DE + IA (INFO 243), Spring 2008

ASSIGNMENT 1: Document Engineering in the News

Author(s):
Bob Glushko
glushko@ischool.berkeley.edu

Course: DE + IA (INFO 243), Spring 2008
Date: 28 January 2008
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.

Finding a Story

Your assignment is analyze a "Document Engineering in the News" story of your own and to comment on stories found by other people. You can find your 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 since 2006 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.

One easy way to find a story is to think of an "information-intensive" industry and then add some Document Engineering concepts to a search query. Some good sources are: CIO Magazine (cio.com), Business Integration Journal (bijonline.com), Align Journal (alignjournal.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). Your story doesn't have to be long, but if you can't instantiate the 8 parts of the D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T checklist your story is either too sketchy or not quite appropriate.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PART 1 - POSTING YOUR STORY

  1. Find your story
  2. Post the URL or bibliographic citation to the story to the course list serve (i243@ischool.berkeley.edu) along with a 100+ word summary. This establishes your "claim" to the story so no one else can post 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.
  3. Apply the D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T case study checklist to it (a sentence or two per item; use plenty of white space so it is easy to pick out each item in the checklist)
  4. Post the URL or bibliographic citation, your 100+ word summary, and your D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T analysis to the course blog ("Doc or Die" at http://docordie.blogspot.com/). You will log into the blog with the login "i243@ischool.berkeley.edu" and the password "spring2008" -- this signs you in as "Document Engineering Student." Be sure to sign your post with your real name so you get credit for posting the story.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR PART 2 - COMMENTING ON STORIES

  1. Monitor the blog and comment on at least two of the stories posted by your fellow students. Your primary goal is to make connections between your story and the other ones or with any of the news stories from the 1/23 and 1/28 lectures
  2. You can also critique or add to the way that the D-O-C-U-M-E-N-T checklist was applied to the story.

COMPLETE YOUR POSTING AND COMMENTING BY 9AM WEDNESDAY FEBRUARY 6