Fluent Essays

6 pages.Assignment No. 5 ~ Expanding into New Markets Revised: 6/29/2022 Introduction The purpose of this assignment is to have you think through various topics in this week’s material in light of real-world examples. We will focus on four topics from this weeks material, one of which is outsourcing. In considering outsourcing, for example, think through its impact on relationships, as well as different aspects of the business that you can outsource. For this assignment, you would consider the impact of outsourcing on trust and relationship building. The Organization The EducateUS Corporation delivers software (educational platforms), which allow an institution to be able to deliver educational content to their students. Customers of EducateUS are corporations, institutions, community colleges and universities. Due to a huge shift in education, it has become imperative for EducateUS to provide an off-premise educational platform (running in the “cloud”). Today, the organization provides an on-premise solution for their customers, where the customer hosts the software themselves, within their own data center. The manufacturing costs by producing and shipping software are high in this model as well as the deployment and support costs. Customers can download the software and install it on-prem (locally). A typical cost heavy situation that the EducateUS faces is as follows: A customer calls about a software problem that is on-premise. In this situation, EducateUS often needs to send out an expert to fix the problem, which is typically due to misconfiguration or a software incompatibility. This is very costly for the EducateUS organization. The EducateUS Corporation recognizes it needs to reduce their costs and at the same time globalize and increase margins for creating their software platform. Today, all employees of the EducateUS organization are in the United States. You are the CIO for EducateUS and have been working with executive management on a new strategic direction for the organization . Strategically, the executive team has determined to move the delivery educational software platforms to Software as a Service model and the company to a SaaS competitive strategic model (see Module 1). You are participating in business decisions at the highest levels of the company. You have been asked to move the EducateUS software development platform to an off-premise Software as a Service model . You need or provide a roll out and transition plan, balance and globalize their organization to accommodate this new SaaS model and produce a plan around contingency and disaster recovery. Remember, outline what business strategies are driving your change! Start there! Deliverables For each of the following topics below, in your own words, create a strategy describing the organizations plans around: · System roll out and transition · Think about the different aspects of planning. Remember, how do you go about creatiIT Management Part 1 Information Systems Organization * Discuss IT project planning and the different types of planning Discuss Poor Planning Outcomes and how to prevent poor planning using POWS Discuss how an organization can track a project and the issues surrounding it Learning Objectives IT Project Planning There are 3 phases of planning: Initial Planning determines the projects goals, stakeholders, scope, functionality, and governance System Planning determines the architecture and components needed to implement the project Implementation Planning determines, in detail, how the project will be implemented, how the resulting system will be deployed and maintained, and how resulting operational and organizational changes will be effected Agile Planning Planning is made up of a fairly large number of activities. When planning is compressed, some of these activities can be skipped or treated in a cursory manner, with adverse consequences. Agile planning can be successful, but it requires: Understanding the consequences of skipping or compressing planning activities Determining which consequences are most serious or most likely, based on the projects goals and impacts Deciding which planning activities need to be treated more carefully Mitigating the risks of inadequate planning, often through additional oversight during execution * Poor Planning Examples Do an inadequate job of identifying the stakeholders and determining how they should be involved.... Do an inadequate job of developing metrics to evaluate the project.... Do an inadequate job of determining the processes for project administration and governance.... * Poor Planning Outcomes The later problems are discovered, the more complex and costly it is to recover from them and not every company has the time or resources to do so. Recovery from complex problems often requires not only re-planning, but a willingness to acknowledge failures and remedy them. When projects address urgent situations, failures may occur because of the constraints of the schedule and the tendency to compress planning. Retrospectives after the project or after a certain milestone are good to have with the project team to determine what went wrong and how that can be addressed in the future. * Initial Planning Phase Consists of the following tasks: Identification of problems and opportunities the project is meant to address Preliminary identification of the goals, scale, and scope of the project Determining the project stakeholders—i.e., who cares about the project or might be affected it—and how they should be involved in it Establishment of project leadership and governance * Project POWS * Competitive Organizational Problems How will this IT project help counter threats from competitive and environmental forces? How will this IT project help overcome ineffective organizational characteristics and capabilities? Opportunities How will this IT projeIT Management Part 2 Information Systems Organization * Discuss IT project outsourcing and offshoring, the differences between them, and planning a project around them Discuss IT disaster recovery and risk mitigation Discuss IT business continuity planning Learning Objectives * Most software including middleware and applications, is more likely to be purchased or licensed. In addition to COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) software, organizations are increasingly using open source (primarily with support contracts) and software-as-a-service. Outsourcing IT Development * Configuration and Customization Requires a significant amount of development, especially for large systems such as SAP, and/or in cases where a companys requirements dont quite match a packages capabilities. System, Data and Business Process Integration Made easier by the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOAs), enterprise service buses (ESBs), and other enterprise integration tools. User-Facing Systems Development of e-commerce sites and portals/dashboards for employees, suppliers and partners. Security, Availability, Privacy, and Compliance Implementation of controls, countermeasures, and disaster recovery architectures and processes. Outsourcing IT Development Cont * Why Outsource? * COTS contracts are certainly simpler. With COTS theres no development structure or process, and no intermediate deliverables. Acceptance and post-delivery terms are largely dictated by the vendor—which changes the process to one of due diligence. In any case, COTS and outsourcing are not mutually exclusive. An issue that can be both important, and hard to judge, is whether the product will evolve to meet the buyers evolving needs. Vendors sometimes have buyers councils or similar mechanisms, but it can be hard to really influence or even know, in advance, what future releases of a product will contain. COTS systems also have their own set of security issues. Software products may include back doors and other security flaws, which may be difficult to identify, especially if the source code is not available. Contracts Outsourcing vs. COTS * Outsourcing IT development, organizations also outsource IT services and functions using hosting companies, the following services are available: Application Service Providers (ASPs) Software as a Service (SaaS) vendors Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) General IT outsourcing vendors such as EDS and Accenture. Outsourcing IT Service * Service Level Agreements (SLAs) ensure that hosting companies, ASPs, and SaaS vendors provide service that meets their requirements. These agreements typically include: Service Guarantees, such as pct availability, maximum downtime allowed, response time, # of simultaneous connections, etc., along with agreements how these are to be measured Problem Response Guarantees, such as how quickly and effectively the provider is required to respond to hardware and soft