David Bass, Rogene Avery, Charles Hinton
Southern New Hampshire University
Introduction
CarePlus Health Plans IT department had a very poor satisfaction rate among the business users. They have made drastic changes, including new management, new policies, and new procedures all in attempt to improve how the business views them. In July 2012, CarePlus Health Plans had brought in a new Information Technologies (IT) director, Chris Scott. Previous to Chris starting, the IT department had a really bad reputation of not listening to the business, not completing requests in a timely manner, and basically just difficult for business to get anything completed. Chris did not make sweeping changes when he first took the position. He wanted to see what was working and was not working before he made any changes. After his evaluation period, Chris implemented what he thought was the best for the IT department to move forward only after getting the approval from the business leaders. Coming up on the two year mark for these changes, it was decided by IT management that it was time to find out from the business how they thought the department was doing, even though the department got praise from time to time.
Causal Research: Attempts to determine cause and effect of the change in management
Alternative – IT manager with a high level of experience will be more capable of doing their jobs rather than having three that weren’t.
Null - Manager with a high level of experience will be equally satisfied with their jobs when compared to employees with low levels of experience. Variables
Dependent - Job satisfaction
Independent - Years of experience
Two levels (high & low)
Exists naturally in the population of Managers at the start of study
Research Question
CarePlus Health Plans IT department has a very poor satisfaction rate among the business users. They have made drastic changes, including new management, new policies, and new procedures all in attempt to improve how the business views them. The IT department makes great strides at improving business perception. Each improvement is tailored so that it can be used to accomplish a specific business satisfaction. This empirical method can be followed to create and then continually improve perception, since it explicitly builds and tests underlying models of how developers work in a particular environment. That is, our approach for developing techniques for the underlying assumptions about:
• Specific tasks for which the business process will be used
• Aspects of the business that must be understood to support those tasks
• Aspects of the environment affecting tasks using the business process
This empirical approach avoids the mistake of applying assumptions that are true in other environments to a context in which they have not been tested.
Hypothesis
It is hypothesized that there is a difference in job satisfaction between those who receive regular request services for the IT department versus those who just work with the department. Due to the change in management better services were obtained.
Data Collection Process
In order to explore our topic and try to answer our research question, I conducted an interview with a primary source. Chris Scott, IT Director for CarePlus Health Plans, is responsible for several locations in a couple states it was difficult to actually have a one on one interview. Chris agreed to answering questions if they were emailed to him. The questions presented to him covered past, present, and possibly some of the future. This source gave us a better understanding of our topic, and even though I was not able to fully answer my research questions, I learned a lot and narrowed out subject for the next paper assignment.
Method
In-depth interviews are a useful qualitative data collection technique that can be used for a variety of purposes, including needs assessment, program refinement, issue identification,