Assessing the Readiness of Professional Services Company 43Copyright © 2005, Idea Group Inc. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without writtenAn individual’s use of a system will produce an impact on that person’s perfor-
mance in the workplace. In addition, an individual “impact” could also be an indication
that an IS has given the user a better understanding of the decision context, has improved
his or her decision-making productivity, has produced a change in user activity, or has
changed the decision maker’s perception of the importance or usefulness of the IS.
Each individual impact will in turn have an effect on the performance of the whole
organization. However, organizational impacts are typically not the summation of
individual impacts, so the association between individual and organizational impacts is
often difficult to draw.
CURRENT CHALLENGES FACING “CITE”
Data collected have been qualitative, and most of the questions have been open
ended with some close-ended type of questionnaire finally put together to collect
qualitative data as previously mentioned. The data collection method used has been
structured interviews, “face to face,” with all 14 employees in the company, including the
12 PS consultants and the two employees in the IS support team. It should be noted that,
before conducting the interview with the 12 PS consultants, each of them had been given
a clear definition of the term “OMIS” in terms of functions, resources, and tools. The main
assumption we used is that the slowdown in IT industry at that time on the international
and local levels, and the related increase in job insecurity, do not negatively impact the
employees’ use of the OMIS in terms of sharing knowledge.
As for the interview questions, they have targeted the following areas: the existing
setup and how it supports the OMIS, the main issues that hinder the implementation of
a successful OMIS, and the main areas that need improvement. The interview questions
have targeted each of the factors stated in the above section, where each of the factors
with its main points has been put into questions targeting answers that should clarify
how the model could be applied, as well as the main points needed to be covered in the
implementation phase. The role of the questions is to highlight the main factors in relating
all those points all together, combined with the Jennex, Olfman, and Pituma OMIS
Success Model, which had finally led to a realizable framework towards the implemen-
tation of a successful OMIS. On the other hand, and as this case study is qualitative, the
findings will be directly resulting from the questionnaires’ answers. This means that we
have to assume that all interviewed employees had given honest answers without any
intentional bias. The main limitation of this case study is that we are only qualifying the
“computer documents” form of OMIS by focusing on intranet, e-mail, and portal services.
The other two forms of OMIS (paper documents and self-memory) are not covered. Also,
other means of knowledge diffusion and transfer (such as direct contacts between people
and communities of practice) are not covered. On the other hand, cultural issues related
to knowledge management and organizational memory are not analyzed.
After conducting the interviews with all the staff members of the PS division of
“CITE,” a successful implementation of an OMIS is affected by multiple factors. The
following factors have been identified.