The Dilemma of Dual Processes

The university implemented a telephone registration system with the intention to speed up the registration process, and to reduce the confusion from the manual processing and verification of documents. Telephone registration has been successfully implemented in many universities. However, a local culture of hospitality translated to great personal attention to special needs of individual students. A staff-assisted registration process was retained to allow overriding of the telephone registration system. Under a friendly and accommodative culture, the administration deactivated many data input verification mechanisms of the telephone registration system to ensure user-friendliness of the registration process, and the verification of eligibility of students was substantially relaxed. Students were allowed to register for courses in satellite registration locations, and it became difficult to verify the authenticity of the approval signatures of academic advisors. Although students were required to consult an academic advisor, many did not. The implementation of the dual registration process created many problems, and severely affected the quality of the registration process and associated information. A sample of the problems include:

• Students accustomed to special administrative attention ignored rules and procedures of the telephone registration system, demanding human assistance throughout the registration process.

• Student enrollment exceeded class cap due to the simultaneous access to the registration system by telephone, and by staff from satellite terminals. However, the administration was lax in enforcing capacity limits.

• A great portion of the population were blood relatives, and "sympathetic" staff members would allow students to enroll in special project classes without the permission of instructor, and register in courses without proper prerequisites.

• Students signed up for courses to reserve seats for friends, and greatly inflated the perceived demand for courses. The distorted information eventually prompted the opening of new sections with extremely low enrollment.

• Students encountered problems in graduation due to the omission of academic requirements because many students were able to bypass academic advisement through the new system.

The telephone registration system was blamed for many of these problems even the system design was capable of handling many of these problems. The coexistence of a staff-assisted registration process allowed the bypass of registration restrictions, and ill-trained staffs allowed ineligible students to register for courses. The continuation of the paralleled staff-assisted registration option restricted the telephone registration system to a supportive role for data entry, rather than being used as an intelligent data processing system. The lesson learned is that excessive human intervention can destroy the credibility of an automated data processing system. This is an old lesson that organizations repeatedly fail to learn. It is also an important lesson for the implementation of information system in cross-cultural organizations, where cultural considerations supersede information technology deployment. An information resource manager should evaluate the role of information system according to its ability to generate value for specific culture, beside technical integrity. Special attention should be given to examine the cultural acceptance of assumptions and restrictions adopted in the system design.

Challenge One: The design objectives of transaction procession system must shift from efficiency orientation to adaptive accommodation of cultural habits. It becomes desirable to allow and track dynamic modification of data processing procedures according to shifting organizational and cultural influences.