Analyst Home

Change and Management Philosophy:

For many years organizations in many countries around the world adopted many of the new improvement philosophies to lower their organizations operating cost without compromising the quality of their services or their products. New management philosophies as Total Quality Management (TOM), Business Process Engineering (BPR), Restructuring and Downsizing (RD), and Continuous Improvement (CI), in addition to various implementation of Information Technologies (IT) can be found to be applied now in many organizations with different levels of success. These improvement philosophies are applied in all fields of service and production from health care to education and from production to utility and power generation. In industry, in addition to these improvement initiatives, industrial organizations may adopt other initiatives as Just in Time (JIT) manufacturing, Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), Production Planning and Concurrent Engineering.
Implementations of these philosophies differ in approaches and context but most of these implementations are carried out in stepwise and are based on process oriented structure. It is expected that the end products of these process-based efforts will never become automatically integerable with the rest of the corporate. For these reason Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), as one of IT applications, comes to the picture to smooth out the outcome of these efforts and its deliverables.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR):

BPR is defined as "the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business process to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary, measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed", (Hammer, 1993). Number of researches have looked at BPR as a method of planning and controlling the change and considered it as one of the strategic change management, (Furey and Diori, 1994). Despite what was promoted about this change strategy number of researchers have attributed its weak record of success to its structure and character (Attran, 2003, Chan, et. Al.,1999). According to Nwabueze (2000), examination of the underlying property of BPR indicated that it is anti-systemic in character. He concluded that BPR lacked a clear strategy for its implementation as it also fails to address the numerous elements that affect the work environment. For this reason new approaches were introduced to guide the implementation.
To deal with the shortcomings of BPR Champy (2002) introduced X-Engineering as a new reengineering initiative for corporate reengineering. X-Engineering is meant to reengineer the process across the corporate boundaries, and use the concepts of e-commerce and the internet technologies.
A comparison between BPR basic principles with systems concept and systems thinking shows that addressing the processes separately will not bring the required improvement and may bring difficulties in other parts of the system.

IT implementation and change:

It is surprising how long it should take, after these large number of failed IT projects, before our managers can look back and realize the fundamental reason of launching the PBR initiative in the 1990s. The purpose was not to automate the existing process. Hammer (1990) message was " Do not automate, obliterate". Grover (2003) indicated that "if you automate a mess, all what you get is an automated mess". For this reason it was realized that system change should not be driven by IT implementation, and information systems development researchers spent the last thirty years (started by De Marco in 1968) to develop new development methodologies. Process redesign was part of many of these methodologies before PBR was launched. Now with the present shift to the Internet technology with its associated business in all fields, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) has emerged as one of the tools for corporate redesign and alignment. It is understood now that because IT implementations go in separate way, and not considered to be part of organizational alignment efforts, most of its power was lost.

It should be note here that IT implementation should not be looked at as just a computerization project, it should be built on a solid foundation of the organization whatever its type or its field of application.

Total Quality Management (TQM):

TQM is a process oriented improvement philosophy. Beginning in 19980s and through the 1990s, quality became a major issue for managers in USA and many parts of the world. Recently, there has been increasing interest in applying TQM philosophy in education and health care industry.. Although quality improvement becomes one of the organizational initiatives, until now there are conflicting views about total quality implementations (Denanona and Born 2000). There are mainly three frameworks for total quality (TQ). These are:

Crosby (1979) who focuses on reducing cost through quality improvement
Deming (1989) framework emphasizes the system nature of organization, and the
importance of leadership and the need to reduce the variation in organizational process, and
Jurans (1989) framework involves three sets of activities: quality planning, control, improvement emphasizing the use of statistical tools.

Other implementation of TQ brings more variations to its meaning and objectives. Dean and Bowen (2000) see TQ as a philosophy or as an approach to management that can be characterized by its principles, practice, and techniques. Its three principles are customer focus, continuous improvement, and teamwork.
The author of this site has number of reservations regarding the implementation of TQ in our society regarding these three principles (the customer, the process, and the team).
The author finds the definition of Easton and Jarrell, (1998) for TQM as one of the management systems to be the most convincing and practical definition.

It is most wisely to define TQM as one of the corporate management systems, to be integrated with all other processing
functions of the organization, and to be used to complement the culture of system improvement

Just In Time Manufacturing (JIT):

JIT is a philosophy of manufacturing based on planned elimination of all waste and continuous improvement (CI) of productivity. It has different implementation known as lean production, stockless production, and common sense production. JIT was developed by Toyota in 1950 and known as Toyota production system, and used now by many Japanese firms. Now JIT is efficiently realized now by the introduction of E-business and internet technology. By building a chain of timely supply and production and maintaining minimum inventory at all times. To read more about JIT visit:
http://www.strategosinc.com/just_in_time.htm
http://www.strategosinc.com/just_in_time.htm

Proactive Maintenance (ProM):

In 1992 and through his monumental book titled �Proactive Maintenance for Mechanical Systems� Dr. Earnest. Fitch introduced this concept of maintenance, for the first time as an opposite concept to reactive maintenance. Putting it in his own words he wrote �Proactive maintenance is a new term not yet in the dictionary or in common usage, yet it concerns problems that man has faced since the invention of the wheel�an event that predates recorded history�. Through his extensive research efforts on the failure of mechanical equipment he was able to classify five degrees of mechanical failure as catastrophic, precipitous, impending, incipient, and conditional failure and considered failures as conditions of instability between equipment systems (fluids, structural, temperature, mechanical) and human performance (as machine operators). With this classification, maintenance strategies as break-down, preventive, and predictive maintenance were linked to these failure modes and he concluded that none of these strategies will prevent failure from happening. Proactive maintenance aims at preventing machine failure by inhibiting its root cause by continuous monitoring and correction and any system condition that can lead to material or performance degradation is designated as a �root-cause of failure�. Proactive maintenance strategy aims at extending machine conditional failure stage, as a pre-alert type condition that not yet resulted in material or performance degradation. Its full implementation has number of elements, two of which are: training of maintenance personnel on the operating principles and characteristics of machine to address the root causes of failure, and the other is building a knowledge base system with information about subjects of machine operation and performance, read a conversation with Dad. (E. Fitch, 1992).
Through the years it became clear that the existing approach of maintenance would not be adequate to meet the sophistication and advances of new equipment and manufacturing systems. The impact of the spread of computer applications was not limited to improving management systems in institutions only (such as accounting systems, human resource management, warehouse and inventory, payroll management, production planning systems, etc.), but it extended to cover wide range of engineering applications. The capacity added by the electronic processing units to the productive factories has led to the emergence of new generations of equipment and machines that operate in an automated method and have a significant amount of intelligence that has added a new dimension to its operations and maintenance. This was also accompanied by the emergence of new methods and techniques based on computers to detect equipment malfunctions and analyze its performance to identify the reasons that led to their performance degradation.

Proactive Maintenance New Methodology:

In 2001 after investing too much time in implementing more than eight projects of predictive and condition monitoring systems in Cement, Steel, Glass, and Petrol sites by the author of this site (Dr. Samir Mostafa) it became clear that implementation of proactive maintenance must go beyond equipment and machines with its mechanical system to include the environment in which these machines operate, or simply the entire management system of the manufacturing organization
Through the years it became clear that the existing approach of maintenance would not be adequate to meet the sophistication and advances of new equipment and manufacturing systems. The impact of the spread of computer applications was not limited to improving management systems in institutions only (such as accounting systems, human resource management, warehouse and inventory, payroll management, production planning systems, etc.), but it extended to cover wide range of engineering applications. The capacity added by the electronic processing units to the productive factories has led to the emergence of new generations of equipment and machines that operate in an automated method and have a significant amount of intelligence that has added a new dimension to its operations and maintenance. This was also accompanied by the emergence of new methods and techniques based on computers to detect equipment malfunctions and analyze its performance to identify the reasons that led to their performance degradation.
When we deal with the productive organization as a system, maintenance system becomes one of its sub-systems whose construction requires the use of appropriate analysis and design methodology like any other subsystem. However, its technical and engineering nature requires special expertise and competence from systems analysts. We can find here that computer applications for CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management Systems) as well as various technologies for detecting equipment malfunctions that fall under a special category of maintenance technology. Then the different methods and rules for its analysis, including the concepts of data mining, and data analytics should become part of its technique. It was not surprising with this technological development that different goals of the maintenance system emerged, each of which requires an appropriate strategy to utilize it. With these searches for an effective strategy comes Proactive Maintenance (ProM) as presented here, which aims at choosing the appropriate strategies for maintenance.
commensurate with the nature of the organizations business (preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance, equipment conditions monitoring, reliability-based maintenance, and or the comprehensive productive maintenance). This strategy requires appropriate methodologies for its implementation and need to handle all the technical and administrative elements of the maintenance system to identify the causes of malfunctions that may not necessarily be technical, as one example: the lack of effective evaluation systems for spare parts suppliers for the organization may lead to the emergence of equipment malfunctions. Therefore, Prom adopts information engineering methodologies by focusing on the re-engineering of the maintenance processes and then designing a new maintenance management system in line with the appropriate production and management systems to achieving complete integration with the enterprises information management system. With this approach identifying the true needs of the plant maintenance system a computerized solution for maintenance management is developed with the capability of building equipment performance and failures records. A complete description of this methodology can be found in (Samir Mostafa, 2004). This new maintenance strategy, in addition to the new specializations it needs, require a change in the education and training pattern of maintenance engineers so that they can take advantage of the capabilities offered by information technology. Using this strategy, the maintenance engineer becomes an industry and manufacturing systems analyst.

Continuous Improvement (CI):

Continuous improvement (CI) as a philosophy for change encompassing organization-wide process by systematic improvement of process, product and service, is one of the tenets of the quality management ideology (Savolainen, 1999). CI normally introduced in cycles and can be implemented to go deep into the cultural levels of the organization and becomes parts of the renewal process, or just to touch the processing functions and becomes part of downsizing and structuring or just a change. Renewal encompasses managerial ideological thinking and organizational practice, and linked to the organizational adoptive behavior. Renewal requires a management transformation that bringing learning capacity to the organization.

Social Interaction in Systems Development:

Success of the project is measured by satisfying the user requirements and achieving the objective of development. This success depends on both the analyst team and the users team and the pattern of interaction between both of them. In many cases this pattern of interaction becomes very complex and result in disatifying users and frustrated analyst. There are two reasons for this result:

Both sides (the analyst and the user) do not share the same orientation to the problem

Most of the methodologies used for the development neglect the human dimension (users concern) during the developing phases.

SSM is the only methodology developed with human activity system (HAS) in its core, but was not designed to handle IS development, ETICHS addresses the participation of the user during the development phases, and all other methodologies are highly technically oriented and consider the user only during the design of the system interface, as screens and scenarios at the end of the design phase. With SSM (Wilson 1990, p28) shows that HAS to be composed of two subsystems as shown in the figure:

(Wilson 1990, p28b)

This illustration explains why we need to put more balance on the activity system which operates based on the logical relations between activities, rather than the present emphasis of our social drive. Simply our objective for change to become "More logic with less harmful sociality". Only through a balanced behavior a well disciplined HAS can be achieved with more project success.

Technical Issues:

Most of IS development efforts in Egypt and the Arab world are driven by technical factors by concentrating on programming and hardware devices. For this reason it is not surprising to notice an increasing rate of failure for most of our IS projects. Business process reengineering or system reengineering does not represent a priority for any IS project. In a study conducted by the American University in Cairo () it was found that most of the private companies did not adopt BPR in any of their projects. This site invites people, companies, and organizations to send their experience with their development projects in Egypt and Arab world so we can assess the reason for systems failure. Please send your experience to info@analysthome.com

Socio-Technical Dimension:

Information Systems (IS) is highly dependent on both social and technical interaction between system elements and humans. Neither can be isolated from the other. For this reason development process is highly affected also by these two factors, and concentrating on technical issues only during the development process will not bring the desired change, no matter how genius the system is. Some people believe that just spreading more automations and computers will force people to change! Do we know the direction of change? Should we measure and assess the change at some points? The author believe that the maximum benefit from IS can only be achieved when human and social dimensions are taken into consideration during the project development. SDLC should be viewed through two accompanying change and accumulation cycles namely:

Knowledge accumulation cycle

Culture change cycle

These in addition to the systems development cycles which can be represented in multilayer. At the core is the program and products, the second is the business area, the third is the information, up to the last layer which is the business environment layer within the society layer. The society culture produces a field which cuts through each of the development layers and separate the two accumulation and change cycles. This is as if the society field diffuses between the knowledge accumulation and culture change cycles. Sustainable change can be only achieved if the development cycle at each level crosses this cut and joins the culture gap. The cut effect has its minimum at the core or the program layer, and increases as we go out to the society

Real Life Problems:

In this part we would like to publish real life problems related to systems development. We are interested in problems which touch our daily life to show how it can be analyzed modeled and solved. Many problems worth to studied. We are inviting concerned persons to take part in this experiment and share their experience. Please send your proposal to info@analysthome.com

System Analysis and Design:

System analysis and design are concerned with the investigation of an organization and the design and implementation of a computerized solution to that organization needs. To analyze a system is to identify its components (devices, people, rules and procedures) and their interrelationships in order to determine its objectives, requirements, and priorities. The analyst must find ways of representing organization as a whole system, taking into consideration any economic behavioral and technical constraints. To know more about systems analyst job from the internet click here. and visit the international institute of business analysis(IIBa).