Last updated: October 20, 2005
The body of your paper should adhere to the following criteria. Your final paper should:
Also, a word about "audience." Whenever you're writing, you need to keep in mind the audience who will read your work. What is their viewpoint? What do they know? What don't they know? What do they care about? For this project, you should assume your audience is an IS Review Committee (sometimes called "steering" committees), composed of several people like me (IS knowledgeable but not really an expert in the business area you're addressing) and several people like your main contact (Business area knowledgeable, but not really an expert in the IS area). That is, you should write so that both of these kinds of people can understand what you're saying. Don't worry that you might provide information that someone already knows about. For example, do explain what specific concepts are and why they're used even though I know. The client probably doesn't, so you should explain it. Committee members can always skip over the stuff they know, but they'll appreciate the stuff they don't know.
Paper Structure:The following is intended as a structureal skeleton for your paper. Your paper MUST include all of the following elements in the specified sequence:
I. Title Page
Your title page must contain the following information:
II. Table of Contents
Single- or double-spaced is fine. Hint: use "Headings" in conjunction with the "Table
of Contents" feature of your word processor. Using this feature, you can very easily insert a table of contents into your working paper and automatically update it after you have completed your final draft. This is a really easy feature to use, if you don't know what I'm talking about, please ask!
III. List of Figures, Exhibits, and Tables (if any)
Again, single- or double-spaced is fine.
IV. Executive Summary (Part I, Section 1 from ScoreSheet)
A single-spaced, single page summary located on its own page that describes the business, busniess process, and the IS/IT you have learned about, and its impact upon the organization. You should write this so that a busy manager can read it and know exactly what the paper is about, what you found, what you suggest, and why it is important to them. You should write this page last so that it covers what you actually covered in the paper, not what you thought you would cover four drafts ago. (Alternatively, you could write a few drafts of this before and during the time you write the main paper, in order to get a better sense of organization. Just make sure the last version of the summary is written after the report is finished.)
An executive summary is NOT an introduction, it is a concise summary of all the important things you say in your paper including an overview of your organization, its business process, what the process looked like before/after the new technology, an overall assessment of impact of the technology and how it has improved the business process. You may also include what you concluded and why you concluded what you did. This is the place where you need to convince a busy executive that you have something interesting and important to say. If your executive summary sounds dull and boring, no one will ever both to turn the page and continue reading... Your executive summary should NOT specificially include topics like porter's competitive forces, supply chain, value chain, critical response activities, etc - your paper already has a table of contents, I don't need two of them. It should summarize the organization, its process, and the impact of technology upon the process. Tell me why the technology that they use is so cool, interesting, valuable, etc.
Consider using a parallel to the format of the opening case study for each chapter in your book. These cases are typically divided into three sections: A brief discussion of the problems the organization is currently having, an overview of the technology involved with solving the problem, and a summary of the impact or results of using the new information system.
V. Organizational Introduction (Part I, Section 2 from ScoreSheet)
VI. Body of Paper (Part I, Section 3 from ScoreSheet)
In determining the content and order of topics in your paper, please follow the topics as they are presented in the Project ScoreSheet (Part I, Section 3). The body of your paper needs to very clearly address the topics from the course relative to your chosen organizational business and its associated information system. Your paper should provide a good description of the business process you are dealing with, the information systems that support that process, and an integrated discussion of how the articles you have chosen fit with your organizational process or system. Please do not omit any sections from the project score sheet.
VII. Conclusions (Part I, Section 4 from ScoreSheet)
VIII. References (Part I, Section 4 from ScoreSheet)
Note on References: Make sure you explicitly identify, in your text, the various information sources you contacted or cited. Failure to do so is called plagiarism! Also, the footnote conventions you learned in highschool are not appropriate for business reports. For people, use names and titles. For companies, include their city. For publications, use a bibliographic format, such as:
For Articles:
In the body of your paper, you should include the last name
of the author and the year of publication:
"Eisenberg (1984) found that ....", -OR- "...is a problem that is often encountered by organizations of this type (Slater, 1993)."
In the Reference Section at the end:
Eisenberg, E. M. (1984). Ambiguity as strategy in organizational
communication. Communication Monographs, Vol 51, 227-242.
Slater, D. (1993). Bullish on videoconferencing. Computerworld, March 11.
For Books:
In the body of your paper, you should include the last name
of the author and the year of publication:
Aguilar (1967).
In the Reference Section at the end:
Aguilar, F. J. (1967). Scanning the business environment. New York: Macmillan.
For Web Pages:
In the body of your paper, you should include the full web URL and the date of access:
(http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/16/explorers.pacman/index.html, November 17, 2004).
In the Reference Section at the end:
Indicate the name of the organization, the full URL, and when it was last accessed.
CNN.COM, http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/11/16/explorers.pacman/index.html, accessed on November 17, 2004.
1) Make sure you label and reference your exhibits clearly and explicitly. I advise you to include single exhibits (like a summary table) near the text where you discuss it. I expect the materials you include as exhibits to be discussed and integrated somewhere in the paper, not just "added on" at the end.
2) Good writing will be rewarded! Bad writing will be... well.. hard to read and graded accordingly!
3) Make good use of headings and subheadings throughout your report. This report is not an essay for an English course, it is a professional report. Please follow the outline provided in the project score sheet to organize your topics and serve as guideposts for your reader:
1.0 Heading
1.1 Subheading
1.2 Subheading
2.0 Heading
2.1 Subheading
2.1.1 Subheading
2.1.2 Subheading
A numbering system, good use of clear headings, and subheadings are required.
4) Make sure you turn in both a hard and soft copy of your report. The soft copy should be a SINGLE document (not a ZIP file, not an entire subdirectory) that is placed in my network drop box. The name of this document should be the name of your organization followed by the semester and year. For example, acceptable project filenames include "Weis Fall 2004.doc", "Merrill Lynch Spring 2005.doc" etc. File names such as "Mgmt 240 Final Project.doc" are NOT acceptable.
5) Re-read the project introduction, Interviewing Hints, and Score Sheet one more time, CAREFULLY, just to make sure you're not missing anything.
6) Please, please, please write in the active voice, not the passive voice. That means don't write "it was developed", write "we developed". I will mark off points if you write in the passive voice too much. In general, try to write without ever using a form of the verb "to be". I’ve tried to do this in this document.
7) Know Your Audience. Your should write to a management committee composed of both I.S. savvy people who know little about the business area or business process, and business people who know little about I.S. That means you should explain jargon, and not assume that the reader knows that "order entry is always a problem" or that "TCP/IP" means "Transmission Control Protocol / Internet Protocol." Explain and justify potentially confusing concepts or controversial issues.
A Pain, But That's Life...
In an ideal world, you would do this project after you've taken the course. As it is, we will end up covering useful material -- such as privacy & legal issues -- rather late in the course, probably just before you need it. We don't like it, you don't like it, but our many attempts to reorganize the course have largely failed to overcome this problem. This means that you will likely have to read ahead for some things.
Alternatively, you could make sure that you finish chunks of your project as we cover the material, and then edit and add as we go along. In this scenario, for example, you'd have everything done except certain areas by the time we cover them. Then we'd cover it and you'd add the missing parts. You may still have to read ahead, though.
Remember, your real payback comes after the course, when you’ll impress recruiters and bosses with your experience gained during this project. The payback is not a grade.
Anyway, call it just-in-time education! Just wanted to warn you....