work together. Legacy systems
may have difficulty exchanging data with other systems. Middleware
systems can over come these issues. Distributed computer systems can
operate together as a single system.
Considerations
- Taxes
& tariffs
- Network
management (including capacity & security)
- Quality
of support services
- Regulatory
/ legal constraints
- Changing
user requirements
- Different
technical (business & IT) standards in different parts of the
organisation.
- Co-ordination between different sites and departments.
There may also need to co-ordination with external organisations
(see Trans-Enterprise Systems, below).
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Enterprise Systems
Historically many companies have developed the
IT infrastructure for each department or function within the company
separately. With the development of more distributed technologies,
such as Remote Method Invocation (RMI) for Java, it is possible to
develop enterprise systems. Such enterprise systems can comprise a
modular whole. Business processes and discrete units of business logic
can be represented using Enterprise Java Beans (EJBs). Each EJB containing
(encapsulating) a specific piece of business logic. Enterprise computing
in this way allows for management interrogation of processing, allowing
an overview of the organisation to be much more readily obtained.
Key Considerations
- IT Infrastructure: What are the current IT
systems (software, hardware, networks)? Does the IT infrastructure
allow for the required changes? Will it have to be changed? If so,
how will the changes be implemented?
- IT Investment Portfolio: What is the organisations
capital investment on IT? Is it too much or too little? What are
competitors doing?
- Business Logic: Business Analysts must define
current business processes and help identify future requirements,
providing a starting point for future change. On a strategic level:
what are the longer term aims?; How is the organisation going to
maximise performance (profit) in the future?
Another consideration
that sometime occurs is the integration of new parts to the organisation
in the event mergers and acquisitions.
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Trans-Enterprise Systems
These are systems, also known as industrial networks,
linking together two or more companies. These may be within the same
industrial group or they may simply be separately owned. The aim is
to provide a strategic advantage that benefits all the companies involved
against their competitors. Such systems are often a form of distributed
computing, using technologies such as Java and XML. Often the term
extranet is used to describe these networks.
by
Matthew Martin
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