IMPLEMENTING A MANAGEMENT-DIRECTEDINFORMATION SYSTEM

摘要

The CEO of the University Research Foundation (URF), Dave Norton, decided to sponsor an informationrnsystems (IS) development project to facilitate automation of discovery disclosure tracking. Discovery disclosurernis the process at URF that tracks establishment and progress of funded (federal grants and contracts)rninventions, innovations, and discoveries made by principle investigators (Pis). Dave made this decision becausernthe legacy IS didn’t work well with the existing discovery disclosure process. That is, managers couldn’t relyrnon the quality and accuracy of the information requested from the legacy IS. The reason being that the legacyrnIS was not integrated nor synchronized with the tracking process. Moreover, managers had great difficulty evenrnobtaining the information they required from the legacy system because the interfaces and applications werernnot “manager friendly” and the IS people were not used to fulfilling the business needs of the organization.rnAs a result, managers had to physically track down principle investigators to obtain information about theirrnprogress and the status of their contracts and grants.rnDave Norton approached us because he had heard that we were working on a novel information system calledrnprocess manager technology (PMT). PMT is based on a tree-based architecture that utilizes a relationalrndatabase and a directory system to facilitate automation of business processes. The database stores relationalrnrecords while the directory stores profile information. PMT uses a tree traversal approach (similar to directoryrntraversal upon which UNIX/Linux is built). PMT is designed so that a non-technical person can either workrnwith a designer or design a process or set of processes. PMT allows the designer to set up a set of actions atrneach stage of a process. The catalyst for the actions is based on a question or set of questions at each node ofrnthe tree. The actions can be calculations, queries to a database, searches in a directory, and/or asking anotherrnset of questions. The actual user of the system (once the processes are designed using PMT) then moves throughrnthe trees based on his or her answers to the questions presented. Since PMT is designed to work with arncentralized database and directory, everyone in the organization is traversing the processes (implementedrnthrough a series of tree decisions) in the manner intended by the designer. The real value of PMT lies in itsrnability to enable actual processes to be readily built into the system. The manager who best understands thernprocess either builds the trees with PMT or works directly with a designer to build the trees. No programmingrnis involved.rnAlthough we were responsible for the development and implementation of PMT, we are researchers at heart.rnTo satiate our research inquisitiveness, we embarked on a case study with the URF to document how a novelrninformation system can automate information flow and streamline inefficient business processes. The researchrnmethodology chosen was the action research approach as the researchers along with three additional partiesrnwere intimately involved with the development and implementation of the novel information system, PMT. Therngoal of the PMT project was to automate discovery disclosure tracking.