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Business Process Elicitation, Modeling, and Reengineering: Teaching and Learning with Simulated Environments

1. INTRODUCTION Enterprise information systems are a class of information systems used to integrate business processes and data across the various departments within an organization and with its external organizations such as suppliers and customers (McGauhey and Gunasekaran 2007). Contrary to functional silo systems that cater to activities (e.g., payroll) within specific departments (e.g., accounting), enterprise information systems enable business processes (e.g., order fulfillment) that cut across various departments (e.g., sales, warehouse, production, and accounting) such that the focus is on the end-to-end business process. Enterprise systems packages such as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft comprise several modules such as human resources, financials, human resources, productions management, and project management (Strong et al. 2006) as opposed to functional silo systems that may be developed or sourced according to specifications. The philosophy of enterprise information systems imposes certain approaches to the design of enterprise information systems. First, the emphasis of enterprise systems is on business processes, which are essentially "horizontal" activities spanning multiple departments within organizations such that multiple stakeholders lay claim to those activities (Barua, Ravindran, and Whinston 2007). Students need to develop skills for tracing business processes across various departments and stakeholders within organizations rather than focus on activities within specific departments. Second, enterprise systems are used to integrate and standardize business processes and data within organizations that hitherto were organized as silos with little cross-functional synergies and typically familiar to only the relevant stakeholders (Fupl et al. 2007). Students need to learn how to elicit knowledge of activities and data from multiple stakeholders contributing to any business process to truly understand the entire scope of business processes. Finally, the implementation of enterprise systems often involves changes to existing business processes within organizations to accommodate the native processes built into enterprise systems packages (Shang and Seddon 2007). Students should develop appropriate skills to elucidate and map the roles, responsibilities, and activities within existing business processes, identify information-related and process-related problems underlying the existing business processes, and reengineer the existing business processes by excluding, including, or synthesizing roles, responsibilities, and activities. To successfully design enterprise information systems then, students would need to master a unique set of technical and soft skills (e.g., Davis and Woodward 2006). * Technical skills include the ability to recognize and trace business processes that are horizontally embedded and across departments within organizations, identify activities and data isolated within different departments and determine how they are related to business processes, document and map the "as is" (i.e., current or existing) business processes, determine the information- and process- related problems underlying the existing business processes, reengineer existing business processes such that the information- and process-related problems are addressed, and design an integrated and centralized data model that can support the "to be" (i.e., new or reengineered) business processes. * Soft skills may be viewed as the communication and interpersonal skills required to elicit the activities performed by different stakeholders in support of the business process, verify the process models with stakeholders, and determine any problems with the process experienced by stakeholders--all of which need to be accomplished through dialogue with stakeholders through mechanisms such as interviews, presentations, panels, focus groups, and observation. The challenge for teachers is to set up learning modules that will allow students to develop and hone their technical and soft skills to tackle the "open-ended" problems related to enterprise information systems design. …