Speaking Notes

PADM 5500

October 21, 2009

Dr. Neubauer

WHERE WE ARE

• We have In the News reports scheduled this evening by Barbara West and Tejuanda Whitehead. I believe the following students may also be prepared to present In the News reports this evening: Jonica James, Cotyus Parks and Stacy Jones.
• NEXT WEEK we have In the News reports by Quanta Bell and Angela Carr
• I returned midterm examinations last week. If you were not here to get your exam back, please ask me.
• I would like receive the knowledge management assignment this evening. This was the knowledge management assignment. It was not lab 2 although I think I accidentally identified it as such somewhere.
• We have only covered the first four chapters of each book so far. According to the course calendar we are suppose to be covering chapter 8 of each textbook this evening.
• For your Arena modeling project, IDENTIFY and DESCRIBE the existing process, produce an Arena model OF THE EXISTING PROCESS, and then SUGGEST an improvement in the existing system and explain what you think would be the benefit of the improvement.

BARRETT AND GREENE, CHAPTER 5 -- Who's in Charge?

The CIO is not just the head of the IT Department. The IT Director is probably already very overworked. There are limits to what one person can do. Ideally, STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP should be separated out from TACTICAL MANAGEMENT and the two areas of responsibility reflected in two positions.

Information is now considered as valuable a resource as is money. Most large organizations have a CFO. Likewise, it is becoming increasingly common to have a CIO.

Granted, most small cities and counties cannot afford to employ a professional CIO. Nevertheless, the recognition of the STRATEGIC IMPORTANCE of information management should be evident.

SOMEONE needs to be qualified to make strategic decisions regarding INFORMATION MANAGEMENT, and that is far more than how many computers (and what brand) to buy.

Who should the CIO report to? If he or she reports to an ELECTED EXECUTIVE, then it tends to become a political position. The old idea that there can be a clean separation between ADMINISTRATION AND POLITICS has fallen. Anyone employed by government is going to have to deal not only with "office politics" but real politics as well.

Most CIO's came up through the technical ranks. Such persons may lack advanced administrative and political skills. It is a rare person who can be a successful CIO.

In state and local governments the role of CIO is becoming more common and increasingly important. It is not an easy job. This is a POLICY LEVEL position and perhaps should not be held responsible for everything that happens at the operational level. But in a small organization people sometimes must "wear more than one hat."

STAIR AND REYNOLDS, CHAPTER 5 – E-Commerce (E-Government) and Transaction Processing Systems

When the Internet was invented for the military and a few lucky professors, they had no idea what it could become.

Under "no child left behind" are we partly outsourcing the education of our children to India?

Will it come to largely replace radio, television and the telephone; and transform the music and movie industries?

Will the internet evolve to change the structures of governments and perhaps even the meaning of democracy?

The same technologies (hardware and software) are being applied to both e-commerce and e-government.

E-commerce "models"

B2B

B2C

C2C

Basically in commerce you have supply chains among organizations and value chains within organizations.

In government (in the US) you have relationships among agencies based upon federalism and regional governance. Plus you have working relationships between agencies and nonprofit organizations.

Paper-based B2B systems are slow and costly. They cannot support lean "just in time" production systems. They are not agile in response to changes in the market. Older B2B electronic systems are based upon a technology called EDI (electronic data interchange). This is costly and not flexible. Web services and SOA (service oriented architecture) is probably the way of the future. This is kind of slow but it is much less costly and potentially much more flexible.

B2B is also likely to become more portal-based, just as B2C e-commerce already is. Basically we are talking about automating business processes both within organizations and between organizations that are strategic allies.

B2C commerce comes in three varieties . . .

• bricks only – real stores in the real world
• "bricks and clicks" – real stores supplemented by an online portal (or a portal supplemented by real stores)
• online only – no real stores

C2C is a situation in which a company facilitates communications or transactions among others (customers) and somehow has a business model that allows it to make some money without being directly involved selling things to customers.

B2B is primarily about saving costs. B2C is primarily about selling something.

E-government is primarily about saving money and making government services more easily available to citizens (or facilitating citizens solving their own problems without involving government employees.)

Government is largely about information.

I think we will see new kinds of payment systems on the Web, such as letting citizens of Florida pay for certain government services with Sunpass on the Web. We need a micro payment system for the web that gets us away from the attitude that so many things "have to be" free. Payments for "toll sites" could be made easy and most people would not mind paying small change for premium sites if it was no hassle to make the payment.

Transaction processing systems support processes within organizations and between strategic partners. They can also extend out to include customers.

Internet – "the big one"

Intranet – "the small one in our organization that works like the big one"

Extranet – "our letting selected others have access to parts of our intranet"

sales portal – the way retail customers can buy things from us

ERP's (Enterprise Resource Planning systems)

These are large, modular "do it all" information systems for organizations.

They generally one on one big enterprise-wide database.

They are very expensive and to my knowledge are still based on legacy technologies.

They are difficult and costly to customize.

WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF E-COMMERCE, E-GOVERNMENT AND TRANSACTION PROCESSING SYTEMS?

• more flexible?
• lower cost?
• more modular?
• easier to "mix and match?"
• smaller, more specialized organizational units?
• more empowered citizens, less dependent upon government employees to get involved in their own "self government?"

CHAPTER 6 OF BARRETT AND GREENE

What they mean by "standards" here is not exactly the same as what technical people mean by standards. To a technical person, a standard is a technical standard, such as the shape of a port or the voltage of an electronic part.

This chapter is more about "business architecture" and the degree to which some central authority forces all the departments to buy the same kinds of hardware and software.

For example, in Georgia all the state universities are required to use WebCT.

These are some of the benefits of "standardization."

• minimize training costs
• help insure systems work together
• bulk purchase discounts

Here are some of the problems with "standardization."

• yet another source of central bureaucracy
• possible failure to accommodate specialized needs and preferences
• if a vender goes out of business, you may be sunk (for example, Wang)
• possible lack of competitive pricing
• possible inability to adopt innovative new things

I suppose requiring every city or county to use the same ERP would be the ultimate form of "standardization."

The best ground is almost certainly, "in all things moderation."

So what do you do when someone insists that he or she must have Word Perfect? If the "middleware" exists to translate the resulting files, it may not be a big deal. If diversity interferes with the cooperation needed to get the work done efficiently, then it may well be a big deal.

Macs and PC's can coexist, although most businesses run on PC's. Macs are stronger in areas such as multimedia production.

STAIR AND REYNOLDS, CHAPTER 6

Structured and Unstructured Data (and related applications)

There are different kinds of Management Information Systems (MIS systems).

Systems using structured data are most useful for "street level bureaucrats."

Systems using unstructured data are most useful at the strategic (policy) level of the organization.

Computers are really good with structured data. They can be programmed to play chess because the rules are clearly known.

If the facts are not known, or the rules cannot be clearly stated, human judgment and intuition become necessary.

The distinction between data and knowledge

• data are facts
• knowledge is the aggregation of facts in a meaningful context
• relational databases are great for storing and retrieving data
• it is up to people to make the translation from information into knowledge
• Knowledge Management (KM) is about moving information in an organization into the minds of the people who need to know it. It is about shared situational awareness, for example.

OLTP and OLAP applications

• transaction processing systems support sequences of activities that happen many times over
• decision support systems are designed differently because they have a different purpose
• most relational databases support transactions. They are volatile and therefore must be designed for EASE OF UPDATE. For this reason, the design of them is HIGHLY NORMALIZED. In other words, there and many "skinny" tables and very little redundant storage of data among the tables.
• a DATA WAREHOUSE stores historic data for strategic DECISION MAKING purposes. Data warehouses tend to be VERY LARGE. Because they are so large, PERFORMANCE is more of an issue than is ease of update. To improve performance they are designed to be STRATEGICALLY DENORMALIZED. In other words, there is some redundant storage of data so that the computer does not have to work so hard to answer a question.
• OLTP applications usually "run over" highly normalized relational databases.
• OLAP applications may "run over" strategically renormalized data warehouses.
• The data in a data warehouse comes from one or more OLTP systems and is usually updated once a day. The process is called an ETL. ETL stands for extraction, transformation and load. There is specialized software available to do this.

Document management systems

• this may just mean scanning paper documents into .pdf files for storage and retrieval
• this also may mean use of XML markup to store the data in documents in a way that computers can "understand"
• a document (form) is really just a complex data structure. XML is a good way to manage complex data structures using simple ASCII code. ASCII code is all characters.

Barrett and Greene, Chapter 7

The IT plan needs to fit into the business plan of the organization. If there is no business plan, how can there be a good IT plan?

Available technologies become available so fast, that future projections become fuzzy beyond about two years.

New political leaders may have new goals that affect IT plans. Term limits can also be a problem.

The strategic plan should answer, WHAT, HOW and WHY?

It should be easier to justify specific requests if ALIGNMENT with the strategic plan is evident.

The long-term plan probably should be reviewed and updated at least annually. In should be a "living document."

If the CIO is "just" a technical person, there is a serious problem.

Stair and Reynolds, Chapter 7

The two major programming languages of artificial intelligence are Lisp and Prolog.

SWI-Prolog program for Windows from University of Amsterdam is available at this URL.

http://www.swi-prolog.org/download.html

Here is a very small practice Prolog knowledgebase.

capital_of(atlanta,georgia).

capital_of(tallahassee,florida).

located_in(athens,georgia).

located_in(X,Y) :- capital_of(X,Y).

You can run the following queries against it.

capital_of(X,Y).

capital_of(X,georgia).

capital_of(athens,georgia).

located_in(atlanta,georgia).

The beauty of it is that given the FACTS and the RULES in the Prolog knowledgebase it can produce the answer to the last query even though it does not have that particular fact. How does it do this?

For more information on artificial intelligence, see the following URL.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/

voice recognition

command

discrete

continuous

rule-based expert system

artificial neural network

genetic algorithms

fuzzy logic (crane example)

knowledge acquisition from experts

tacit and explicit knowledge

system modeling and simulation

http://www.umar.biz/pdfs/Simulation_Modeling_in_Arena_for_BU395.pdf

Stair and Reynolds, Chapter 8 – Systems Development

It is often not possible for an organization to buy the software it needs OFF THE SHELF and going with an ERP is either not desired or not possible.

There are two major ways for an organization to obtain customized software for its needs.

• Hire consultants to create the new software.
• Have in-house programmers create the new software.

There are potential problems either way.

• You may not want to share information and data with consultants.
• You may not want to enter into a long-term working relationship with consultants.
• You may not have the necessary programming expertise on payroll.
• You may not have the budget or the long-term need to add additional programmers on payroll.

EITHER WAY, you and some of your fellow employees are likely to become involved in the ANALYSIS necessary to build a new software application.

If this is a major project, be sure your have a qualified PROJECT MANAGER. This person probably has a programming background and also has the skills to participate in BOTH ANALYSIS AND DESIGN and to manage the project.

Get some "real" END USERS involved. There are at least two good reasons to include end users.

Have a DEVELOPMENT METHODOLOGY for the entire SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT LIFECYCLE (SDLC).

The SDLC lasts a long as the resulting software if being used. It may take 12 months or more to do the ANALYSIS, DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION, TESTING, AND DELOYMENT.

One approach is called the WATERFALL METHODOLOGY. The "spirit" of this approach is, "no going back." The major problem is that it is not agile enough and it delays testing until all the code is written, which is VERY RISKY.

PROJECT INITIATION

ANALYSIS OF THE NEEDS

DESIGN OF THE SOLUTION

IMPLEMENTATION (WRITING CODE)

TESTING

DEPLOYMENT

MAINTENANCE

MAINTENANCE includes "bug fixes" and addition of features as it becomes necessary to add features. MAINTENANCE IS THE MOST COSTLY PART OF IT!

The newer approach is called the ITERATIVE INCREMENTAL methodology.

Representation of the Iterative-Incremental Methodology

source: Rational Software Corporation (now part of IBM Corporation)

This is the MORE MODERN and BETTER approach and is possible in large part because of the OBJECT-ORIENTED programming paradigm.

PROGRESS is measured by the completion of PHASES which are broken down into multiple INTERATIONS. There is a MILESTONE at the completion of every PHRASE.

At the end of every iteration you should REFACTOR all the artifacts of the project.

Your development team can be doing multiple kinds of work at the same time. It is not necessary to finish one kind of work before going forward to the next.

You can accommodate (reasonable) CHANGE REQUESTS while still in development.

You start writing code and testing code quite early along the way.

You can begin to deploy in BETA while still completing the programming and testing.