Author(s):
Bob Glushko
glushko@ischool.berkeley.edu
Course: DE + IA (INFO 243), Spring 2007
Date: 22 January 2007
Title: ASSIGNMENT 1: Document Engineering in the News
The purpose of this assignment is to give you some practice looking at Document Engineering news stories and case studies in a systematic way.
Your assignment is analyze two "Document Engineering in the News" stories. The first one is the "Accelerating RosettaNet" article that you've already read. You can find a second story on the web, in the library, in newspapers or magazines. The only requirements for the story that you find are that (a) it was published in the last year and (b) you can provide a URL or a bibliographic citation for it and (c) no one else in the class has claimed it first by posting the URL or citation to the course list serve.
If you're not sure where to look, some good sources are: CIO Magazine (cio.com), Business Integration Journal (bijonline.com), Line56 (line56.com), Business Process Management (bpm.com), and Info World (infoworld.com) but more general publications like the Wall Street Journal (wsj.com), The Economist (economist.com), and Business Week (businessweek.com) occasionally have Document Engineering stories.
Try to be sensitive to the "credibility continuum" when you select a story. A story in a refereed journal, the Wall Street Journal, or the Economist will be more rigorously researched and edited than a blog posting, and many trade magazines do little more than rehash vendor press releases. Be skeptical of "Barney" stories ("Accelerating RosettaNet" is a bit of a Barney story, but a really interesting one).
Part 1 -- Accelerating RosettaNet
Apply the D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T case study checklist to "Accelerating RosettaNet" (a sentence or two per item)
Part 2 -- Your Story
2.1 Write a 100-word summary of the story
2.2 Post the URL or bibliographic citation to the story to the course list serve (i243@ischool.berkeley.edu) along with your 100-word summary. This establishes your "claim" to the story so no one else can write about it. This will ensure that we have a diverse set of stories and we will probably be talking about some of them all semester. If you haven't subscribed to the list serve by sending a subscribe message to "majordomo@ischool.berkeley.edu" you'll have to do that first.
2. 3 Apply the D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T case study checklist to it (a sentence or two per item). It is possible that not all of the factors are discussed explicitly in the story, but they are likely at least to be implied by it. A story that is missing one or two of the factors is OK, but a story that is missing more than that is probably too sketchy to be a good news story for this assignment.
2.4 Discuss briefly (100 words) some aspect of the story that is similar to or reminds you of one of the 7 news stories from the 17 January lecture. For example, if you were comparing the "SPEEDy Self-Service Comes to Airline Information Processes" and "Global Shippers Give Customers Real-Time Cargo Info" stories, you might talk about the fact that both involve tracking, but the former is about tracking people and the latter about tracking cargo.
Part 3 -- Submit Your Work
Submit all of your work in Parts 1 and 2 using the homework upload system at https://ischool.berkeley.edu/upload/i243/
Due by 9am on Monday 5 February, but given the need to claim your story by posting to the list serve, don't wait until the last minute to start looking for it