بررسی تاثیر سیستم کسب و کار الکترونیکی در یک محیط پیچیده سازمانی : در مورد ثبت نام پیمانکار مرکزی

This article describes an evaluation of how an electronic business (eBusiness) system affected the Defense Logistics Agency of the Department of Defense. It is a ‘deep dive’ into the details of one of three similar evaluations that were conducted. A case study approach is used to convey a sense of the interplay among the formal elements of evaluation (e.g. schedules, feedback), and the reality of evaluating organizational consequences of eBusiness systems in complex organizations. The article contains collective lessons learned which emerged from each of the three efforts, and shows how those lessons were applied to a specific eBusiness system.

The Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) coordinates a large volume of very complex transactions involving the transfer of both information and materiel. Two quotes from the DLA website provide a sense of this complexity: The DLA is a US DoD defense agency. The DLA Director reports to the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics through the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Logistics and Materiel Readiness). DLA provides worldwide logistics support for the missions of the Military Departments and the Unified Combatant Commands under conditions of peace and war. It also provides logistics support to other DoD Components and certain Federal agencies, foreign governments, international organizations, and others as authorized. DLA's origins date back to World War II when America's huge military buildup required the rapid procurement of vast amounts of munitions and supplies. A major initiative underway is Business Systems Modernization, a project that will replace DLA's mission critical legacy systems with a new enterprise architecture based on COTS software and best commercial practices (http://www.dla.mil/about.asp). Since its inception in 1961, the DLA has grown to become a worldwide logistics combat support operation. From its headquarters just outside Washington DC, DLA oversees a staff of more than 23,300 civilian and military employees who work in all 50 states and 27 foreign countries. It supplies almost every consumable item America's military needs to operate, from groceries to jet fuel. In short, if America's forces can eat it, wear it, drive it, shoot it, or burn it, chances are that the DLA helps to provide it. DLA also helps to dispose of material and equipment that is no longer needed. …DLA stands in the forefront of the revolution in electronic commerce and information management, making millions of critical supply items available to the forces worldwide at the click of a computer mouse (http://www.dla.mil/Trifold9-02.pdf).

In federal government settings there is a disjunction between an imperative to evaluate the impact of IT systems, and the lack of such evaluation activity. This lack is understandable because evaluating the impact of IT is not a straightforward exercise in drawing information from management information systems, or tracking a discrete set of metrics that are embedded in those systems. Rather, assessing the impact of IT innovation at levels below gross organizational functioning requires a great deal of detailed inter-organizational knowledge, excellent access to personnel both high and low in organizational hierarchies, multiple data sets, and a lot of local expertise to qualify metrics and methodologies, and to judge the reasonableness of assumptions. Experience in doing this kind of evaluation was embodied in a set of lessons learned encompassing metrics, methodologies, logic models, and adaptive systems. The work reported here demonstrated that by applying those lessons, impact evaluation of IT can be accomplished, and that it can be done at reasonable cost. The fact that it can be done is the grand lesson learned from this work.