Enterprise Systems and Information Management (Autumn 2023)

Abstract

Contemporary organizations critically rely on enterprise systems to support their business processes. In this course, students learn to analyze work systems in organizations and to identify ways for improving them. Students acquire these skills by analyzing a real-world work system and by gaining hands-on experience suggesting requirements for a sociotechnical system that supports the work system.

Description

The objectives of the course are to enable the student to analyse enterprise-level work systems (including activities and processes, the information involved in them, and types of enterprise software that support information management) and to help firms select and design enterprise systems to improve information management at an enterprise level.

Information management plays a key role in shaping business processes and organisational performance. Key challenges relate to how to capture, store and share information between the involved actors and across organisational boundaries. The ultimate goal is to provide up-to-date, reliable, and readily-available information to support collaboration, decision-making, and provision of quality services and products. A number of different types of enterprise systems are available for these purposes. To this end the course also aims to show how integrated processes create value, and demonstrate how these processes look in an enterprise system through hands-on lab exercises where students work with enterprise software products.

Formal prerequisites

This course is part of the third semester in the bachelor's degree in Global Business Informatics.

Intended learning outcomes

After the course, the student should be able to:

• Describe different types of enterprise and collaboration software and their role in supporting information management
• Describe work systems by using appropriate techniques (e.g. use case diagrams, entity relationship diagrams, requirements specifications)
• Analyze and transform work systems by identifying gaps in information requirements and by identifying changes that are suitable to address the gaps
• Create basic instances of enterprise software or collaboration software that address the information requirements in a given work system, either by developing apps or by configuring packaged software
• Apply research on enterprise software implementation to analyze cases of enterprise software implementation and to design effective implementation strategies supported by a business case.
• Conduct project work following academic standards taught in the course

Learning activities

The course is organised around a project on

• Information management challenges and enterprise systems solutions in business process innovation.
  
• The project is organised in smaller groups and aims to innovate a real-world business process in a specific business context through improved information management and enabled by specific systems solutions. Each group must analyse the as-is-process, diagnose information related challenges and options, and in conclusion provide recommendations for how to innovate the process through specific system options. The project is supported by lectures and readings on enterprise systems & information management. Each student will receive one grade based on the project report and an individual oral exam in which the student defends the report and engages in discussion of the readings related to the course.
  

Course literature

The course literature is published in the course page in LearnIT.

Student Activity Budget

Estimated distribution of learning activities for the typical student

• Preparation for lectures and exercises: 15%
• Lectures: 15%
• Exercises: 15%
• Project work, supervision included: 45%
• Exam with preparation: 10%

Ordinary exam

Exam type:
D: Submission of written work with following oral, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
D2G: Submission for groups with following oral exam supplemented by the submission. Shared responsibility for the report.

reexam

Exam type:
D: Submission of written work with following oral, External (7-point scale)
Exam variation:
D2G: Submission for groups with following oral exam supplemented by the submission. Shared responsibility for the report.

Time and date

Ordinary Exam - submission Thu, 21 Dec 2023, 08:00 - 14:00
Ordinary Exam Thu, 18 Jan 2024, 09:00 - 21:00
Ordinary Exam Fri, 19 Jan 2024, 09:00 - 21:00
Ordinary Exam Mon, 22 Jan 2024, 09:00 - 21:00
Ordinary Exam Tue, 23 Jan 2024, 09:00 - 21:00
Ordinary Exam Wed, 24 Jan 2024, 09:00 - 21:00
Ordinary Exam Thu, 25 Jan 2024, 09:00 - 21:00