Case Study:
Instructions: Answer each question thoroughly.
1. For years, broad surveys have reported surprisingly high rates of ERP project failures. In a survey exploring the nature of these failures, Panorama Consulting Solutions, an ERP systems integrator, found that in 2013, over 50 percent of ERP projects experienced cost overruns, and over 60 percent experienced schedule overruns. Even worse, fully 60 percent of the survey respondents reported receiving under half of the expected benefit from their ERP implementation. Only about 8 percent reported receiving 80 percent or more of the expected benefit from their new ERP system. Clearly, ERP implementations are prone to difficulties and delays, but the reasons behind the problems are difficult to pinpoint. Some recent epic failures include Hershey's, Waste Management, and the U.S. Navy.
a.) Develop a story of any two recent ERP implementation failures.
b.) What caused the project to fail? What could have been done differently?
c.) What are the payoffs from taking a multidisciplinary approach to an ERP implementation?
d.) Discuss how the Panorama survey might look in 5 years and 10 years from now. Will success rates improve? Get worse? Why?
2. Search the Web for recent articles on business process management and related approaches (e.g., business process reengineering) for improving organizations. What is the current state of the art for these approaches? To what extent are these "headlines" about IS implementations, especially regarding enterprise systems? Search the Web for recent stories about the use of cloud-based ERP systems. To what extent does it appear that cloud-based ERP systems will be replacing traditional ERP systems?
3. Discuss the ethical trade-offs involved when using large databases that profile and categorize customers so that companies can more effectively market their products. Think about products that are "good" for the consumer versus those that are not.
4. Describe your experiences with information systems that were undergoing changes or updates. What kind of conversion procedure was being used? How did this affect your interaction with the system as a user? Who else was affected? If the system was down altogether, for how long was it down? Do you or any of your classmates have horror stories, or were the situations not that bad?
5. Examine the Bowie State University's Web site to identify examples where a knowledge management system could be used or is being used to help provide improved services to students.