CMISS Development Workshop Details


Facilitator:

Robert W. Zmud, Director of the MIS Division and the Michael F. Price Chair in MIS

Motivation & Objective:

The IT services industry has changed dramatically over the past five years. Global services outsourcing, Internet-enabled architectures, common business data/process software packages (e.g., ERP, CRM, supply chain, etc.), web-hosted technology and business process services (e.g., ASPs), and the increased capability/usability of packaged analysis systems (data warehousing, data mining, OLAP, etc.) provide both opportunities and challenges for IT-using organizations. In particular, much uncertainty exists today about issues such as the following:

• Do these changes in the IT industry represent short-term or long-term phenomena?

• Do these changes imply incremental or disruptive change in the manner by which IT services are provided?

• What should be the primary roles of an organization's IS groups (both the central group and those groups located in business units and/or divisions)?

• What is the nature of the IT skills and IT capabilities (both technical and managerial) that should reside (i.e., be nurtured and developed) within an organization rather than be acquired on an as-needed basis from service providers?

• What is the nature of the software assets that should be developed and evolved by internal staff?

• What is the nature of the hardware assets that should be operated and evolved by internal staff?
   

Workshop Process:

Definitive answers to these important questions just do not exist at this point-in-time. In order to facilitate CMISS members to better address these issues within their own organizations, we propose to bring together 'senior thinkers' across the membership to jointly work through the changes that continue to occur, their impacts on organizations, and the implications of both these changes and impacts. We foresee participants moving through these issues in four stages of facilitated discussion:

• What are the most important changes that are occurring within the IT services industry and what does each change imply for the IT-using organization?

• What should be the primary roles of today's internal IT organization?

• What conditions/considerations determine which software and hardware assets should remain the province of the internal IT organization?

• Next steps for CMISS?
   

Workshop Outcomes:

The primary outcome of the workshop would be the production of a white paper that captures, synthesizes and summaries the learnings from the workshop. Other possible outcomes could include:

• The formation of one or more small 'working groups' to develop a particular topic further

• The design of a follow-up workshops on specific subtopics

• The design of research projects on specific subtopics