No abstract

The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) International's assurance of learning (AoL) standards require that schools develop a sophisticated continuousimprovement process. The authors review various assessment models and develop a practical, 6-step AoL model based on the literature and the authors' AoL-implementation experiences. The model creates a sound foundation for compliance with AACSB standards as well as regional accreditation and likely future assessment requirements. The authors present suggestions for successful implementation of each AoL step as well as cautions on possible pitfalls.

No abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate whether business process integration is feasible.Design/methodology/approachThis paper employs a single case study strategy to research the aforementioned research question. The case study is exploratory.FindingsBased on the findings and within the context of the case organisation, it appears that enterprise application integration (EAI) technology can integrate business processes. However, since it is not possible to generalize from a single case study, further research is suggested to investigate this area. From the case study, it appears that EAI can easily integrate the business processes when it is combined with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.Research limitations/implicationsThis is a single case study and thus the results cannot be generalized.Practical implicationsThe empirical date suggest that organisations may combine ERP with EAI to integrate their business processes in a more flexible way.Originality/valueThe contribution of the paper is threefold: it describes the business process automation layer of EAI technology, it defines and presents a stage model for the business process integration and it examines the research question.

The use of teams and groups in the workplace continues to grow and trust and commitment to decisions remain desirable characteristics for team members. Group Support Software (GSS) or groupware software has been developed to automate the basic activities of group meetings and thus, help groups. This study combines the two sets of interests; specifically, it looks at the changes in trust and commitment to decisions exhibited by five teams using groupware. The data set was collected from five real‐world (federal, state and commercial) groups as they undertook their actual (Business Process Re‐engineering (BPR) and Joint Application Development (JAD)) projects using groupware. Using a case‐based research methodology, the data set was collected over a series of 41 meetings and organized around group characteristics such as commitment, trust, openness to express ideas, etc. The analysis hints at positive changes in desirable group characteristics over time when using GSS or groupware. However, the groupware characteristic of “more open expression of ideas” does not seem to be the source of the changes. Finally, based upon these findings, the authors suggest that GSS can impact the social components of a group as well as the production components but the cause of the impact resides deeper than a simple idea of providing an environment for more open expression of ideas.