For each of these, only answer the case study questions associated with them found at the end of the discussion. You do not need to answer the "MIS in Action" questions. Chapter 11, pg. 427: Denver Goes Alfresco Most of us have never contemplated the totality of services provided every day by our local or city governments. From administering elections to maintaining a court system, a coroner’s office, birth and death records, and deeds of trust, to managing trash pickup, recycling programs, and hazardous waste disposal, local governments are document repositories extraordinaire! The consolidated city-county government of Denver, Colorado, is a striking case in point. With a combined population of over 600,000, and encompassing 155 square miles and 80 defined neighborhoods, this fused governmental entity oversees nearly 140 schools, over 200 parks, 29 recreation centers, 14 public libraries, 34 fire stations, over 1,000 buses and five light rail lines, Denver International Airport (DIA), an animal shelter, a Department of Motor Vehicles, and hundreds of other governmental departments and services. The amount of documentation in the varied and yet often interconnected departments is staggering. Nearly $1 billion and over 10,000 employees are needed to keep Denver’s services running and to record, verify, and compile all of the supporting documentation. In 2005, the more than 70 agencies of the consolidated city-county government used 14 different document management systems, none of which could communicate or interact with each other. The Information Technology department supervised multiple autonomous IT units with their own systems and standards. This decentralization created problems not just with document sharing, but also with document security and the ability to audit record keeping functions, particularly scanned contracts and financial records. Employee productivity was negatively impacted through time wasted in locating required documents from other agencies, duplication of IT functions, and cumbersome document scanning applications. Mayor John Hickenlooper, a proponent of government transparency and efficiency, created a centralized IT group and assigned it the task of conceiving an integrated strategy to unify and streamline IT functions. Scrapping the 14 document management systems was an obvious first cost-saving action. The enterprise content management (ECM) system adopted would need to revamp the city’s contract record system so that it no longer needed a nightly reboot, met security standards, and was easily searchable for employees across agencies. Described by Al Rosabal, Deputy CIO Denver City and County, as an “end-of-life” system, the existing system had poor search capabilities and overall feeble performance. Initially, the Technology Services Group was stymied in locating a cost-effective solution that could be implemented without any interruption in service. Then it discovered Alfresco. Alfresco’s all-Web-based, open s.

1. For each of these, only answer the case study questions
associated with them found at the end of the discussion. You do
not need to answer the "MIS in Action" questions.
Chapter 11, pg. 427: Denver Goes Alfresco
Most of us have never contemplated the totality of services
provided every day by our local or city governments. From
administering elections to maintaining a court system, a
coroner’s office, birth and death records, and deeds of trust, to
managing trash pickup, recycling programs, and hazardous
waste disposal, local governments are document repositories
extraordinaire! The consolidated city-county government of
Denver, Colorado, is a striking case in point. With a combined
population of over 600,000, and encompassing 155 square miles
and 80 defined neighborhoods, this fused governmental entity
oversees nearly 140 schools, over 200 parks, 29 recreation
centers, 14 public libraries, 34 fire stations, over 1,000 buses
and five light rail lines, Denver International Airport (DIA), an
animal shelter, a Department of Motor Vehicles, and hundreds
of other governmental departments and services. The amount of
documentation in the varied and yet often interconnected
departments is staggering. Nearly $1 billion and over 10,000
employees are needed to keep Denver’s services running and to
record, verify, and compile all of the supporting documentation.
In 2005, the more than 70 agencies of the consolidated city-
county government used 14 different document management
systems, none of which could communicate or interact with each
other. The Information Technology department supervised
multiple autonomous IT units with their own systems and
standards. This decentralization created problems not just with
document sharing, but also with document security and the
ability to audit record keeping functions, particularly scanned
contracts and financial records. Employee productivity was

2. negatively impacted through time wasted in locating required
documents from other agencies, duplication of IT functions, and
cumbersome document scanning applications. Mayor John
Hickenlooper, a proponent of government transparency and
efficiency, created a centralized IT group and assigned it the
task of conceiving an integrated strategy to unify and streamline
IT functions. Scrapping the 14 document management systems
was an obvious first cost-saving action. The enterprise content
management (ECM) system adopted would need to revamp the
city’s contract record system so that it no longer needed a
nightly reboot, met security standards, and was easily
searchable for employees across agencies. Described by Al
Rosabal, Deputy CIO Denver City and County, as an “end-of-
life” system, the existing system had poor search capabilities
and overall feeble performance. Initially, the Technology
Services Group was stymied in locating a cost-effective solution
that could be implemented without any interruption in service.
Then it discovered Alfresco. Alfresco’s all-Web-based, open
source ECM system was not only affordable to implement, but
would conservatively save Denver approximately $1.5 million
over five years. CIO Rosabal estimates that, over time, the open
source model could save the city up to $1 million a year in
recurring licensing, deployment, and maintenance costs as
opposed to a proprietary system. Alfresco’s ECM capabilities
include document, record, and image management, document
versioning, multi-language support, and support for multiple
client operating systems (Windows, GNU/Linux, and Solaris),
Web content management, and integration with MySQL, which
Denver used for its relational database management system.
With a browser-based graphical user interface and integration
with the most commonly used Microsoft Office suites, Alfresco
ECM was a perfect fit to economically meet Denver’s needs.
Implementation began in 2009 and took place in 6- to 12-week
cycles over 15 months’ time. Each cycle also included employee
training. This gradual phase-in encouraged employee
cooperation and allowed time for feedback before the next

3. learning curve began. For the auditor and controller offices,
Alfresco was integrated with the current PeopleSoft Financial
Management software so that employees could view contracts
and associated content within the familiar interface. Complete
automation of the contract requisition, writing, and
authorization processes resulted in accelerated contract
approval time and enhanced contract and financial document
auditing. The procurement process had the same structural
problems as the IT department; it was spread throughout
multiple autonomous or semi-autonomous agencies. To
centralize and standardize the procure-to-pay process (which
includes the initial decision to make the purchase, the process
of selecting the goods, and the transaction to pay for the goods
purchased), the existing PeopleSoft Financials system was again
leveraged. Elements of the workflow and document repository
were handled by Alfresco, and a Web service was used to
communicate and move requisitions, purchase orders, receiving
documents, accounts payable invoices, and associated
documents between Alfresco and PeopleSoft Financials. In
addition, an Alfresco content repository maintained all data
retention policies.
According to Rosabal, another important part of the long-term
strategy was to improve citizen engagement. A key element was
to extend the document repository to citizens. While many
documents could be obtained at government offices, Denver
wanted to provide citizens with online access at a reduced cost.
As with the contract record system and the procure-to-pay
process, Oracle Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) was used to
integrate Alfresco with PeopleSoft and other key applications.
This enabled data to be routed as Extensible Markup Language
(XML) messages between multiple applications. Documents
could now be moved between Alfresco and PeopleSoft and made
available to citizens on the Web.
Another initiative to better serve citizens was an upgrade to the
311 service. 311 is a special non-emergency phone number in
many communities that connects citizens to a Citizen Service

4. Center. Residents can call to report community concerns such as
pot-holes, barking dogs and other noise disturbances, graffiti,
roadway debris, and dysfunctional street and traffic lights.
Denver migrated the 311 service online by reusing newly
created Web services and incorporating Alfresco with the call
center and customer relationship management (CRM) software.
Citizens can now use an online form to submit complaints and
concerns from their computer or through iPhone and iPad apps.
With the Alfresco ECM, PeopleSoft, and Oracle ESB
infrastructure in place, Denver can now reuse the 311
application technology to proceed to new initiatives such as
migrating various licensing, permitting, and inspection
programs online and making them accessible to mobile devices.
If the projected cost savings are fully realized, Denver can look
forward to not only improved employee productivity, superior
document access, auditing, and security, and enhanced service
to its citizenry, but the ability to strategically invest in future
technology.
1. What types of problems was the consolidated city-county
government of Denver, Colorado, experiencing with document
management before instituting the Alfresco ECM system?
2. How did the Alfresco ECM system provide a solution to
these problems?
3. What management, organization, and technology issues had
to be addressed in selecting and implementing Denver’s new
content management system?
4. How did the new content management system change
governmental processes for Denver? How did it benefit
citizens?
• Chapter 11, pg. 432: Firewire Surfboards Light Up with CAD
Nev Hyman had been building surfboards in Australia for 35
years. In 2005, he teamed up with Mark Price and a group of
longtime surfing friends in Carlsbad, California, to form
Firewire Surfboards. This company thrives on innovation and

5. was responsible for the first major change in surfboard
composition and assembly methods in 40 years. Rather than
polyurethane resin and polyurethane foam, Firewire’s boards
were composed of expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam and epoxy
resins. Hyman and Price believed that this composition for the
surfboard core, along with aerospace composites for the deck
skin and balsa wood rails (the outside edge),created a more
flexible and maneuverable product that would attract top surfers
and set Firewire apart from its competitors.Firewire is
competing in a crowded field that includes Isle Surfboards,
Surftech, Aviso Surf, Board works Surf, Channel Island, and
Lost Enterprises. Firewire is alone in the reintroduction of balsa
wood to the board rails for added flex response time and the
ability to maintain speed during precarious maneuvers. Firewire
believes it can compete successfully because its surfboards are
far lighter, stronger, and more flexible than those of its
competitors. An additional selling point is the reduced
environmental impact: Firewire’s materials emit only 2 percent
of the harmful compounds of traditional boards and recycling
excess expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam has earned Firewire
international awards and acclaim. But that isn’t enough. To
make sure it stays ahead of the competition, Firewire decided to
start making custom surfboards instead of just the usual off-the-
rack sizes. For the everyday surfer, the durability and flexibility
of Firewire’s materials was a key selling point. However,
custom boards made to surfer specifications are critical in the
elite surfboard market, and the ability to claim top-level
competitive surfers as customers drives the broader surfboard
market as well. Traditionally, skilled craftsman, called shapers,
designed and built surfboards by hand, but Firewire started
doing some of this work using computeraided designs (CAD)
sent to cutting facilities. The company’s computer-aided
manufacturing process returned to the shaper a board that was
85 to 90 percent complete, leaving the artisan to complete the
customization and the lamination process. According to
Price, who became Firewire’s CEO, there are 29 time-

6. consuming and labor-intensive steps in the surfboard
manufacturing process. Initially, the multifaceted manufacturing
process made it impossible to offer personalized CAD to the
average consumer. Customized boards could only be produced
for elite competitive customers. There was no way to offer
customization to a wider market without overburdening
Firewire’s CAD system. Moreover, most custom boards had to
be ordered by filling out a piece of paper with various
dimensions for the requested changes. There was no way to see
a visual representation of these adjustments or assess their
impact on the board’s volume, which directly affects buoyancy,
paddling ability, and performance. Firewire needed a system
that would allow customers to experiment with established
designs, feed the CAD process, and integrate it with its
computer numerical control (CNC) manufacturing process.
Enter ShapeLogic Design-to-Order Live! For NX, which
provides an online customization system with a Web-based user
interface and advanced 3-D CAD tools.Firewire started working
with the ShapeLogic NX software in 2009 to develop its own
Firewire Surfboards’ Custom Board Design (CBD) system,
which allows users to easily manipulate board dimensions of
established models within design parameters. Any registered
customer can choose a standard Firewire model and use drag-
and-drop tools to adjust the board’s length, midpoint width,
nose width, tail width, and thickness, as long as these changes
don’t degrade the board’s design integrity. CBD generates a
precise three-dimensional model of the stock model used as the
base design along with a 3-D portable document format (PDF)
file of the customized board. The PDF file documents the
board’s dimensions and volume. A customer can manipulate the
model from all angles and compare the customized board to the
standard board to fully understand the design before placing an
order. When the customer uses the system to order a custom
board, CBD generates a precise solid CAD model of the board
that is transmitted directly to the Firewire factory for driving
the CNC machines that manufacture the board. This

7. combination of technologies results in a board that is 97 percent
complete, minimizing the manufacturing time, finishing
process, and thus, costs to the consumer. In contrast to the
earlier CAD assisted, 10 to 15 percent hand-finished boards,
once a surfer has designed the board of his or her dreams, it can
be remade to those exact specifications time and again. Neither
the ideal handmade board nor a shaper-finished board can be
replicated with this degree of precision. An additional benefit of
Firewire’s online design system is the social networking
engendered by the sharing of customers’ unique design files.
Before placing an order, customers can show their modifications
to fellow surfers and ask for opinions and advice. After placing
an order and using the product, they can report their experiences
and (hopefully) tout their design or suggest improvements to
other customers. Interactive communication such as this drives
customers to the Firewire site, creating a marketing buzz that
boosts sales.
1. Analyze Firewire using the value chain and competitive
forces models.
2. What strategies is Firewire using to differentiate its product,
reach its customers, and persuade them to buy its products?
3. What is the role of CAD in Firewire’s business model?
4. How did the integration of online custom board design
software (CBD), CAD, and computer numerical control (CNC)
improve Firewire’s operations?
Chapter 12, pg. 476: Colgate-Palmolive Keeps Managers
Smiling with Executive Dashboards
COLGATE-PALMOLIVE KEEPS MANAGERS SMILING
WITH EXECUTIVE DASHBOARDS
Colgate-Palmolive Company is the second largest consumer
products company in the world whose products are marketed in
over 200 countries and territories. The company had 38,600
employees worldwide and $16.734 billion in annual revenue in

8. 2011. Colgate has been keeping people smiling and clean
around the world, with more than three- quarters of its sales in
recent years coming from outside the United States. Colgate’s
brands in oral products, soap, and pet food, are global names,
including Colgate, Palmolive, Mennen, Softsoap, Irish Spring,
Protex, Sorriso, Kolynos, Elmex, Tom's of Maine, Ajax, Axion,
Fabuloso, Soupline, and Suavitel, as well as Hill's Science Diet
and Hill's Prescription Diet.The secret to continued growth and
stability for the past two decades has been Colgate’s ability to
move its brands off shore to Latin America, Europe and Asia. In
the past, Colgate divided the world into geographic regions:
Latin American, Europe, Asia, and North America. Each region
had its own information systems. As long as the regions did not
need to share resources or information this patchwork system
worked, more or less. This all changed as global operations
became more integrated and senior management needed to
oversee and coordinate these operations more closely. Colgate
had been a global SAP user since the early 1990s, but it was
running five separate ERP systems to serve its different
geographic regions. Over a period of time, disparities in the
data developed between different geographic regions and
between the data used at the corporate level and the data used
by an individual region or business unit. The data were
constantly changing. For example, every time a sales report was
run, it showed different numbers for orders and shipments.
Colgate wanted more usable data to drive business decisions
and all of its managers and business units worldwide to use the
same version of the data.Colgate chose to solve this problem by
creating a single global data repository using SAP NetWeaver
Business Warehouse, SAP’s analytical, reporting and data
warehousing solution. Colgate’s regional ERP systems feed
their data to the warehouse, where the data are standardized and
formatted for enterprise-wide reporting and analysis. This
eliminates differences in data across the enterprise. One of the
outputs of the warehouse for senior managers is a daily HTML
table showing a series of financial and operational metrics for

9. the day com-pared to the previous month and quarter. The data
the executives see is exactly the same as what their peers in all
Colgate regions and business units see. However, the data were
not being used by enough employees in their decision making to
have an impact on business benefits. Colgate’s power users had
no trouble using the reporting and analytical tools provided by
the warehouse, and they were satisfied with the matrix reports
from the system. Colgate’s senior managers and other casual
users, on the other hand, did not feel comfortable running ad
hoc reports or drilling down into the layers of data to answer
questions the data brought to light. They did not have much
time to spend developing reports, and the standard reports
produced for them by the warehouse lacked navigation and drill
down capabilities. Tables had no color coding so users could
only interpret the data by scrutinizing the numbers on the table.
Eventually Colgate’s senior managers and other casual users
began requesting deeper access to the warehouse data in a more
timely and user-friendly format. They wanted reports that were
easier to run and where the data could be interpreted faster.
Senior management requested customizable, real-time
dashboards that could be more easily used to drive performance
improvement. Colgate’s information systems specialists then
implemented SAP NetWeaver BW Accelerator to speed up data
loads and improve user perception and adoption and SAP
Business Objects Web Intelligence to build customized reports.
SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence provides a powerful,
intuitive interface that enables business analysts and non-
technical business professionals to ask spontaneous questions
about their data. Casual business users can use simple drag-and-
drop techniques to access data sources and create interactive
reports that drill, slice and format information based on their
needs. Tools for cutting edge visualization allow end users to
view two- and three-dimensional charts and hone in on specific
areas of focus.Colgate started using SAP’s Business Objects
tools to build user-friendly dashboards, and quickly created
dashboard prototypes for management to review. Once

10. management approved the dashboard design, the dashboards
were populated with production data. Now Colgate’s senior
managers are running the dashboards to monitor the business
from a high level. Employee training was essential to the
dashboards’ success. Members of Colgate’s global information
systems development team created customized courses for
Colgate’s 65 business intelligence experts and ran the classroom
training. The training identified people that could be used as
resources for developing the reporting tools. When word spread
about the dashboards’ capabilities, Colgate’s power users
signed up for the classes as well.For Colgate, better reporting
tools that can sup-port different kinds of users have greatly
expanded the use of business intelligence throughout the
company. Currently about 4000 users interact with Colgate’s
SAP systems daily but this number is expected to expand to
15,000 to 20,000 users in the future. People who are accustomed
to seeing reports stuffed with numbers are finding that they can
use the information presented in dashboards to make faster
decisions. For example, managers can determine positive or
negative financial conditions by simply looking for where
dashboard reports use the color green, which reflects
improvements in Colgate’s financial position. Executives who
formerly relied on other people to obtain their custom reports
and data are able to access the information on their own. They
can see real data from the system much more easily and quickly.
1. Describe the different types of business intelligence users at
Colgate-Palmolive.
2. Describe the “people” issues that were affecting Colgate’s
ability to use business intelligence.
3. What management, organization, and technology factors had
to be addressed in providing business intelligence capabilities
for each type of user?
4. What kind of decisions does Colgate’s new business
intelligence capability support? Give three examples. What is
their potential business impact?