Total Cost of Ownership Analysis for Acquiring a Data Integration Solution
Option 1: Total Cost of Ownership Analysis for Acquiring a Data Integration Solution
Background
You are an IT consultant advising your client, Boffo Research, a research and advisory firm covering the consumer technology market sector. Boffo gathers its research data by manually collecting online reviews of consumer electronic products, scanning social media sites for consumer product reviews, publishing online surveys and recording results, performing interviews with consumer electronics vendors, and operating an in-house laboratory where consumer electronics are tested and the results recorded.
Boffo’s analysts then manually copy the results into spreadsheets; review and analyze data from these disparate sources; and prepare business intelligence reports on market trends, vendors to watch, product comparisons, and similar analyses. Boffo’s research clients include buyers for wholesale and retail establishments, and the product vendors themselves.
Boffo has a small in-house software development and testing team that maintains and enhances the accounting, order processing, and research subscription solutions they developed through the years.
Assignment
The explosive volume of new consumer electronic products, online reviews, and social media comments has overwhelmed Boffo’s manual data collection and integration approach. Boffo’s management has asked you to study how to automate collecting online data and integrating it into the structured data produced from in-house laboratory testing.
You plan to investigate commercial data virtualization solutions installed in house, open source alternatives for adoption and customization in house, and the purchase of a turnkey, custom-designed solution to be produced by offshore outsourcing vendors. Your deliverables for Boffo will include:
A solution-acquisition project plan covering the high-level activities of gathering requirements, producing a requirements specification document, and preparing and distributing a Request For Proposal (RFP) to data virtualization vendors and offshore outsourcing vendors.
A simple (3 pages maximum) Stakeholder Requirements Specification (StRS), as defined by Hoel, T., & Holtkamp, P. (2012). Requirements modelling in international information systems design – What competencies are needed and how to manage them?Proceedings Of The European Conference On Knowledge Management, 1, 466-475.
A set of data flow diagrams that describe the processes of capturing input data (including online reviews from websites, relevant tweets from Twitter, and the structured data from Boffo’s in-house laboratory), and the processes of integrating data from the input sources for use by Boffo’s research analysts.
A Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis comparing and contrasting the risks, rewards, and readiness of Boffo for each form of solution acquisition.
A three-year Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) study prepared in an Excel spreadsheet. Consider the costs of initial acquisition, implementation, testing, training, change management, maintenance, and enhancement. Include human resource expenses, and storage and server costs for development, test, and production environments for work performed in house.
Include a title page and reference page. Make sure your paper follows APA style according to the CSU-Global Guide to Writing and APA Requirements. Use three CSU-Global Library resources and/or outside academic sources other than the textbook, course materials, or other information provided as part of the course materials. You may not use Wikipedia for any CSU-Global assignment. For this assignment, a credible source is defined as:
A scholarly or peer-reviewed journal article
A newspaper article
A trade or industry journal article, publication, or website, including those from trade organizations
Option 2: New Order Processing System
Background
You are a systems analyst working for Laggard, Inc. (Laggard), a wholesale distributor of bulk vitamins and fine chemical food additives. Laggard has stayed way behind the IT industry evolutionary curve. The company relies on a software suite they developed more than 40 years ago. You have convinced the Laggard management to investigate replacing this legacy software before the hardware on which it runs can no longer be repaired.
You think the system at greatest risk for failure is the order processing system. Here is how it works today. A bank of telephone operators takes sales order calls from customers, transcribes the orders onto coding forms, and sends them to the keypunch department for encoding. During the night shift, computer operators run batch jobs to read in the orders, check customer credit, and print stock pick lists for those customers with good credit. If the batch jobs detect problems with customer identification, shipping addresses, credit, or any other issue, the errors print on an order reject report that is routed to sales, order processing, and inventory managers for review and resolution. Pickers, packers, and shippers annotate the pick list report that is used as a turnaround source document for updating inventory, customer records, and accounts receivable.
Laggard’s aging software development team is nearing retirement. However, the members are still available to answer questions about the existing order processing solution. Relevant business people from the sales, order processing, and inventory management teams are also available to you.
Assignment
To get the modernization ball rolling, you will gather requirements for a new order processing solution, structure the requirements, and ensure they are correct. In addition, you will expose Laggard to web-based applications and mobile computing access. You are eager to get started, before the software team retires and the aging hardware fails. Here are your deliverables for this assignment:
Produce a legacy system replacement Baseline Project Plan (BPP) for Laggard. Begin with gathering and structuring requirements and end with a web-based order-processing prototype. Make note of the business and technology roles that will participate in various phases of the project, and be sure to include multiple review cycles for requirements review.
Create a one-page project scope statement explaining why Laggard needs this project.
Laggard management is risk-averse, so develop a project feasibility study of 2 to 3 pages in MS Word or PowerPoint examining the economic, operational, technical, schedule, legal/contractual, and political risks. Use your existing business or life experience to propose likely risks and mitigations. Stick to the two or three greatest risks in each category.
Interview sales, order processing, and inventory management team members, and develop an “as-is” data flow context diagram and a two-level drill down showing external entities, processes, data flows, and data stores.
Create the “to-be” DFD set indicating how online-oriented processes will replace batch processes
Develop the “as-is” and “to-be” ERDs showing that the “to-be” ERD has multiple ship-to addresses for each customer account, and that orders may have an unlimited number of line items. The “as-is” ERD does not have these flexibilities. Note which entity or entities correspond to which DFD data stores.
Write an MS Word document or create a PowerPoint presentation describing:
an order entry system interface and dialog design specification
the simplest success dialog sequence scenario for entering an order
two more complex success scenarios
two failure scenarios
how the failure scenarios relate to the order reject report from the current batch process
This document will be the interface specification for the order processing prototype you described in the project plan.
Include title and reference pages or slides, as applicable. Make sure your paper or slide presentation follows APA style according to the CSU-Global Guide to Writing and APA Requirements. Use three CSU-Global Library resources and/or outside academic sources other than the textbook, course materials, or other information provided as part of the course materials. You may not use Wikipedia for any CSU-Global assignment. For this assignment, a credible source is defined as:
A scholarly or peer-reviewed journal article
A newspaper article
A trade or industry journal article, publication, or website, including those from trade organizations
projectscope Project Feasibility Study
Solution preview
The project that is being proposed will ensure that a solution is provided to cover the main challenges being faced by Laggard. This includes faster processes that can be utilized to come up with responses that are accurate as per the demands of the consumers. The responses can be offered within reasonable time………………………….
APA
1220 words