Business Information Systems

Not every one of the visitors of your new project blog sites will be as awed as the fine young man in the picture. But the truth is: until you show your stuff to strangers, you won’t know! You’ve worked hard on your sites but when you’re on a project for a while, you don’t see the wood for the trees anymore – it’s important that you bring in some outsiders to look at your tackle and size it up, give you ideas about missing links, missing information, design flaws, content glitches – and also in order to plain tell you how awesome your work is! (See here for usability testing tips.)

An interesting article appeared in Knowledge @ Wharton today making the point that e-commerce gets more personal in the age of mobile networks. Though none of you are trying to sell any products over your sites, you’re all in the e-commerce of information and many of the inferences of this article apply. It also says that ‘focus groups’ are overrated, measurements however aren’t: begin to look at those numbers Google Analytics surprises you with (see our student module, too)!

So get up and do those usability tests with friends, family, strangers, if you haven’t done them! You’ll be thinking about presenting your project sooner than you know it – the next three weeks will fly by, they always do at this time.

HWR inside view: "You'll learn process modeling or you'll eat my spinach, dammit!"

As a deepening follow-up to my last post on blog organisation, please use this week to take a look at Bruce Spear’s article “Multi-dimensional WordPress”, which argues convincingly using many examples and illustrations in favor of turning blogs from a one-dimensional “journal with links and pics” into a story on the page. Since we finally started with business process modeling (BPM), please read the seminal article by Tom Davenport which is contained in your reader, for next week. We’ll use the expert map method to unlock the secrets of this paper.

After taking a look at MS Visio, a simple drawing program, this week and experiencing – via the “biography” exercise – how different process maps can look like without an agreed grammar, we will turn to Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) (see example below) as a simple and yet powerful way to model processes, which is also the basis of the process language used in the design of SAP, one of the most widely used Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems.

EPC example of a simple ordering process - devil's in the detail.

And lastly: your individual blogs. Some of you were concerned this morning that you have not had feedback from me. Now, the main feedback, in such a large group of bloggers, should come from your peers – as you will remember, you are supposed to leave at least one comment per week on the blog of another student from this course, preferably not the same student time and time again. I will make sure to get to your blogs in the course of the next few weeks at least once before the final evaluation via – must I spell it out – the rubric! Hope this helps!

We’re not doing too great with our regular course work, partly because of the combination of bank holidays and sickness…but we’ll get there. Your student projects on the other hand are coming along really nicely. I am dying to see how they’ll look like in a couple of months. But for now, we need to take another look at the organising basics:

The illustration shows six different, important dimensions of your blog. How much you emphasise each (or more than one) of them decides which message your blog will send – and it allows you to stir your readers’ expectations. Read more »