Last updated: October 20, 2005
At a minimum, you will need two separate interviews with your host organization. In an ideal case, you would be able to arrange three interviews. Your first interview should occur about 1 week before Milestone #3 is due. This will give you time to complete the milestone after your interview. After this, you will probably need to have a second interview (or sereral "follow-up" telephone conversations or e-mail exchanges) as you work on preparing Milestone #7. Finally, your group may feel the need for a third interview (or sereral "follow-up" telephone conversations or e-mail exchanges) after I return Milestone #7 and you begin working on the final submission of your paper. Usually, this last effort involves getting additional examples, data, and concrete evidence of the impact of the information system upon the selected buisness process.
It is always better to show up in person, with your entire group, and knock on the door of an organization. Calling over the telephone may open up some opportunities, but it is also very easy to simply say that everyone there is busy and hang up on you. If you are there with your group, its harder to close the door on you. If they are busy, see if you can make an appointment with someone before you leave. If they still resist, you are probably beating the proverbial "dead horse".
Once you've got someone's attention, explain that you are a student at Bucknell University. You are currently taking an Introduction to Information Systems course and you would like to learn about how this company uses information systems in order to do what it needs to do. The great advantage that you have is that people generally love to talk about themselves and their jobs!
In some cases, you might run into privacy or security concerns. The company might state that they don't share data or information from their systems with outside people. If this happens, let them know that you are not interested in the actual data that is in their system. Rather, you are interested in knowing how they use the data that is in the system. What functions are performed by the system? Who uses it? For what tasks?
If it is a public company (traded on the stock exchange) you can do a great deal of research even before you get there so that you have some idea of that the company is doing, where they are using technology, etc. This will also help provide the appearance that you are not about to waste the time of someone who is already pretty busy.
If you're having trouble figuring out what to do during the first interview (that is, the first work interview, after you've gained permission to do the project), consider the "inventory" interview. I usually liked to start my projects taking an inventory of what they do and how it is supported by information systems.
First, ask questions about various business processes that are performed within the organization. What products does the company sell? How are these products or services created or provided? In many cases, you can learn these things about your organization before you actually arrive.
For example,
Procedures: What kind of work goes on?
What do they define or see as a business process?
What processes are most important?
How do these processes support business goals?
Then for 2-3 candidate processes, delve into each deeper with such questions as:
People: What kinds of job titles and responsibilities are there?
Who does what?
(Notice that we are focusing on business processes first, then technology issues)
What kinds of information are most important to your business?
How are they using information systems to support those processes?
Databases: What business resources are supported by I.S.?Networks: Who works where?
What I.S. or non I.S. (e.g., social) networks do you have?
Hardware & Sofware: What applications do you use?
What computers do you have?
Which computers support which processes?
Which computers store which data?
Before you leave your organization, make sure that you have telephone numbers of several individuals to follow up with at a later time. Often, that contact person will be busy, travelling, or have taken a job at another company at some later date. Additionally, try to get e-mail addresses for these people. Perhaps you might want to arrange a time for a follow up interview before you leave (see above for timing of interviews). Then go away and think about connections among these lists, and see if you can create some of your own project ideas that you can propose to your contact. Feel free to schedule a meeting with me to brainstorm.
The goal of this first interview is to discover a single significant business process (or several small, yet interconnected business processes) that will be the focus of your project. You should have just learned about several business processes that go on at this organization. Choose the one (or ones) that seem most important to the company, most interesting to you, etc.
For the business process you have found at your organization, you might begin gathering information from your organizational contact such as:
For the articles you have found describe the items below. It is perfectly acceptable (and will probably make your paper flow better) to integrate this discussion with the topic described above.
Finally, take a step back and compare your organization to all of the articles you have found.
A great time to schedule a third interview is for 7 to 10 days after your hand in your project drafts. This will (hopefully) give me enough time to read them, provide some comments, feedback, ask questions, etc, and get them back to you. Many groups have not earned as many points as they hoped at this point because they have not provided a sufficient level of details, examples, evidence of the specific impact that information systems have made on their selected business process. After your project drafts are returned, you should have a very clear idea of what is necessary to improve your paper, thus making this last interview very focused and very productive.
Read the Project ScoreSheet!!!
The above are simply sample questions that you should feel free to ask your organizational contact. This is not an exhaustive list of questions, it is merely a sample of the types of things you can ask and is provided to help you get going on your project.
Be sure that you have carefully read through the Project Score Sheet and clearly treat each of the topics in the scoresheet in your paper! The project score sheet is a great source of questions that you should ask of your organization.