260 W ASSIGNMENT

SADM 7/ed – ESSS CASE STUDY - Introduction Page: I-1

Sunnyvale

CA

Orlando

FL

Denver

CO

Marietta

GA

Valley Forge

PA

Sunnyvale, CA -

725 employees

Denver, CO -

770 employees

Valley Forge, PA -

1,056 employees

Marietta, GA -

171 employees

Orlando, FL -

1,475 employees

Each site is responsible for servicing and supporting the customers in its region as well as its internal employees.

A-1 IS has experienced a 15 percent increase in employees over the past two years, and long-range projections show that trend continuing for the next three years.

· Organization Structure

A-1 Information Systems

· Information Systems Facilities

The information architecture for A-1 IS uses the following standards:

PCs

· Each technician works uses a Dell notebook:

· Pentium M class machines with 512 MB RAM, 30-50 GB hard drives

· The bookkeeper/receptionist has a Dell Optiplex desktop running a Pentium 4, 256 MB RAM, and an 80 GB hard drive:

· Operating systems - MS Windows Windows XP Professional

· Tools - MS Office 2003 suite plus other software depending on use

· Internet Browser – IE 6 and Mozilla FireFox

· E-mail Client - Mozilla Thunderbird

· Various inkjet and laser printers

Servers

· Dell PowerEdge 2800 Server

· 1 GB of RAM, 80 GB RAID-5 hard drive storage

· Operating system - MS Windows Server 2003

· Providing DHCP, Security, and Internet Access, and Database Management (SQL Server 2000)

· Dell PowerEdge 1850 Server

· LAN – Each office employs a wired and wireless Ethernet LAN

· WAN – A VPN connects each office to the main office in Orlando

*** Notes:

Each site has comparable hardware and software, and the employee to micro ratio is 1-to-1.

Many employees, including most managers, use Dell notebook with docking stations as their desktop computer. Each notebook is comparable to Dell desktop specifications.

· The Problem

Due to the tremendous growth the company has experienced in recent years, it has recognized that to ensure the continued success of servicing internal as well as external customers, it needed to develop a strategic plan and vision for the use and modernization of its computing resources. The challenges of creating centralized systems across all five IS sites to support business practices that are common if not identical across the sites further emphasize the need.

In January 2015 a strategic plan to modernize the company’s resources was presented to executive management. This document included a multi-phased plan to reengineer the current systems to use state-of-the-art technology and to provide a showcase of systems that eventually could be delivered across the whole corporation.

Phase 1 of the plan consisted of reengineering all systems related to Human Resources, which included employee information, time and attendance, and payroll. Task 1 of this phase is the development of the Employee Self-Service System (ESSS), a system that will house the repository of employee master data. This system would provide the capability for each employee to maintain his or her own information regarding address and telephone numbers, emergency contact information, payroll deduction options, and savings bond purchases.

Current practices now have each of these changes being processed by an extensive manual effort in which Human Resource administrators fill out forms and input the data. This manual effort often results in a time lag of several days between the time the employee submits the forms and the update of the information in the computer. This delay has caused several problems, including unacceptable lag time in implementing payroll deduction changes and company mailings (including pay checks) being sent to the wrong address. Another problem of the present system is the employee directory, which is printed every six months. It seems to be out-of-date as soon as it arrives with missing information on new employees, and incorrect information on employees who have changed addresses or been transferred.

The plan for the new system is to provide the capability for an employee to update data themselves in real time, the problems mentioned above can be reduced, if not eliminated. The printed employee directory will be replaced by an intranet-based online directory that will be driven by the ESSS database and always up-to-date.