Question

find an example of an organization that introduced new technology and systems in order to effectuate changes in business processes, enhancements, and productivity gains

(answer as many questions as you can):

(1) What set of business problems was the organization trying to address?

(2) How did the organization go about assessing the information requirements of the new system? What level of involvement, if any, did the end users have in the development of the new system?

(3) What solution did the organization choose to implement? Was it developed in-house or purchased from an external source?

(4) What business process changes resulted from the implementation of the new system?

(5) What level of risk was presented by the proposed organizational changes?

(6) From the readings in your text (starting on page 490), which one of the four kinds of structural organizational changes, enabled by this technology, best describes your case study?

(7) In the final analysis, did the new system and the associated organizational changes result in any process/quality improvements? How were these improvements measured? Or did this initiative fail to achieve the desired outcome? Why?

Answer 1

I would like to cite an example from my workplace which is a multinational publishing company. The company publishes scholarly journals to benefit the medical and research fields. In order to effectuate changes in business processes a new technology and system in the process. The new technology and system change was done to improve productivity and Impact Factor (IF) of the journals. The journals’ publication speed was increased.

1. Since the competitors focused on faster publication, my publishing company took up a new technology called ‘Article Based Publishing’ (ABS) for faster publication. The regular publishing took 28 days wherein the ABS publishing eliminated the redundant steps and the articles were published lesser than 28 days. Thus, reducing time and cost.
2. The organization went about assessing the information requirements of the new system through collaboration and interaction of the application team. The feasibility of the system was studied by the application and the project team. The teams also assessed the information requirements before the new system was concepted or developed. A survey and feasibility analysis was made to assess the information requirements. The end users (Journal Managers) are to assign the articles ready to be published in the new ABS system. The publisher provides topics (if any) to assign the articles. If there are any misses, then it led to great consequences as the Journal Manager was answerable to the Publisher, Author and the Management team.
3. The organization chose to do a test of the new system with few journals which had a simple workflow. The concerned Journal Managers were called-in for training on the new system. Then, the project team developed the new system in-house for all the journals once they realized that the testing phase was successful.
4. The implementation of the new system changed the 28 hour publication to a faster publication to about 12-15 days and it further led to research on 24 hour publication.
5. The risk was that if any article was assigned incorrectly, then the consequences were great. If any article with copyright issues was assigned, then it would be online immediately thus posting legal threats to the company and the author.
6. The kind of structural organizational change enabled by technology that best describes the case study is Business process reengineering wherein the business process was analyzed, simplified and redesigned to reduce business cost and time considerably.
7. In the final analysis, the new system resulted in process and quality improvements as the proof reading was started off much earlier than in regular publication. These improvements were measured by taking the statistics of queries and errors for the articles assigned in the new system. The new system was successful and achieved its purpose.