Wk 4 - Apply: Project Documentation [due Day 7] Wk 4 - Apply: Project Documentation

3

Project Supporting Research

Narek Saribekyan

BSA 425

Professor Stephanie Benoit-Kurtz

3/15/2021

Week 3

Project Supporting Research

Executive Summary

The advancements in information technology have radically transformed business operations and activities. Firms are increasingly embracing such technologies to gain competitive advantage over their rivals. Lowkey Inc, for example, recognizes the need to improve its business processes and operations. Therefore, it is launching a project to introduce information system resources such as database management tools, cloud computing technologies, customer relationship management, and enterprise relationship management.

Purpose of the Project

The purpose of the project is to use information technology as a tool to improve the organization’s business processes. To achieve this objective, the project team members will focus on introducing three key information systems to the firm: customer relationship management systems, cloud-based solutions, and network database. The company will introduce these systems and integrate them to enable it to perform tasks such as gathering, storing, processing, and reporting data from different sources to provide information that is required to manage the process of making informed decisions. The organization has witnessed a surge in its operational costs, delays, and faulty processes. Customers also complain that their orders are taking too long to process and deliver. Therefore, the company hopes to invest in information technologies to improve its operational efficiency by cutting operational costs, speeding up business transactions, and optimizing customer experience.

Industry Background

Lowkey, Inc. is one of the organizations that operates within the gaming industry.This industry can be described as an environment that is characterized by intense competition as more and more players and investors scramble for the market share. Indeed, the global video game sector has grown phenomenally in the last five years, to resemble the competitive and interactive movie industry. The COVID 19 pandemic has, for instance, fueled the sector to generate more profits than movies and the North American sports combined. The revenue is expected to increase by 20 percent to 179 billion dollars by 2021, according to a survey conducted by the IDC data. This pattern makes the sector a major money maker than the global movie and North American sports, which would generate more than 75 billion in 2020. The latter industries suffered from the cruelties of the pandemic, whereas the video game sector is still projected to see a double-digit growth in 2021 after high single-digit growth in the previous two years.

Technology Trends

The advancements in information technologies have revolutionized the industry in which the company operates. For instance, the key players are increasingly embracing cloud technologies to drive market growth. Recent developments of could technology has transformed the idea of gaming into a reality. In it, the servers, where all the games are stored, do all the computation tasks, which include game scene rendering, game logic processing video encoding, as well as video streaming. Many firms, such as Lowkey and Onlive are increasingly recognizing the significance of this computation technology in providing commercial cloud gaming services. Such technologies can support different user devices such as console, tablets, smartphones, as well as personal computers. Moreover, many companies are adopting CRM programs to enable them to better understand customer behavior, simplify marketing and customer engagement, and perform more efficacious customer acquisition and retention. These are enabling them to reduce churn, and offer better customer services.

Project Approach

The project will employ the agile approach to its initiation, design, and implementation. This approach stresses on the relationship and communality of system developers and human role that is reflected in the contracts, as opposed to the institutionalized processes and development tools (Berisha-Shaqiri, 2015). In the current agile practices, this takes the form of close team relationships, and encourages project team members to work in an environment where there is cohesion and collaboration. The purpose of this methodology is to continually turn out the tested working software (Srivastava et al., 2017). This means that the new releases are generated at regular intervals. On some approaches, the developers can release hourly or daily versions, but in most cases it is often bi-monthly. More importantly, this methodology encourages cooperation and collaboration between developers and the clients, thereby meeting their needs.

Selected Vendors

There are various vendors who have been selected to provide and implement the proposed services. They include Oracle, IBM, and Amazon Cloud. Oracle will be selected to provide CRM services for the organization. One benefit of selecting this company for such applications is that they provide additional services such as sales, marketing, and handling of human capital. Additionally, its customer relationship management system has many features, which the company requires such as contact management, tracking interactions, scheduling reminders, email marketing, pipeline monitoring, and reporting or analytics. It also includes a helpdesk, and a system for accommodating mobile access.

IBM and Amazon will provide database and cloud computing services respectively. One benefit of using IBM for database system is that it provides relational database management system, which the organization can utilize to support the storing, analysis, retrieval, and analysis of data. This product is often expended with the support of object-oriented elements and non-relational structures with XML. Amazon, on the other hand, will provide the company with cloud computing services. The vendor’s services have evolved and improved significantly in the last five years. Currently, it offers different cloud solutions, which give businesses of all sizes a flexible IT environment that can further be adjusted to meet their changing needs.

Alternative Approach

The alternative method that will be employed to implement the proposed project is the system development life cycle approach. This approach offers a process-driven model of developing and implementing information technology projects (Arrey, 2019). According to the framework, the process of developing an effective information technology tool should include planning, analysis, design, development, implementation, integration, testing, and system maintenance. This approach is important as it will help to transform the idea of a project uinto0 a functional and completely operational structure.

Impact Analysis

System evaluation is an important step towardsexamining the overall success of a project. In this case,for example, the main evaluationmodelthat will be used is impact assessment. This method assesses the extent to which the outcomes and impacts to the project are in line. It does so by establishing the counterfactuals, which is what would have occurred in the absence of such a project. Thus, the impact assessment will seek to create a valid control group, for which a comparison will be made to examine the project success.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

The feasibility of the project will be determined by undertaking a cost-benefit analysis. This process will be attained by examining whether the benefits or advantages outweigh the project’s disadvantages or limitations. As such, the strengths and weaknesses of the project will be analyzed and a cost-benefit analysis conducted.

Financial Analysis

	Activity	Cost ($)
1	Planning and requirements analysis	10000
2	System design	100000
3	System development and identification of vendors	150000
4	Implementation	150000
	Total	410,000

Risk Analysis

The risk analysis process will focus on assessing how the project outcomes and objectives may change owing to the impact of a risk event. In this regard, the project risk analysis will undertake by assessing the potential risks and ranking them in terms of their likelihood of occurrence. Hacking and computer fraud are some of the potential risks that might occur. Once the risks are determined, they will be analyzed to ensure that appropriate steps are taken to mitigate them.

References

Arrey, D. A. (2019). Exploring the integration of security into software development life cycle

(SDLC) methodology (Doctoral dissertation, Colorado Technical University).

Berisha-Shaqiri, A. (2015). Management information system and competitive

advantage. Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 6(1), 204.

Srivastava, A., Bhardwaj, S., &Saraswat, S. (2017, May). SCRUM model for agile

methodology. In 2017 International Conference on Computing, Communication and

Automation (ICCCA) (pp. 864-869). IEEE.