Enterprise Systems and Information Management (Autumn 2024)

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

There are no formal prerequisites for this course.

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
• Assess the business value and environmental impact of a proposed IT solution.
• 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.

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.