In response to increasingly heated global competition, organizations today are undergoing massive transformations in the way they are structured, managed, and operated. In focusing their attention on their customers, many organizations are redesigning business processes to deliver products and services more effectively. The effective use of information technology to support these processes has, for most, become critical.
Transformation, however, is not a one-time event. Organizations of today and tomorrow must be flexible and nimble enough to redefine themselves easily and often. Unfortunately, an inability to develop or change their information systems quickly is proving to be a serious bottleneck to widespread and ongoing change.
Until now, there have been two primary approaches to systems development — build or buy. Our research over the past two years suggests that a third alternative is emerging: the “template” approach. Combining most of the best aspects of the other two, the template approach can enable organizations to both develop and change systems faster. Templates are existing systems, built with the aid of computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tools, that are changed at the design level and thereby customized for a new organization’s use. CASE tools are computer-based tools that help developers build systems; essentially, they are CAD/CAM for systems developers.
In this paper, we discuss how three organizations used the template approach. All three significantly reduced both the time and cost of... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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