It’s the end of another semester, and that means it’s final project time for our undergraduate Systems in Organizations class. Our Systems class is a cool combo of process design, operations, and technology. By the end of the class, the students should have many tools, ideas, and techniques for making things work better in organizations.
Our projects this semester included:
- Reducing check-in delays at a downtown hotel
- Reducing the amount of expired product thrown away at a major beverage distributor
- Eliminating manual timesheet processing at a university cafeteria
- Reducing incorrect order entry at an Asian food manufacturer
- Improving the email capabilities of an online application system for a student organization
- Redesigning the USF dorm assignment process
- Improving pizza delivery with online service
- Addressing information access problems at the San Francisco Police Department
- Improving the language tutoring process
- Improving disabled access to ATMs
Click below to get short project summaries. Thanks to all the 308 students for putting up with the JP way! Read the rest of this entry »
The award-winning Internet Business Applications class for MBAs is gearing up for its third offering in Fall 2007. It’s been gratifying to hear how our alumni have used this class to create really interesting career opportunities for themselves. I hope to highlight some of these techno-Dons in future posts.
The class flyer is available online, but some have been asking for more details. The course will include these topics and skills:
- An overview of modern Internet applications, and their business significance
- A quick introduction to web pages and style sheets
- How to connect to outside web services (such as PayPal, Amazon, and Skype)
- Web hosting, FTP, and domain name registration
- Google AdSense and Analytics
- How to create and manage sophisticated websites without programming, using CMS (Content Management Systems)
- Launching a WordPress blogging/community site, and customizing with freely-available themes and plugins
- Launching a more sophisticated CMS-driven website, using either Drupal or Joomla
- Using other important open source application categories, such as CRM (vTiger), forums (phpBB), wikis (MediaWiki), e-commerce (OS Commerce), and education/training (Moodle)
- Online collaboration services, and community management basics
- Podcast/video creation, RSS newsfeeds and syndication
- Virtual world (e.g., Second Life) business applications
Please consider joining us! No programming or previous techie experience required.
The CIT (Center for Instructional Technology) Innovation Award celebrates the “excellent use of technology in education” at USF. One of the 2007 awards honored the use of wikis, open source, and podcasting at the business school. The India tour wiki and the MBA podcast series were singled out for special praise.
The 2007 CIT Innovation Awards.
Thanks to all the hard-working USF students who made this possible. I wish I could share the award check with each and every one of you!
A draft version of a new position paper, “Web 2.0: A social informatics perspective“, is now available online. Any actual intelligence on its pages is the product of my co-authors Howard Rosenbaum and Pnina Shachaf, both at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University.
We’ll be presenting the paper at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) in Keystone, Colorado.
While you’re probably familiar with Web 2.0, you might not have heard of social informatics. Social informatics (SI) is an academic specialty that cuts across business, information science, and computer science. SI research looks at how technology design and use are affected by society, culture, and institutions.
When revolutionary new technologies emerge, the usual assumption is that technology will cause social and organizational change. SI argues it’s a two way street. Existing business practices, institutions, professions and culture don’t just sit back passively and let changes happen–they shape outcomes, and even the technology itself.
The paper has a short review of academic research on Wikipedia, which is interesting and growing.
It will be fascinating to watch the ‘people power’ revolution of Web 2.0 hit the complexity of large corporations, government agencies, and different national cultures.
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 