May 29, 2014
Kristal Singletary
Capella University
MBA-FP6182 – Impact of Advances in Information Technology
Instructor: Joe Johnson
Executive Summary
The City of Augusta, Georgia’s municipal government originally contracted with Bi-Tech, Inc. (now Sungard) in 1997 to supply Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software to manage financial, procurement, and human resources management processes in the city. A progressively growing company, Sungard has acquired, consolidated, and updated products into a modern architecture called “OneSolution” that replaces the current suite of products (IFAS) Augusta currently users. Also, due to consolidation within the hardware and database industry, the Oracle platform used to operate IFAS will no longer be available on Augusta servers so migration of the current database to Microsoft SQL Server has become mandatory.
Introduction …show more content…
In an economy driven by technological change and advances, businesses must remain abreast of the latest innovations in order to remain competitive and access new market opportunities (Mercer, n.d.). To keep a business up-to-date, this process should be done continually but it also requires taking time before every major technology project or upgrade to plan strategy, requirements, implementation, training programs, and responses to potential risks. These steps are the building blocks of effective technological implementation plans. This paper will present an IT implementation proposal regarding the potential upgrade of the City of Augusta’s current Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software including risks and the financial impact of proceeding with or forgoing the project would have on the city’s