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The use of teams and groups in the workplace continues to grow and trust and commitment to decisions remain desirable characteristics for team members. Group Support Software (GSS) or groupware software has been developed to automate the basic activities of group meetings and thus, help groups. This study combines the two sets of interests; specifically, it looks at the changes in trust and commitment to decisions exhibited by five teams using groupware. The data set was collected from five real‐world (federal, state and commercial) groups as they undertook their actual (Business Process Re‐engineering (BPR) and Joint Application Development (JAD)) projects using groupware. Using a case‐based research methodology, the data set was collected over a series of 41 meetings and organized around group characteristics such as commitment, trust, openness to express ideas, etc. The analysis hints at positive changes in desirable group characteristics over time when using GSS or groupware. However, the groupware characteristic of “more open expression of ideas” does not seem to be the source of the changes. Finally, based upon these findings, the authors suggest that GSS can impact the social components of a group as well as the production components but the cause of the impact resides deeper than a simple idea of providing an environment for more open expression of ideas.

ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems run on top of database systems, like Oracle, SQL Server and DB2. The longer these systems are in place within organizations the larger the databases are. Some sources estimate that corporate databases double or triple in size every year. As these databases grow, performance, the time it takes to complete transactions, is adversely affected. This implies that limiting the amount of data stored on an ERP system is an essential element of proper storage and data management. However, removing data from an ERP system can be a complex and risky task. Archiving ERP data is an area of academic and professional research that has had minimal attention. This paper examines the issues and provides insight into solutions associated with archiving ERP data. The issues are explored by summarizing the limited background and research in the archiving area, followed by an overview of the methodology used to arrive at the case study approach used to gather the data. Case data are presented from three different large corporate environments and the results of the data are used to recommend an archiving strategy that other companies can follow. A discussion of the implications of the proposed archiving strategy for future use and research concludes the paper.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether business process integration is feasible.

This paper employs a single case study strategy to research the aforementioned research question. The case study is exploratory.

Based on the findings and within the context of the case organisation, it appears that enterprise application integration (EAI) technology can integrate business processes. However, since it is not possible to generalize from a single case study, further research is suggested to investigate this area. From the case study, it appears that EAI can easily integrate the business processes when it is combined with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

This is a single case study and thus the results cannot be generalized.

The empirical date suggest that organisations may combine ERP with EAI to integrate their business processes in a more flexible way.

The contribution of the paper is threefold: it describes the business process automation layer of EAI technology, it defines and presents a stage model for the business process integration and it examines the research question.