Speaking Notes

PADM 5500

November 18, 2009

Dr. Neubauer

WHERE WE ARE

• Course term paper is due this evening.
• We may have some late "In the News" reports this evening.
• Study suggestions for the final are available as a link from our course home page.
• I plan for the meeting on Dec. 2 to be a brief class meeting in which you all can ask questions regarding course materials. I will then dismiss all students other than those scheduled to graduate this semester. I will not take attendance on December 2.
• All other students are to take the final examination on December 9 during our class meeting.
• You will each receive full credit for lab assignments 2 and 3 and for the online discussions to discussion board. There was no labs 2 and 3 because of technical problems in the new lab. I did not implement an online discussion board as I intended to.

BARRETT AND GREENE CHAPTER 9 -- OUTSOURCING

IT services are frequently outsourced to venders and consultants because IT professionals are expensive to hire and the need for specialized services may not be continual.

ONE OR MANY VENDERS? Getting locked into only one vender (especially for a long-term contract) can be like a bad marriage. On the other hand, having contacts with multiple venders may be difficult and costly to manage. Multiple venders may try to shift responsibility to others.

Shorter term contracts may be better, especially if future budgets are up in the air.

Do try to keep at lease some IT professionals on payroll.

BARRETT AND GREENE CHAPTER 12 -- About Agency Web Sites

This is neither small, simple or cheap.

Site should be organized from the perspective of a user.

You cannot assume that people will enter from the home page.

EASE OF USE is a big thing. There should be a deliberate INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE. Search is an important feature. A SITE MAP can also help.

There is a need for POLICIES regarding how the site is to be maintained. TOO MANY COOKS IN THE KITCHEN is the road to "Page not found" and other problems.

HOSTING is an important issue. I suggest EXTERNAL HOSTING unless the organization is large enough to support a well qualified IT staff.

People have different BROWSERS and use different SCREEN RESOLUTIONS.

ADA compliance is important but is not always done.

Old pages should be removed but without breaking links.

A well-designed directory structure on the WEB SERVER will help.

Be concerned about SECURITY, PRIVACY and COPYRIGHTS.

Online marketing is a whole new ballgame. GOOGLE is rich because of their innovative marketing strategies.

CHAPTER 17 -- THE CRYSTAL BALL

It will become increasingly difficult to secure employment for people who cannot learn and adapt to automated business processes.

We are still working through the difficulties with major new systems such as ADP for payroll processing.

Increasingly, the business processes of organizations will be largely composed of SERVICES that can be outsourced to small highly specialized companies. Instead of OUTSOURCING entire processes we will be outsourcing parts of our major processes to others.

Cloud computing is likely to become increasingly common as "cloud providers" create secure and dependable server farms.

TRAINING and HELP DESK services will become increasingly important as organizations continually upgrade and (hopefully) improve their automated business processes.

The human cultures of organizations may become more AUTHORITARIAN as processes become increasingly automated. We should guard against the "the machine made me do it" mentality. "Technocracy" may tend to replace bureaucracy as the thing that shapes the human cultures of organizations.

I believe the most successful organizations are the ones that intentionally emphasize human values while leveraging the benefits of IT systems.

We should avoid high-tech SWEATSHOPS. The industrial assembly line reduced many workers to "robots" because it was cheaper to hire humans than to build robots. We must take care not to create a society in which machines to "everything" except the particular things for which the human alternative is cheaper.

COURSE CONCLUSION

I hope that as a result of this course you have a better understanding of IT systems and how they work.

I hope you have a better understanding of the "politics and administration" of organizations that are highly dependent upon technology.

I hope you understand the two major models of the software development lifecycle.

I hope you will be a better manager of a government agency or nonprofit organization by having completed this course.