Page 42 - DCAP205_DCAP409_ANALYSIS_AND_DESIGN_OF_INFORMATION_SYSTEMS

Analysis & Design of Information Systems

Notes The Deming Cycle is a fractal. One cycle spawns others. The actions emerging out of the
‘Do’ step at a higher level of abstraction become the contents of the ‘Plan’ step of the next
lower level. For example, the ‘Plan’ of increasing market share at one level may spawn a
‘Do’ step of running a media campaign with a designated effectiveness. This becomes the
content for the ‘Plan’ step of the business process that will implement the campaign. Thus
the fractal chain is used at practically all levels in the organisation: Corporate, business
unit, business process or individual.
The Deming Cycle can be applied equally to a strategy or an operations problem. It can,
for example, be applied to the operational problem of cutting down the cycle time of the
new product development process. It can be applied equally to the strategic problem of
gaining market share by the addition of new features to a product that would change its
positioning in the marketplace.
Role of Enterprise Applications
The domain of Enterprise Applications is primarily the ‘Do’ and ‘Check’ steps. For the
greater part, ERP implementation has been an “equalising” effort rather than a
“differentiating” effort. A handful of discerning enterprises have used the strength of ERP
with the power of Business Process Redesign to develop signature processes that lead to a
distinct competitive advantage.

Business Intelligence extensions to Enterprise Applications, performance measurement
systems and their ilk assist management with the ‘Check’ step.
Retrospective Analytics work more at the ‘Check’ step than at the ‘Plan’ or ‘Act’ steps to
provide discernible patterns that might account for the gap between actual results and the
goals evolved during the Plan step. The emergence of Predictive Analytics is providing
the first glimmer of substantive assistance to managers, both at the Plan and Check levels.
Yet Predictive Analytics is incapable of using expert rules and heuristic reasoning.

Today’s Enterprise Applications concentrate on the Do and Check steps and offer scanty
support for the Plan and Act steps. Therefore, IT-enabled management is still not a closed-
loop system. However, the proposition of Enterprise Management Systems (EMS) will
permit the installation of a powerful, revitalised Deming Cycle.
Enterprise Management Systems

Enterprise Management Systems (EMS) are intelligent information systems that embed
specialist components to support the ‘Plan’ and ‘Act’ steps. An EMS consists of three principal
components:
Enterprise Applications (Transactions) that contain data relating to the thousands of
transactions by which an enterprise conducts its business Enterprise Applications (Business
Intelligence) that incorporate the power of both Retrospective Analytics and Predictive
Analytics that reveal patterns, both past and prospective, contained in the transaction layer.

Enterprise Planning Systems (EPS) that contain the knowledge base and the inference
mechanisms which act upon both transactions and patterns to generate alternatives for the
‘Plan’ and ‘Act’ steps.
EMS help management teams continuously evolve plans at the various levels of
management, such as corporate, strategic business unit, and business process. They support
the P-D-C-A fractal evolution and make IT-enabled management a closed loop.
The process of generating ‘Plan’ and ‘Act’ steps has to be understood from a computational
and reasoning perspective. Computational sciences, in general, and Artificial Intelligence
Contd.....

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