Coursebooks

Enterprise and service-oriented architecture

CS-491

Lecturer(s) :

Wegmann Alain

Language:

English

Summary

In this course, we teach how to define the requirements for an IT service that would best serve the needs of an organization. The course is taught using a non-conventional style in which the students learn mostly through the stress of a series of concrete experiences that mimic real-life situation.

Content

The goal of this course is closely related to IT, but a substantial part the material is related to business, as well as to systems thinking. Even if some visual programming is taught, the course can be taken by non IT-students. The course can be especially useful for students interested in business analysis, IT consulting and in the specification part of IT development.

 

Detailed contents: 

 

1) Business Part (4 weeks): practical experimentation and theoretical understanding of the key business processes of a manufacturing company : tendering, product development, manufacturing, quality management and accounting.

 

2) Business / IT Part (7 weeks): specification of an IT application that provides after-sales service. We do a critical analysis of BPMN. We then teach the following techniques : interviews & contextual inquiry, analysis/design of the business services and of the IT services. The specified solution is implemented in a commercial tool (Software as a Service). The underlying theory to business and IT service design is system thinking.

 

3) IT Consulting and Strategy Part (3 weeks): IT strategy and its impact on technology selection, enterprise architecture to coordinate IT technology, tender process applied to IT development.

In this course, the students have to do a critical analysis of some "classics" of the IT litterature.

Keywords

Tender process, quotation, purchase order, leadtime, bill of material, development process, V process, spirale process, quality system, traceability, ISO 9000, financial statements, year-end book closing, ERP,

 

BPMN, business process reengineering, interview, contextual inquiry, business service, IT service, requirements engineeing, SEAM service modeling, SEAM motivation modeling.

 

Interpretivism, model / reality, homeostasis, appreciative systems

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, the student must be able to:

• Describe business domains (sales, engineering, manufacturing, quality, accounting)
• Coordinate reply to a tender
• Design quality system based on ISO 9000
• Analyze business stakeholder perceptions and motivations
• Assess / Evaluate existing business processes
• Conduct overall business/IT alignment project
• Design specifications of business services and IT services
• Implement prototype on a SaaS

Transversal skills

• Continue to work through difficulties or initial failure to find optimal solutions.
• Use both general and domain specific IT resources and tools
• Write a scientific or technical report.
• Collect data.
• Make an oral presentation.
• Summarize an article or a technical report.

Teaching methods

Experiential learning and group work

Resources

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)

No

Bibliography

ISO9001:2015 - available through SAGA via EPFL library

OMG (2004), Introduction to BPMN

Hammer M. (1990). reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate, Harvard Business Review, July - August

Regev, g. et al. (2016) What We Have Unlearned Since the Early Days of the Process Movement ?, Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling, 113-121

Beyer, H. R. and K. Holtzblatt (1995). "Apprenticing with the customer." Commun. ACM 38(5): 45-52.

Beyer, H. and K. Holtzblatt (1999). "Contextual design." interactions 6(1): 32-42.

Markus M.L., Keil M. (1994). If We Build It, They Will Come: Designing Information Systems that People Want to use, Sloan Management Review; Summer 1994; 35, 4; ABI/INFORM Global pg. 11

Regev, G. et al.(2013) What We Can Learn about Business Modeling from Homeostasis, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, 142, 1-15, 2003

Regev, G. et al.(2011) Service Systems and Value Modeling from an Appreciative System Perspective, Exploring Services Science, 82, 146-157, 2011

Carr, N. G. (2003). "IT Doesn't matter", Harvard Business Review

Zachman, J. A. (1987). "A framework for information systems architecture." IBM Syst. J. 26 (3): 276-292.

 

 

 

Ressources en bibliothèque

• Contextual design / Beyer