Collaboration Exercise 8 Using the collaboration IS you built in Chapter 1 (page 32), collaborate with a group of students to answer the following questions.

The county planning office issues building permits, septic system permits, and county road access permits for all building projects in a county in an eastern state. The planning office issues permits to homeowners and builders for the construction of new homes and buildings and for any remodeling projects that involve electrical, gas, plumbing, and other utilities, as well as the conversion of unoccupied spaces, such as garages, into living or working space. The office also issues permits for new or upgraded septic systems and permits to provide driveway entrances to county roads.

Figure 8-21 shows the permit process that the county used for many years. Contractors and homeowners found this process slow and very frustrating. For one, they did not like its sequential nature. Only after a permit had been approved or rejected by the engineering review process would they find out that a health or highway review was also needed. Because each of these reviews could take 3 or 4 weeks, applicants requesting permits wanted the review processes to be concurrent rather than serial. Also, both the permit applicants and county personnel were frustrated because they never knew where a particular application was in the permit process. A contractor would call to ask how much longer, and it might take an hour or longer just to find which desk the permits were on.

Figure 8-21 Building Permit Process, Old Version A flowchart. Figure 8-21 Full Alternative Text Accordingly, the county changed the permit process to that shown in Figure 8-22. In this second process, the permit office made three copies of the permit and distributed one to each department. The departments reviewed the permits in parallel; a clerk would analyze the results and, if there were no rejections, approve the permit.

Figure 8-22 Building Permit Process, Revised Version A flowchart. Figure 8-22 Full Alternative Text Unfortunately, this process had a number of problems, too. For one, some of the permit applications were lengthy; some included as many as 40 to 50 pages of large architectural drawings. The labor and copy expense to the county was considerable.

Second, in some cases departments reviewed documents unnecessarily. If, for example, the highway department rejected an application, then neither the engineering nor health departments needed to continue their reviews. At first, the county responded to this problem by having the clerk who analyzed results cancel the reviews of other departments when a rejection was received. However, that policy was exceedingly unpopular with the permit applicants, because once the problem in a rejected application was corrected, the permit had to go back through the other departments. The permit would go to the end of the line and work its way back into the departments from which it had been pulled. Sometimes this resulted in a delay of 5 or 6 weeks.

Cancelling reviews was unpopular with the departments as well, because permit-review work had to be repeated. An application might have been nearly completed when it was cancelled due to a rejection in another department. When the application came through again, the partial work results from the earlier review were lost.

8-6. Explain why the processes in Figures 8-21 and 8-22 are classified as enterprise processes rather than departmental processes. Why are these processes not interorganizational processes?

8-7. Using Figure 8-8 as an example, redraw Figure 8-21 using an enterprise information system that processes a shared database. Explain the advantages of this system over the paper-based system in Figure 8-21.

8-8. Using Figure 8-10 as an example, redraw Figure 8-22 using an enterprise information system that processes a shared database. Explain the advantages of this system over the paper-based system in Figure 8-22.