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When:
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Mondays & Wednesdays, 11:00AM-12:20PM
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Where:
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HBH 1002
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Instructor:
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Office Hours:
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Almost any afternoon, by appointment
Schedule with my secretary |
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Secretary:
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| Course web site | www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut/orgcomputing |
Computers have been used in organizations since World War II. Their use has both intensified and changed in character in recent decades. For a typical firm, fully fifty percent of its capital investment goes into computers and telecommunications equipment. While early computers were primarily used for mathematical functions and accounting, they are now used for a much wider array of functions, including process control, development of new products, various forms of organizational communication and electronic commerce.
This course examines the introduction, diffusion, and use of computers and telecommunications in organizations from a social and managerial perspective. The course examines the enduring problems that information technology is designed to solve and some of the consequences of using it. The course conceives of information technology broadly, to include computers and telecommunications and organizational structure practices surrounding them. Both historical and contemporary examples will be used. By the end of the course, students should have a better understanding of the range of uses to which information technologies are put in organizations, the controversies surrounding their use, and the complexities involved in predicting their effects. The course is appropriate for three types of students: 1) those who expect to work in fields in which they create or manage computing systems; b) those with a research interest in organizational processes; and c) those who want to be able to participate knowledgeably in current debates on computing and information systems.
Attewell reviews evidence accumulated through the 1980 and early 90s suggesting that the nation's massive investment in information technology has not produced the productivity gains that investors hoped for. What is productivity? How do the data lead to conclusions about the failure of IT?
Many people who read about the productivity paradox have one of two responses: 1) It is OK if information technology (IT) hasn't improved productivity per se, since it has helped in so many other areas; or 2) the conclusion can't be correct, and probably the measures of productivity must be wrong. You should consider three groups of questions while doing readings for this class and the next: 1) Is productivity so important? 2) What are the appropriate measures for deciding whether investment in information technology has had a positive impact on productivity? What measures would you use in your company to decide whether a multi-million-dollar investment in IT is indeed paying off? 3) Assuming that the productivity impact is not as great as one would like, what factors decrease the productivity payoff for IT investment?
Different researchers present data at different levels of analysis: broad industrial sectors, particular industries, like banking, or particular operations, like machine cutting. Which level do you think is most appropriate to examine the productivity impact of IT?
A major course project will be investigating more effective ways to use information technology in the customer support group in a national bank. A liaison for Wachovia Bank will visit to lay out the issues. Neither of today's readings are about banking per se, but both give an idea of the work that service representatives do.
The goal of this session is to compare Attewell's analyses with other data from a similar period. Read 2 of the articles (to be assigned in class). Be prepared to report back to the class the main points and your opinion about the fit or lack of fit with Attewell's argument.
Can you reconcile the data that Morisi, Kelly, and Brynjolfsson present with Attewell's summary of the evidence about the productivity effects of computing and with the data we considered in class?
Much of the discussion about the productivity paradox revolves around issues of measurement. What is the appropriate measurement of productivity in service industries and in the articles you read?
Both researchers and managers argue that automating old routines without changing the way the work is done will not lead to improvements in productivity. What do you think are the important changes in work procedures that are needed?
While the Rule and Attewell article is dated, it provides a broad sample of the ways that firms use information technology. What are the most common uses? What do you see as the most important uses? Rule and Attewell distinguish between relatively routine uses and transformative ones. What kinds of uses do you think transform organizations? How has the range of uses changed since the mid-80s?
Businesses and government have long invested in technology to automate the counting of objects of interest (e.g., people, industrial accidents, orders, inventory, etc.) In what sense were the tabulating machines from the British census information technology? Why were they adopted? Were they transformative technologies, in Rule and Attewell's terms?
Why did the US and British experience differ so much in adopting technology for their censuses?
In Chandler's Restaurant, the kitchen staff and the dining room staff don't get along. What are the underlying causes of this "human relations" problem? Are there better ways of organizing the work so that it is satisfying to the workers and more efficient in terms of customer service and wasted food? Come to class with an analysis of the problems at Chandler's and a concrete plan to solve them, based on your analysis.
Other fast food cases (for background only, optional)
More recent information on Taco Bell's use of IT (for background only, optional)
One view of information systems (IS) is that organizations use them to reduce their defining uncertainties--about markets, production processes, personnel, the external environment, etc. What are the major uncertainties at a fast food company? How were the information systems used to resolve these uncertainties? What limits the extent to which organizations can reduce their uncertainties? What role does IS play?
Both Mrs. Fields and Taco Bell were early and heavy users of information technology. Compare the way that these two fast-food companies deployed information technology in the 1980s and 90s. Did they have different or similar problems to solve? How did the technologies they deployed fit with the problems of fast-food restaurants? Which was the better solution? Notice the way their technology influenced decision-making, organizational structure, managerial autonomy, and quality of work life.
The Barrett and Walsham article describes how fears about an electronic trading system in the London insurance market sabotaged its introduction. Is there anything inevitable that causes computing to degrade or enhance the quality of work life? What factors outside of the technology itself do you think determine whether technology will make work more or less interesting?
Optional
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) software is a set of applications that automate finance and human resources departments and help manufacturers handle jobs such as order processing and production scheduling. ERP systems such as SAP AG's R/3 are notoriously complex, and installing the software often forces users to change their internal processes.
For your restaurant assignment, you will analyze how the key uncertainties faced by a particular restaurant shaped its organizational structure and tools. By Sept 25, you must have identified the restaurant and the type of uncertainty you will analyze. Document this in a paragraph or two. For the full assignment (due Sept 20th) you will observe and interview relevant managers and staff and compare your chosen restaurant to others to assess how it has dealt with key uncertainties. Does this restaurant have similar problems to those at Chandler's Restaurant? What other uncertainties is the restaurant subject to? What influence does the information system have in changing these problems? Come to class prepared to describe the restaurant, the key uncertainties that it has, its information systems and how they are used, and its problems. A more complete description of the assignment is included at the end of the syllabus.
What led to the development of systems for organizational memory in DuPont and Scovill in the early 1900s? Why then? Why these particular forms--loose-leaf binders and vertical file cabinets?
Guest lecture: Wilpen Gorr
Capturing information isn't the only step necessary for making it available for managerial decisions. Representing it in an appropriate form is also important. What are the advantages and disadvantages of a geographic information system?
A subset of teams will present their findings and recommendations on uncertainty and information systems for a restaurant.
Alan Montgomery will guest lecture on online data mining for marketing.
Sproull and Kiesler argue that specific features of email change the way that people communicate using it. What are these features and how do they have their effects on human communication? To what extent is this a case of technological determinism, or are the ways that people use email just a stylistic convention?
One type of coordination gives people the freedom to make decisions as they want, but to eliminate some of the constraints in their traditional decision-making environments (e.g., by allowing them to make group decisions at a distance or slowly, over time). Another way is to constrain their decision-making processes (e.g., by introducing a computer skeptic who challenges their early decisions). What are the pros and cons of these approaches?
What are the features of the distributed teams that Cramtom and Maznevski studied which made work at a distance so difficult? As a manager or designer, what would you do to alleviate the problems?
Dawes shows that while people think they are using sophisticated decision-making rules, they would do better if they adopted simple linear models. People seem good at assessing data, but not combining it. Given this insight, how would you use an information system to help make employment decisions? If you were involved in an employment decision (either as an employer or candidate), would you want a computer involved?
The loan program used by Hibernia National illustrates a way to aggregate past information to influence current decisions. What are your ideas about the appropriateness of these methods, in terms of quality of work life, fairness and organizational efficiency?
Meet in Posner Hall (GSIA) 147 for a session using a GDSS system for brainstorming
When people get together in a meeting to brainstorm, they generate fewer and less creative ideas than they would if they worked separately and pooled their ideas after the fact. What characteristics of face-to-face communication account for this phenomenon? What features would you build into an electronic meeting system to overcome these problems?
Use the assigned readings to help understand how well people can predict the success and uses of new technologies.
What are the elements that make some innovations succeed and others fail? Apply this analysis to the failure of video telephony to succeed in the marketplace and the success of the Internet.
How does critical mass work? Does an increase in the number of users always result in a more useful technology?
Is there something else that government, big business or educational institutions should be doing to insure that a critical mass of Internet users can make the Internet valuable for electronic commerce?
In what interesting ways are businesses using the Internet for their businesses? Come to class with a URL showing a business that goes beyond advertising and electronic-catalog shopping. Be prepared to conduct a "guided tour" of your site, showing why it is interesting. What business model is it using?
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Assignment
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Due
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Weight
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Class participation
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Daily
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15%
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Quizzes
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Periodic
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10%
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| Final exam | TBD | 15% |
| Restaurant analysis | 15% | |
| Select the restaurant | Sept 25 | |
| Oral presentations & reports due | Oct 14 | |
| Essay - Information Policy | Oct 30 | 15% |
| Oracle or Wachovia consulting report | Dec 4 | 30% |
Grades are based on both individual and group assignments. Your individual grade for a group assignment will be the group grade, weighted by your team members' assessment of your contribution to the group product. Most groups report all individuals contributed equally. However, every semester at least one team has a free rider. If you find that a member of your team isn't pulling his or her weight, first have a forthright discussion with him or her. If that doesn't fix the problem, schedule an appointment for your team to meet with me to handle the problem. As a last resort, do the work yourself and give the slacker a zero for his or her contribution weight.
Class participation is a critical part of this course. As the instructor, I know the theoretical and empirical literatures and have had practical experience in several organizations in the American telecommunications industry and in the American university system. You will have your personal reactions to the course materials and collectively will have had experience with a wide range of organizations. The class discussions are designed to help you understand the material and apply it to real organizations. Each individual is expected to be actively involved in class discussion. Good contributions are thoughtful, analytical, timely, constructive to the group effort, topically relevant, and linked to the readings assigned for that day, while poor ones are redundant, take the discussion on a tangent, refer to issues we have already left behind, do not respect the other class members, or show you haven't done the assigned readings.
The assignment is due 10/30. You can do this assignment individually or with one other person.
You are an IS department head in a national Internet business. For the purposes of this assignment, the business can be in any area you wish (e.g., an Internet portal, like Yahoo; a auction site, like Ebay; an entertainment site, like Nickelodeon; a health site, like Dr Koop; etc.). In the post-dot-com era, your company could desperately use additional revenue. Your CIO has asked you to prepare a 3 to 5-page policy statement about how to use the Internet for marketing purposes in ways that meet business objectives but are also ethical. The audiences for the statement include company employees who write requirements and program the company's services, members of the marketing department, and the vendors who supply IS systems to the company. Include in your policy statement the goals you want to accomplish, guidelines that IS professionals should use to meet these goals, and outcomes or standards that would identify if they are achieving the goals or deviating from them.
Here are the elements you should include in your report:
(1) List a set of high-level goals you are trying to achieve with the policy statement (e.g., maximize revenue from customers, grow market share, retain customers, prevent abandonment of shopping carts, sell additional merchandise a customer already making a sale (cross-sell or up-sell)).
(2) List a small number of guidelines (4-10) that could inform stakeholders within the company about the features they could build or request in your application or the actions they could perform in fulfilling their mission.
(3) Justify each guideline that you propose. What would be gained from violating it and what from honoring it? How does the guideline meet your goals? Why did you select this guideline rather than another for meeting your high-level goals.
(4) Compare your guidelines with those your competitors are using.
(5) Where relevant, identify how your guidelines meet current state or federal regulation (or indicate if this isn't relevant).
(6) Identify a realistic business dilemma faced by the company (e.g., a decision to increase revenue by selling customer history data to relevant consumer companies). How would your guidelines apply? Some realistic business decisions are below. You need not be constrained by them.
a. Re-use for marketing purposes of information originally collected to customize the site for a particular subscriber,
b. Marketing via unsolicited email
c. Use of Doubleclick (http://www.doubleclick.com/us/) or similar data to place banner ads on subscriber's pages
d. Collection of data from children
e. Sharing of customer information with partner companies.
Like Chandler's Restaurant, every organization has a basic routine in which information and services must flow between groups in the organization. Many organizations use computerized information systems to smooth the flow. The goal of this assignment is to have you critically observe an organization, to identify the critical uncertainties that confront it, to identify its intraorganizational routines and to think about how to improve them. You will examine organizational routines in a food service establishment in the Pittsburgh area.
The owner asked you to help re-engineer the basic organizational routine in the establishment, in which managers predict demand and make resource decisions based on their estimates, customers order food, the kitchen prepares it, service personnel deliver it, and customers pay. Her objective is to get a handle on the bottlenecks and different perceptions of orders as they pass through the various parts of the restaurant. For example, in the customer service cycle, she is interested in knowing the answers to questions like these:
1. How long does it take to process an order at each stage?
2. How do different departments prioritize an order? What criteria are used?
3. What information can be unclear or missing on the order?
4. How does each group handle problems with an order?
5. Do different groups have a sense of the “whole system”?
6. How does each group filter the information?
7. What view of the customer does each group have?
There are different questions associated with the restaurant's ordering of inventory or with staffing.
The owner would like you to make recommendations on improving the organizational routine based on some data collection. She would like you to make recommendations on the following issues:
1. How effective is the routine?
2. What are the key strengths and weaknesses of the system?
3. What can go wrong and what are the typical ways that employees fix problems?
4. How can customer service be improved?
5. Are current uses of computing technology improving or hurting the process? Is there any way of using computers to improve the process?
1. Identify a restaurant you can get access to. You should discuss your choice with the instructor. Across the class as a whole, you will select a variety of types of restaurant--fast food, high end, food carts, catering. Even in a small restaurant there are a variety of routines you could explore, including: a customer ordering a meal to be eaten in the restaurant, a customer ordering a meal to go, the manager hiring new staff, the kitchen ordering perishable food, ordering of drinks at the bar, a purchase order at a small factory, opening a new account at a bank, or registration procedures at CMU. Try to pick a cycle that is not too complicated; even reconciling the perspectives of three departments is difficult, as the Chandler case demonstrated.
2. Describe the cycle in detail.
3. Evaluate the cycle using the owner's questions
4. Provide recommendations based on your evaluation.
Note that the Chandler reading is a variant of this assignment for a customer order in a restaurant.
The Financial Planning System at CMU is an Oracle-based system that records and provides reports on most aspects of the university's financial operations. A process improvement team is attempting to improve various aspect of the this system. Your term paper assignment is to conduct an analysis of one area where the Oracle system is being used. In this area, what is it doing well and where does it need improvement? Your assignment is to write a consulting report to the relevant person in the Oracle development/evaluation team with your findings and suggestions for improvement.
Notes for a short lecture on Oracle at CMU are available here.
Select an organizational process at CMU you'll want to investigate (e.g., planning a departmental budget, administering a grant, planning a renovation, hiring new staff) and the general analysis questions you'll be asking. The organizational process you choose should be one where Oracle currently does or could play a major role. Your ultimate goal is to make recommendations about how the use of Oracle in this process could be more effective. Select an interesting organizational process, where you will get to make insightful and original observations. Processes where information goes across different departments, groups, or functions within CMU are especially likely to be problematic and therefore should be interesting to write about. Another way to make the paper more interesting and to increase the likelihood of saying something new is to compare different ways the same process is done across two different parts of the University. For example, that Oracle might be used quite differently depending upon the training of the end users or upon the centralization of planning. Alternatively, you can compare variations on the process you've chosen (e.g., comparing how purchasing is done by specialized purchasing personnel versus non-specialists or how it is done for small versus large orders or for preplanned orders versus emergency ones) or how Pinciple Invesitagors versus Department Business Managers versus Program Heads use Oracle to plan budgets.
You might want to approach the problem as you approached the restaurant analysis:
Describe the financial process in detail. Here you should use formal documents, as well as interviews and observations from multiple informants. If you are examining grant administration, for example, you should be talking to the college's business manager most responsible for grants, and to various PIs, who are managing their grants. If you are looking at departmental or program budget planning, you should be interviewing business managers and department heads in multiple departments.
Evaluate the process and how Oracle is used in terms of criteria such as
- How long does it take to complete the process? Where are the bottlenecks?
- How do different departments/groups prioritize different elements of the process? What criteria are used?
- What information can be unclear or missing as data moves between departments/groups? How does each department filter information?
- What information is missing for planning purposes?
- How does each department/group handle problems with a transaction or the data?
- Do different departments/groups have a sense of the "whole system"?
Document your observations.
Make recommendations for improvement
Description of project will be provided during the first two weeks of class.
