Ppt vii

UnitVIIPowerPointPresentation.docx

Unit VII PowerPoint Presentation

It is important to understand what information systems are and why they are essential for running and managing a business. The case studies below will provide you with an opportunity to review many of the concepts covered in this course thus far. These case studies provide you with an opportunity to critically analyze events that are taking place in real-life organizations. This helps to develop your critical thinking and research skills as you research each of these scenarios.

For this assignment, you will review two case studies. Then, in a PowerPoint presentation, you will evaluate the studies and address each of the requirements listed below, using both critical thinking and theory as well as supporting documentation.

Review and analyze the Chapter 1 Case Study “Will the Coronavirus Pandemic Make Working from Home the New Normal?” and address the following in a minimum of four slides:

· Define the problem described in this case. What are the management, organization, and technology issues raised by this problem?

· Identify the information systems used to provide a solution to this problem. Was this a successful solution? Why, or why not?

· Will working from home become the dominant way of working in the future? Why, or why not?

· Analyze how information systems aligned with organizational goals and strategies is necessary.

Review and analyze the Chapter 8 Case Study “Is the Equifax Hack the Worst Ever—and Why?” and address the following in a minimum of four slides:

· Identify and discuss the security and control issues that resulted from flaws in Equifax security and control.

· What management, organization, and technology factors contributed to these problems?

· Explain how an organization’s information systems are vulnerable to internal and external threats.

· Discuss the impact of the Equifax hack.

· Explain why data management has a tremendous impact on an organization’s survival.

· How can future data breaches like this one be prevented? Discuss information systems solutions.

In formatting your PowerPoint presentation, do not use the question-and-answer format; instead, use bullets, graphs, and/or charts in your slides to identify important points, and then discuss those points in the speaker notes of each slide. The speaker notes section of each slide should not repeat slide information, but serve as an area in which you augment or elaborate on slide information so that your audience has a better understanding of the material. You must have a minimum of 100 words in the Speaker Notes section of each content slide.

Your PowerPoint presentation should be at least eight slides in length (not counting the title and reference slides). You are required to use at least two peer-reviewed, academic sources that are no more than 5 years old to support each case study. You may use your eTextbook once in each case study. All sources used, including the eTextbook, must be referenced; all paraphrased material must have accompanying in-text citations in APA Style. At least two sources must come from the CSU Online Library.

CaseStudy1.docx

Case Study 1:

Will the Coronavirus Pandemic Make Working from Home the New Normal?

As COVID-19 continued to spread around the globe, companies large and small started to make changes to the way they work, shuttering their offices and requiring most or all of their employees to work remotely from their homes.

During the pandemic, ClearRisk, which offers integrated, cloud-based software solutions for claims, fleet, incident, and insurance certificate management had its entire staff working from home.

Many large law firms, including Reed Smith, Baker McKenzie, and Nixon Peabody, closed offices and required work at home during the pandemic. The law firms emphasized that they could continue to serve clients despite office closings and remote work.

OpenText Corp., a Canadian provider of enterprise information management products, plans to eliminate more than half of its 120 offices globally, with 2000 of its 15,000-person workforce working from home permanently.

In mid-May 2020, Twitter Inc. notified employees that most of them could work from home indefinitely.

According to a recent MIT report, 34 percent of Americans who previously commuted to work stated that they were working from home by the first week of April 2020 due to the coronavirus outbreak. Prior to the pandemic, the number of people regularly working from home remained in the single digits, with only about 4 percent of the US workforce working from home at least half the time. However, the trend of working from home had been slowly gaining momentum thanks to advances in information technology for remote work and changes in corporate work culture. The coronavirus pandemic may mark a tipping point.

It’s likely that many people who started working from home for the first time during the pandemic will continue to do so thereafter. New health guidelines about distancing will require some workplaces to expand to accommodate all their employees or to have a significant percentage of employees work permanently from home.

Information technologies driving these changes include broadband high-speed Internet connections, laptop computers, tablets, smartphones, email, messaging, and videoconferencing tools. As companies shift their work from face-to-face to remote, video conferencing is becoming the new normal for meetings. People are trying to have good conversations, share critical information, generate new ideas, reach consensus, and make decisions quickly on this platform.

Although less than ideal for face-to-face interactions, videoconferencing is becoming more powerful and affordable. There are many options, including Skype, Skype for Business, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Chime, BlueJeans, Cisco’s WebEx, GoToMeetings, and Google Meet. Some business people are using the same tools they do in their personal communications, such as FaceTime and Facebook Messenger. (FaceTime now supports group video chat with up to 32 people.)

Video conference software such as WebEx and BlueJeans appears designed for more corporate uses. Other software such as Microsoft’s Skype and Zoom feels more consumer-friendly and easier to set up, with free or low-cost versions suitable for smaller businesses. Skype works for video chats, calls, and instant messaging and can handle up to 50 people in a single video call. Skype allows calls to be recorded in case someone misses a meeting. Skype also provides file-sharing capabilities, caller ID, voicemail, a split view mode to keep conversations separate, and screen share on mobile devices.

Up to 1,000 users can participate in a single Zoom video call, and 49 videos can appear on the screen at once. Zoom includes collaboration tools like simultaneous screen-sharing and co-annotation, and the ability to record meetings and generate transcripts. Users can adjust meeting times, select multiple hosts, and communicate via chat if microphones and cameras are turned off.

There are definite benefits to remote work: lower overhead, more flexible schedules, reductions in employee commuting time and attrition rates, and increases in productivity. (Many companies reported that productivity did not suffer when employees worked at home during the pandemic.) According to Global Workplace Analytics, a typical company saves about $11,000 per half-time telecommuter per year. Working remotely also poses challenges.

Not all employees have access to the Internet at home, and many work in industries that require on-site work. About 80 percent of American adults have high-speed broadband Internet service at home. However, according to a Pew Research Center study, racial minorities, older adults, rural residents, and people with lower levels of education and income are less likely to have in-home broadband service. In addition, one in five American adults access the Internet only through their smartphones. Employees with little children or small apartments find working at home more difficult.

Full-time employees are four times more likely to have remote work options than part-time employees. According to Global Workplace Analytics, a typical remote worker is college-educated, at least 45 years old, and earns an annual salary of $58,000 while working for a company with more than 100 employees.

Although email and text messaging are very useful, they are not effective tools for communication compared to the information exchange and personal connection of face-to-face conversations. Remote work also inhibits the creativity and innovative thinking that take place when people interact with each other face-to-face, and videoconferencing is only a partial solution. Studies have found that people working together in the same room tend to solve problems more quickly than remote collaborators, and that team cohesion suffers when members work remotely.

Sources: Lindsey Jacobson, “As Coronavirus Forces Millions to Work Remotely, the US Economy May Have Reached a ‘Tipping Point’ in Favor of Working from Home,” CNBC, March 23, 2020; Rita Zeidner, “Coronavirus Makes Work from Home the New Normal,” All Things Work, March 21, 2020; Dana Mattioli and Konrad Putzier, “The End of the Office,” Wall Street Journal, May 16-17, 2020; Cate Pye, “Coronavirus: What Does the ‘New Normal’ Mean for How We Work?” Computer Weekly, April 3, 2020; Josh Lowy, “Overcoming Remote Work Challenges,” MIT Sloan Management Review, April 9, 2020; Derek Thompson, “The Coronavirus Is Creating a Huge, Stressful Experiment in Working from Home,” The Atlantic, March 13, 2020; Kevin Roose, “Sorry, but Working from Home Is Overrated,” New York Times, March 10, 2020; Rani Molla, “This Is the End of the Office as We Know It,” Vox, April 14, 2020.

UnitVIIStudyGuide.pdf

ITC 5301, Management Information Systems 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit VII Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

1. Analyze the use of information systems in business. 1.2 Discuss information systems solutions that can be applied to business problems.

3. Explain how information technology systems influence organizational strategies.

3.6 Analyze how information systems projects are aligned with organizational goals and strategies. Required Unit Resources Chapter 13: Building Information Systems Chapter 14: Making the Business Case for Information Systems and Managing Projects Unit Lesson

Information Systems No organization will remain the same for too long if it wants to be effective, efficient, and competitive. The concept of organizational change goes hand-in-hand with implementing new systems, regardless of whether you purchase new systems or develop them in-house. There is a whole discipline of quality management based on organizational change, process improvement, and business process redesign that supports the use of technology to improve business processes. For many organizations, the concept of business process redesign is never ending due to the continual need for evaluating current processes, designing new processes, implementing new processes, and seeking to optimize processes (Laudon & Laudon, 2022). Let’s look at an office environment as an example. An office environment is not generally set up to be process-efficient like an assembly line in an automobile assembly plant. However, people in office environments often get new information systems. Why is that? There are always ways of being more efficient in every type of workplace. There are always new ways to automate manual tasks—even just being able to access data faster is a plus. Most systems development comes from a desire to solve a problem. For example, how can we gather some specific data, manipulate the data, and output the data into information that makes sense to us or that we can use to make good business decisions? The opening case in Chapter 13, “Vinci Energies Builds a New Mobile Employee Time Sheet App” (Laudon & Laudon, 2022), illustrates how important it is for an organization to assess its business processes and strive to improve them continually. Between 2009 and 2019, the company tripled in size and found that its existing systems that were once sufficient now cumbersome. The systems were heavily manual, making them difficult and time-consuming to maintain. The highlighted company implemented a single instance of SAP S/4HANA Cloud as-a-Service (PaaS). This ERP system simplifies its information technology (IT) systems and financial reporting processes. One of the applications in the suite is a new employee timesheet application named MOBITIME that could capture worker time sheets as well as project costs and activities for multiple projects from any location. Other authorized users would be able to view the time sheet and project data online

Developing a New Information System There are some core activities involved in systems development. These activities or steps in the process might actually be common sense to some of us. Different theorists can break the development process into

UNIT VII STUDY GUIDE Building Information Systems and Managing Projects

ITC 5301, Management Information Systems 2

UNIT x STUDY GUIDE Title

different steps, but for the purpose of this course, we will say that there are six basic activities, according to Laudon and Laudon (2022).

1. Systems analysis: How do you know how to solve the problem unless you do some analysis first? What is the exact problem? What are the causes? What are the requirements? What are some potential solutions? Are these solutions feasible? Based on many factors including time, cost, benefits, and impacts, management will choose a solution.

2. Systems design: How do you get written user requirements into technical requirements? What are the system specifications? What is the functionality? What should the user involvement be? The systems design document should lay out the entire solution so that the developers can create the new system.

3. Programming: This is where a lot of the work happens because the developer has to take the technical document and create an operational system. In many cases, organizations will purchase software packages from a vendor. If the tasks are standard or customizable, then purchasing a system may be a good option.

4. Testing: There are different forms of testing. The developer will test as he or she goes, making sure there is functionality in the system. Then, the developer or a quality assurance (QA) representative will perform unit testing on the applications or modules one at a time. The next step would be to test the whole system to make sure everything works in unison. There will also likely be some regression testing, which means the tester will make sure no other systems are harmed by what this new system is doing. The final step is to test with the user to make sure the system is functional.

5. Conversion: This involves the process of going live with the new system. There are many ways of doing this. Two popular ways involve a phased approach or direct cutover. Many times, organizations can even run systems in parallel until they are ready to turn off the old system.

6. Production and maintenance: This step involves a review process over a period of time to make sure that there are no bugs that need to be addressed.

The opening case of Chapter 14, “BDO Canada Selects New Project Management Software,” illustrates how important it is to involve users in designing, building, and implementing system changes. BDO replaced its internally built project management tool with a user-friendly online software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that would work better with BDO’s growing portfolio of cloud applications. BDO’s senior IT management meets regularly, and the PMO team works with IT project managers to help them with product features and processes. The PMO team also offers drop-in sessions for stakeholders with questions two or three times per month. This case study shows that project management can be successful when done right. Unfortunately, too many organizations fail to correctly assess the business value of projects or fail to manage the organizational change brought on by new projects.

Management of the Information System Just like any process, there are ways to manage the software development process to make sure that the rules are followed and that the process is as efficient as possible. Depending on the size of the project, managers may need some tools to help document and manage the process. First, it is important to note that there are different methodologies for developing systems. Structured methodologies are top-down, step-by- step methodologies that use data entities whereby progress flows from one logical step to the next. Object- oriented development methodologies are more iterative and incremental. They use objects that are data accompanied with information/instructions concerning the data. To manage the software development process, most development shops use a software systems development life cycle (SDLC) program. The original SDLC was called the waterfall method and was characterized by having formal stages where one stage had to be completed before the next one began. That sounds a bit rigid, does it not? It works well for smaller, less-complex software projects; however, it does not work well for larger, more-complex projects. Since the development of the waterfall SDLC, there have been many other approaches that have been developed. For example, prototyping is a popular method where parts of the system are created and presented to the user for use and approval. If the user does not approve, then adjustments can be made and presented again. This method can be used in conjunction with the waterfall method and adds an iterative element. More recently, several methods have been developed that are more versatile and iterative in nature. One of the more popular methods is called agile development, which focuses

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on the quick delivery of small subprojects, each treated as a full project. Agile is used in many software development shops. Just as technology has adapted over time to answer the needs of organizations, so have the methods and processes been used to support technology advancement and information systems development. Role of project management. You might ask yourself why you need project management if you have a SDLC. Broadly speaking, a project is a set of activities that work together to achieve a business objective. That business objective might be to build a new warehouse, or it might be to build a new system. Either way, the project has to be managed. Nowadays, most complex systems go outside the boundaries of just software development. There may be hardware, network, server, database, and security considerations. You may even have prominent involvement from the business side of the organization. For the actual software development portion of the project, you can use an SDLC methodology to manage that process and project management to manage the overall project. There are some higher-level considerations for organizations and project management as well. How can you align your system projects with business goals? The organization’s business strategy drives the selection of projects. Many organizations will have a steering committee or similar facsimile to drive this selection process. How can organizations link their information systems projects to their business plan? An information systems plan will help make the link between specific technology and corporate goals. The plan will list the corporate goals and specify how IT will support the achievement of those goals through current systems and new development and acquisitions. How can you assess business value in relation to the information systems that you are developing? The value of a system is based on whether it provides enough returns to justify its cost. However, remember that there are always tangible and intangible benefits when discussing value. All of these are important considerations in the process of developing information systems for organizations.

Reference Laudon, K. C., & Laudon, J. L. (2022). Management information systems: Managing the digital firm (17th ed.).

Pearson. Suggested Unit Resources In order to access the following resources, click the links below. To reinforce the concepts from this unit, you are encouraged to review the following:

• Chapter 13 PowerPoint Presentation (PDF for Chapter 13 PowerPoint presentation)

• Chapter 14 PowerPoint Presentation (PDF for Chapter 14 PowerPoint presentation)

The following video cases mentioned in your eTextbook augment the information presented in the assigned chapter readings. You are encouraged to review the Chapter 13 and 14 video cases linked below. A transcript can be accessed for each video within the YouTube player by clicking on the three dots below the video title on the right. Closed-captioning can be turned on by clicking the “cc” icon at the bottom of each video. leorwebsphere. (2011). IBM business process management [Video]. YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDfQunJ12Mc

https://online.columbiasouthern.edu/bbcswebdav/xid-150632007_1

https://online.columbiasouthern.edu/bbcswebdav/xid-150605743_1

https://online.columbiasouthern.edu/bbcswebdav/xid-150632009_1

https://online.columbiasouthern.edu/bbcswebdav/xid-150605745_1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDfQunJ12Mc

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit VII
Required Unit Resources
Unit Lesson

Information Systems
Developing a New Information System
Management of the Information System
Reference

Suggested Unit Resources