It and the Enterprise

1. INTRODUCTION: COMPANY AND PRODUCT PRESENTATION. 3

2. PURPOSE OF THE PLAN. 3

3. STRATEGIC BUISNESS PLAN 4

4. CURRENT SYSTEMS 5

5. NEW DEVELOPMENTS 6

6. MANAGEMENT STRATEGY 7

7. IMPLEMENTATION PLAN AND BUDGET REQUIREMENTS 8

8. CONCLUSION 9

1. Introduction: company and product presentation

This document is an Information System (IS) plan, the purposes and aims of the plan will be described later, in this short introduction I will present the subjects of this IS plan: the company and its main product. For security and confidential reason both the company and the product will remained unnamed.

The company studied is an Irish software company based in Dublin; its product is a financial related software using different type of database (Oracle, SQL, Raima). The company's human resource organization has therefore two strong departments: a development team looking after the software's development and a Data team looking at the data maintenance and collection, plus the usual departments found in most software companies such as Human resources, Quality Assurance (QA), Finance and sale/marketing

The nature of the company and of its product make the IS plan an appropriate and needed project as the product - described in the "Current System" chapter - is a complex system composed of many sub-systems that needs to be managed, organized, and maintained efficiently in order to meet the critical success factors of such a product.

2. Purpose of the plan

The purpose of the plan is to identify where and how IS is used within the company both in the business and the management of the company and to outline the cost and benefits of an IS where it is already in use and also the cost and benefits of integrating a new IS where not in use.

In order to analyze this we will go through the current strategic business plan, the current systems in use and the changes already happening to those systems. We will also need to study the key business process and the management strategy to weigh up the possibility of implementing a new system or the implications in changing existing systems.

3. Strategic Business Plan

The current strategic business plan's main objective of the company is to be number one provider of financial data and solutions to the investment industry in Europe. In order to meet this goal within the next five years, strategies have been set in the main departments: sales, marketing, data and development.

The business strategy for sales and marketing has changed over the last few years. The sales team used to be focused on selling desktop software to individual clients. The new objectives are more in line with the global strategic business point of being number one in Europe. The sales and marketing have now for priority to focus on the top 100 Financial Institutions doing business in Europe. The strategic business plan also outlines that in order to reach this requirement the sales agreements might be done alongside third party complimentary products in order to reach those top institutions.

The strategies set for the development and data teams is to develop solutions to assist sales functions in organisations marketing funds and investments and capture data available across Europe.

Those new strategies are a major turn in the company's history because to deliver its customers the solutions required the company needs to develop its structure and system. In the next chapters we will look at the current systems in place, the changes required and the changes already implemented in order to reach those targets.

4. Current Systems

The main information system in the company is obviously the one around the main product of the company. It is a complex system involving different "sub-systems" such as the systems in use to manage the data (i.e. DataManager, an in-house data entry application) and the different software (i.e. the XML feed generation, the 16 and 32 bit desktop applications or the website used to host the data). The whole information flow of the system could be represented as follow:

To support this system eight servers are in use including a file server, an FTP server 3 Oracle servers and an SQL to host the different databases. They are linked to the staff's workstations through an Ethernet 802.3 network which is linked together with 8 hubs with a 100Mo capacity allowing a fast network connection much needed to maintain and work with relatively big databases. Many software are used to produce and maintain this system some are commercial software such has Microsoft OS, MS Office, MS Visual Studio etc... plenty in house software are also used in this system such as the application used to produce the XML feed or DataManager. These in house applications are systems on their own involving user input, database storage, validation and function and process control. They are mostly C++ and/or VB application, which are all written using Microsoft's Visual Studio.

All those business related systems and the fact that the human resources is very limited make it very difficult to meet the requirement. Even more when it is question of setting up a new system it then need to be planned and followed accurately, we will see that in the next chapter.

5. New developments

Within the business related systems and the management related systems a few new systems are currently being implemented. Even though the company paradigm will not change thoroughly, new systems will be or are developed in order to meet customer requests, technology changes or management needs.

The main business system currently under development is the new "DataManager" application. It has been - and still is - for a long time the weak point of the whole system, while most of the sub-systems followed most of the technology trends such as the desktop application which evolved from a DOS to 16bit and then a 32bit application or the WEB hosting solution. DataManager is still a 16 bit application which was developed with requirements and needs that are now obsolete. The new system will be a 32bit application