CIS 599 Deliverable

RUNNING HEAD: Project Deliverable 1: Project Plan Inception 1

Project Deliverable 1: Project Plan Inception 2

Project Deliverable 1: Project Plan Inception

Dwight Ivey

Professor Jimmie Flores

Graduate Information Systems Capstone

20 April 2020

Background information

Based in San Francisco, Multipobrand Industries is a company that deals with microfinancing of small business enterprises, mostly in the computer and mobile technology industries. The company mainly provides loans to the members of the state and the country in general that are interested in setting up businesses that are geared towards technological improvement, including computers and mobile devices. The company, however, plans to merger with a multinational microfinance group to enable it to widen the scope of its financial services from just financing the technological small business enterprises to all the general public despite the business.

Currently, with annual revenue of $35 million annually, the headquarters of the 25-member employee company is on the fifth floor of Innovation plaza. The company provides financial loans to its clients through visiting the offices or through applications and websites that enable one who is registered with the microfinance institution as a member to be able to access the loans and repay them through the internet.

Company products and services

As earlier stated, the company mostly invests in providing loans for small business enterprises to set up the sales of mobile phones and computers in the state and in the country as a whole. The loans provided range from short term loans that require periods of up to one year to offset and long-term loans that take the period of up to 5 years to offset. The company currently offers these services either physically or over the internet to these businesses at interest rates of 6% per annum. There are systems in place that ensure auditing, reception of the payment, billing, and issuing of receipts is done automatically (Hermes et al, 2018). There are also security measures to ensure money being physically deposited is well protected from malicious third parties.

Speculations on outsourcing opportunities

Given the company’s recent decision to merge with a multinational microfinancing group, there will be a broader scope of activities calling for more efficient systems of operations. The available opportunities for outsourcing that might present include cloud hosting companies, security logistics providers, and courier services. These outsourcing opportunities will be clearly explained in the subsequent paragraphs.

First, being a financial institution that provides services through online platforms, there might be a need for migration to cloud provision. This is meant to increase efficiency in the online services being provided and the scalability of the newly merged company. This will require the intervention of cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services to provide cloud computing logistics to the company to enable efficacy in the process execution and service provision (Marinescu, 2017).

With the expected increase in the number of clients and consequently, an increase in funds being transacted, there is a need for upscale security around the premises. Also, with the upscale of operational space from one floor to three floors, there would be a need for implementation of security measures within the premises. Therefore, the need for intervention of third-party logistics providers in the provision of security in the premises will be I place. This 3PL provider will be responsible for beefing up security around the premise and also within the premise to ensure malicious third parties infiltrate no information or physical resources.

Given the wider scope of operations from just funding small market enterprises to funding the general public and larger enterprises, there will also be the need for logistics providers’’ intervention in providing courier services to the funds being transacted. This logistics provider will also be responsible for overseas shipments and transactions as a merger with the multinational corporation would mean a significant upgrade of the company to a multinational scale.

The importance of these third-party logistics providers who are outsourced by the company is to increase efficiency while at the same time, reducing costs of operation of the company (Grant, 2019). This reduction of the cost comes in where the responsibilities of providing the funds towards these services will be shifted from the company to these providers. There also will be increased efficiency in the services being provided by these companies. This is because these companies providing specific services like shipment, cloud computing, and security have invested in technologies that ensure they provide the best quality of services. All these, therefore, work to the overall advantage of the company.

Description of the current Information Systems of the company

Currently, the company has operational systems running on computers that are used for auditing services and transaction services. The software in the computers is meant to analyze creditworthiness, eligibility, and other verifications of requirements from clients before their loans are approved. There is also software that is in place to trace payments of these systems and those that are meant to run periodical audits (Zhuhadar et al, 2017). In addition to these systems, there are databases that are in place to provide the company with storage of the client information and files that track the financial records.

Relational databases are currently in use to receive information from multiple clients and thereafter, analyze them and integrate them into meaningful data that can be used by the company in coming up with critical decisions, policy formulations, and other calculations like accounts receivable and accounts payable options. There are, however, plans to put into place data warehousing techniques for more efficient analysis of data from heterogeneous sources.

Projected Improvements

As earlier indicated, the company intends to adopt data warehousing and cloud computing options in their infrastructure. Data warehousing techniques are in place to ensure that with the big data from merging the two companies together, there is expected conflict in terms of analysis. The data warehouse put in place is meant to sort out the data from both heterogeneous sources, to summarize and consolidate these pieces of information to desired and meaningful results by both companies, to check the integrity of the data from various sources and to build indices and partitions accordingly. This way, there will be a reconciliation of the data from both companies and thus smooth running of the merged companies.

Cloud computing will be in place to also ensure efficacy while cutting on operational costs. With the merger to a multinational company, there will be increased data traffic on the online platforms and thus call for more efficient systems of operation (Cull et al, 2018). With cloud service provision, there are systems in place to ensure load balancing of the data traffic while there are problems with specific nodes.

Load balancing, by definition, is the equal distribution of data throughout the nodes of the system to prevent overloading of particular nodes at the expense of others. Also, there are systems in place that direct data to other nodes in the case of malfunction of others until those malfunctioning nodes are rectified. This not only improves the efficiency of data transmission but eliminated downtime for online users.

Cost-cutting strategies associated with migration to cloud for both companies include the elimination of the need to buy and replacing physical servers and other computing hardware. This will mean a reduction of the cost needed for these items. Consequentially, it eliminates the need for a dedicated team that is tasked with maintenance and security patching of the systems periodically. This is because these services are done by cloud service providers, thus a consequential reduction in the cost of operating the business (Sampathkumaran et al, 2016).

Addressing Information Security

As with most other companies that are more invested in internet-based operations, the issue of security of their data is raised. With the migration to the cloud, there is a security measure in place to ensure that there is no leakage of information either from inside or outside sources. To begin with, two-step authentication of data sources works to ensure intruders who have no authorization cannot access the data (Rittinghouse & Ransome, 2016). This can be used by the use of passwords and pins that generate hash algorithms to the cloud service providers where a similar algorithm is run against each time one key in their password and access is only granted upon a match (Nowrin & Khanam, 2019).

Finally, to address the issue of data loss, there are various techniques in place by cloud service providers to ensure that data is not lost, and the possibility of backing up the data. The use of redundancy by cloud service providers ensures this. Redundancy refers to the storage of the same information on various multiple sources (Schultz et al, 2017). This works to be able to retrieve the information in the case of losses due to any reason. This also works to ensure a smooth transition of the business from one server to the other in case of maintenance schedules. Through this, a business doesn’t have to stop when servers are being maintained, as there will be an automatic connection to the next server. This improves the efficiency of running a business.

References

Cull, R., Demirgüç-Kunt, A., & Morduch, J. (2018). The microfinance business model: Enduring subsidy and modest profit. The World Bank Economic Review, 32(2), 221-244. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/wber/article-abstract/32/2/221/4971668

Grant, D. B. (2019). Outsourcing integration and third party logistics services: An appreciation of two ‘classic’articles in industrial marketing management. Industrial Marketing Management, 79, 21- 26. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0019850119302093

Hermes, N., Lensink, R., & Meesters, A. (2018). Financial development and the efficiency of microfinance institutions. In Research Handbook on Small Business Social Responsibility. Edward Elgar Publishing. Retrieved from https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781784711818/9781784711818.00017.xml

Marinescu, D. C. (2017). Cloud computing: theory and practice. Morgan Kaufmann. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=O9smDwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1& dq=cloud+computing&ots=NOoVIymTwR&sig=Hgn1Faa7X_QOiGWPqkHAHP4V9Q E

Nowrin, I. N., & Khanam, F. K. (2019, May). Importance of Cloud Deployment Model and Security Issues of Software as a Service (SaaS) for Cloud Computing. In 2019 International Conference on Applied Machine Learning (ICAML) (pp. 183-186). IEEE. Retrieved from https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8989204/

Rittinghouse, J. W., & Ransome, J. F. (2016). Cloud computing: implementation, management, and security. CRC press. Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=YRIeASgVUJoC&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&dq =cloud+computing&ots=z7DNr7hgUL&sig=MruXPaJY_y_6HqXfO67j5Nna61g

Sampathkumaran, R., Chandrasekaran, K., & Ramkumar, A. (2016). U.S. Patent No. 9,519,695. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US9519695B2/en

Schultz, B. M., Gaddehosur, P. R., Garg, M., & Rajwan, J. S. (2017). U.S. Patent Application No. 14/839,829. Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170063927A1/en

TAN, W. C., Osman, M. A., Siau, C. J. Y., & Tan, C. C. (2020). U.S. Patent Application No. 16/019,586. Retrieved from https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200007523A1/en

Zhuhadar, L., Thrasher, E., Marklin, S., & de Pablos, P. O. (2017). The next wave of innovation—Review of smart cities intelligent operation systems. Computers in Human Behavior, 66, 273-281. Retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563216306574