If you were to design a globally focused it application for a multinational corporation, how would you introduce it and would the challenges be for the corporation?
Before beginning the design of a globally focused it application, I would first be sure to understand how its key features, functions, workflows and performance contributed to the users who would use the system daily. After having a thorough review of these key criterion and the development of workflows and benchmarking of existing processes to evaluate total performance, I'd get the initial phase of software development completed. Using agile-based software development methods, I'd continually refine the key functional and workflows areas of the application to ensure it performed as defined.
Next, the application would be tested for real-time data and process integration to the broader it infrastructure of the company. This would concentrate on the integration points across legacy, enterprise-wide and platform systems to ensure any future growth would be easily accomplish for a legacy system support perspective. The ability to integrate with legacy systems while creating global, enterprise-class applications is critical in any application development effort (Li, Berry, 2004).
Once all of these steps were complete, I would next have a representative of every group who would use the system globally provide their feedback on usability and navigation. The focus of this phase would be driving up the overall...
In addition, this phase would cover how users could customize the system to their unique, often highly specific needs. With all of these steps, adoption fo the finalized system would also be significantly better as well. Finally I would put into place a series of analytics, metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate how effective the overall system was in achieving its initial objectives. By doing this I would make the system account to the users who relied on it daily.
References
Chen, Q., Tu, Q., & Lin, B. (2002). Global it/is outsourcing: Expectations, considerations and implications. Advances in Competitiveness Research, 10(1), 100-111.
Ebert, R.R. (2007). How we compete: What companies around the world are doing to make it in todays global economy. Comparative Economic Studies, 49(1), 167-167.
King, W.R., & Flor, P.R. (2008). The development of global it infrastructure. Omega, 36(3), 486.
Li, F., & Berry, J. (2004). It and business models / the global internet economy. Organization Studies, 25(2), 325-327.
Mann, C.L. (2004). What global sourcing means for U.S. It workers and for the U.S. economy. Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM, 47(7), 33-35.
Patel, N.V. (2002). Emergent forms of it governance to support global e-business models. JITTA: Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application, 4(2), 33-48.
