Mkt 578 Week 4 Information Technology Strategic Plan
Information Technology Strategic Plan
Riordan Manufacturing China Manufacturing Facility Relocation
Sayed Abdelrahman, William Dubose, Alan Erb, John Rodie, Eric Sillman
CMGT 578
December 24, 2014
KenRoy Regester, MS
Information Technology Strategic Plan
Executive Summary
The plan should begin with a summary targeted for the business audience.
Purpose
Purpose of the plan.
Scope
High-level goals and plans for all areas of information technology that affect the business, not just the infrastructure. A road map for IT is useful in illustrating overall strategy.
Business Direction
Lay out the specific business drivers, assumptions and plans that informed the IT strategic plan. (For example, the business is planning to acquire smaller companies so its plan is to focus on integration technologies.).
Current IT Infrastructure …show more content…
Riordan Manufacturing China operation in Hangzhou is configured as a standalone self-contained system, depicted in Figure 1.
The system is divided up into four main areas, office automation, research and development (R & D), servers and network attached storage (NAS), and communication (Apollo Group, Inc., 2013). The IT staff in China are all contract workers reporting to a local IT manager. The IT manager for the China facility reports to Maria Trinh, Riordan Manufacturing’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). None of the China IT department’s employees, except for the Manager are Riordan employees (Apollo Group, Inc., 2013).
The office automation function consists of 35 Dell Vostrro computers configured with Microsoft Windows 7, Office, and links to appropriate corporate databases and systems running on one of the servers. The computers utilize a 100BaseT wired Ethernet backbone for connectivity to the servers and local printers. The size of the computer hard disks is kept small to make sure that company data is stored on one of the NAS
systems.
The R & D function consists of 15 Apple Mac Pro workstations with dual six-core processors and large monitors. Local printing is done using one of three Xerox color printers or the Hewlett Packard (HP) large bed plotter. The R & D function is serviced by a dedicated International Business Machines (IBM) HS20 Blade Server with dual Xenon multicore processors and a dedicated 1000BaseF fiber optic Ethernet network. The R & D network is connected to the company 100BaseT backbone via a gateway/switch to expedite network traffic across the two networks.
The server farm consists of two IBM HS20 Blade Servers and a single IBM pSeries Multiprocessor. All three servers and the remainder of the computers use an Iomega P800M NAS for data storage. The pSeries server hosts the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Systems, Applications, and Processes (SAP). The two blade servers function as a network server and Windows Exchange server. All the servers and NAS are powered by an uninterruptable power supply (UPS).
The communication functions consists of a dedicated Ka Band encrypted satellite base station for bidirectional communication to corporate headquarters in San Jose, California. Telephone communications are handled by a voice over internet protocol (VOIP) through one of the servers and out either the satellite link or a local internet connection, depending on the call destination. A dedicated high speed connection to the internet is handled through a dedicated VOIP/Data router and firewall appliance.
All servers, NAS, and satellite base station equipment are located in a single room in the main office building. The IT server room is equipped with dedicated power lines, false flooring, and Halon fire protection systems. Access to the server room is controlled by card and pin access locks on every entry.
Future IT Infrastructure
Document the IT infrastructure after the facility relocation.
IT Gap From Current to Future
High level gap analysis.
Business Continuity Outsourcing a business is not an easy thing to do, and for a company as Riordan Manufacturing, to keep their business running while outsourcing could be costly, and by looking at the communications between the Accounting and Human resource departments, They cut the cost of sending employees to china for training from $100.000 to $80.000, by reducing the travel cost to locally only and any travel over 30 miles requires the approval of the vice president, at the same time, the company will establish a teleconferencing solution for training purpose and also need to update their system to portable system that have high speed network for the high quality vide to make it easier for employee to access from anywhere, and to ensure the best way to have business continuity during the planned move we need to ensure that:
1. Critical Business Functions Have Been Identified and Prioritized.
The Critical Business Functions or CBF that must be restored in the event of a disruption to ensure the ability to protect the organization’s assets, meet organizational needs, and satisfy regulations, these are business activities and information that should not be disrupted such that they impact the ability of the organization to achieve its minimum Business Continuity Objective MBCO.
2. Recovery Time Objectives Have Been Determined for Critical Assets
(RTO) is the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.
3. Recovery Point Objectives Have Been Established for Critical Applications
(RPO) is the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a computer, system, or network goes down as a result of a hardware, program, or communications failure.
4. A Comprehensive Risk Assessment Has Been Conducted On Critical Facilities. A Comprehensive Risk Assessment is the determination of quantitative or qualitative value of risk related to a concrete situation and a recognized threat (also called hazard). Quantitative risk assessment requires calculations of two components of risk (R), the magnitude of the potential loss (L), and the probability (p) that the loss will occur. Acceptable risk is a risk that is understood and tolerated usually because the cost or difficulty of implementing an effective countermeasure for the associated vulnerability exceeds the expectation of loss
5. Succession Plans Exist for Key Employees or Consultants
6. A Technology Backup Strategy Exists and Is Tested Regularly
7. Multiple Sources Are Available for Critical Supplies and Processes
8. People (an often overlooked critical business resource) Are Included in Business Continuity
9. Tools and Training Are In Place to Provide Advanced Warning of Incidents
10. All Projects Include a Disaster Recovery Component
11. Technology Domains Are Defined to Include Business Continuity and Security
12. Capacity Planning Includes Strategy for Increased Demand
IT Department Roles
The objective of this project is to develop, test and deploy a sales data warehouse and BI application.
Milestones
A discussion about the IT department 's role in supporting the organization 's other departments during the move.
The letter from Hugh McCauley of Riordan manufacturing to his management team regarding the relocation of the China facility in Hangzhou to the city of Shanghai as told the Riordan team the China facility will be relocating. . A five year plan will be put in place to determine, from an IT perspective, what needs to be done and when. The following is an overview of the one, three and five year milestones for moving the facility, specifically as it relates to Infromati0n Technology
Year 1 Milestones
The first year milestones will be broader in scope. The goals in the first year will be as follows.
Initiate the IT project move team
Gain executive support for the move.
Charter an IT Steering team
Charter a core team
Develop a project plan
Develop a project communications plan.
Conduct an IT Environmental Analysis
Conduct an External IT environmental analysis including:
Find an IT community and Advisory council in Shanghai to work with and help guide the move externally; regarding thins like finding ISP 's phone lines, etc.
Find higher educational resource
Benchmark schools for input on how Riordan can become a valued member of the community.
Conduct Internal IT analysis.
Conduct individual interviews with existing IT team members in Shanghai gathering all input.
Conduct interview with all areas within the organization to address concerns on IT moves.
Engage in regular think tanks sessions, discussing the move and potential pitfalls.
Identify all key issues
Finally, a primary year one milestone would be to develop a rough draft of an IT plan to move to Shanghai.
Year 3 Milestones
At the end of year three the IT milestones in place would be to
Finalize the IT move plan. Address detail items like:
Putting contracts in place for electrical system, ISP, phone system
Rough draft a disaster recovery plan for the move. What will be done as a backup if the move fails for various reasons?
The facility must be determined by the end of year three. Then, we need to ensure the facility if new, has correct wiring layout to accommodate growth, if the facility is not new, ensure all wring is up to the latest code. Year 5 Milestones
Develop tactics for implementing the plan early on.
Ensure all key players have the plan
Address all concerns in the plan.
Conduct the move.
Metrics
What metrics will we use to measure how well we are doing,
Review
Set up requirements for regular plan reviews and updates.
References
Apollo Group, Inc. (2013). Organizational Charts - Chief Information Officer. Retrieved December 14, 2014, from Virtual Organizations Portal: https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/cist/vop/Business/Riordan/HR/OrgCharts.asp?cio
Apollo Group, Inc. (2013). Riordan Manufacturing Information Technology. Retrieved December 14, 2014, from Virtual Organizations POrtal: https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/cist/vop/Business/Riordan/IT/Networks.asp?overview
Corby, M. J. (2010, April 13). 12 Attributes of a Successful Business Continuity Plan. Retrieved December 13, 2014, from ChainLink Reseach: http://www.clresearch.com/research/detail.cfm?guid=D4E94B31-3048-79ED-999D-AA082603C6B2
Figures
Figure 1. Riordan China IT Infrastructure
Riordan Manufacturing China Manufacturing Facility Relocation
Sayed Abdelrahman, William Dubose, Alan Erb, John Rodie, Eric Sillman
CMGT 578
December 24, 2014
KenRoy Regester, MS
Information Technology Strategic Plan
Executive Summary
The plan should begin with a summary targeted for the business audience.
Purpose
Purpose of the plan.
Scope
High-level goals and plans for all areas of information technology that affect the business, not just the infrastructure. A road map for IT is useful in illustrating overall strategy.
Business Direction
Lay out the specific business drivers, assumptions and plans that informed the IT strategic plan. (For example, the business is planning to acquire smaller companies so its plan is to focus on integration technologies.).
Current IT Infrastructure …show more content…
Riordan Manufacturing China operation in Hangzhou is configured as a standalone self-contained system, depicted in Figure 1.
The system is divided up into four main areas, office automation, research and development (R & D), servers and network attached storage (NAS), and communication (Apollo Group, Inc., 2013). The IT staff in China are all contract workers reporting to a local IT manager. The IT manager for the China facility reports to Maria Trinh, Riordan Manufacturing’s Chief Information Officer (CIO). None of the China IT department’s employees, except for the Manager are Riordan employees (Apollo Group, Inc., 2013).
The office automation function consists of 35 Dell Vostrro computers configured with Microsoft Windows 7, Office, and links to appropriate corporate databases and systems running on one of the servers. The computers utilize a 100BaseT wired Ethernet backbone for connectivity to the servers and local printers. The size of the computer hard disks is kept small to make sure that company data is stored on one of the NAS
systems.
The R & D function consists of 15 Apple Mac Pro workstations with dual six-core processors and large monitors. Local printing is done using one of three Xerox color printers or the Hewlett Packard (HP) large bed plotter. The R & D function is serviced by a dedicated International Business Machines (IBM) HS20 Blade Server with dual Xenon multicore processors and a dedicated 1000BaseF fiber optic Ethernet network. The R & D network is connected to the company 100BaseT backbone via a gateway/switch to expedite network traffic across the two networks.
The server farm consists of two IBM HS20 Blade Servers and a single IBM pSeries Multiprocessor. All three servers and the remainder of the computers use an Iomega P800M NAS for data storage. The pSeries server hosts the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Systems, Applications, and Processes (SAP). The two blade servers function as a network server and Windows Exchange server. All the servers and NAS are powered by an uninterruptable power supply (UPS).
The communication functions consists of a dedicated Ka Band encrypted satellite base station for bidirectional communication to corporate headquarters in San Jose, California. Telephone communications are handled by a voice over internet protocol (VOIP) through one of the servers and out either the satellite link or a local internet connection, depending on the call destination. A dedicated high speed connection to the internet is handled through a dedicated VOIP/Data router and firewall appliance.
All servers, NAS, and satellite base station equipment are located in a single room in the main office building. The IT server room is equipped with dedicated power lines, false flooring, and Halon fire protection systems. Access to the server room is controlled by card and pin access locks on every entry.
Future IT Infrastructure
Document the IT infrastructure after the facility relocation.
IT Gap From Current to Future
High level gap analysis.
Business Continuity Outsourcing a business is not an easy thing to do, and for a company as Riordan Manufacturing, to keep their business running while outsourcing could be costly, and by looking at the communications between the Accounting and Human resource departments, They cut the cost of sending employees to china for training from $100.000 to $80.000, by reducing the travel cost to locally only and any travel over 30 miles requires the approval of the vice president, at the same time, the company will establish a teleconferencing solution for training purpose and also need to update their system to portable system that have high speed network for the high quality vide to make it easier for employee to access from anywhere, and to ensure the best way to have business continuity during the planned move we need to ensure that:
1. Critical Business Functions Have Been Identified and Prioritized.
The Critical Business Functions or CBF that must be restored in the event of a disruption to ensure the ability to protect the organization’s assets, meet organizational needs, and satisfy regulations, these are business activities and information that should not be disrupted such that they impact the ability of the organization to achieve its minimum Business Continuity Objective MBCO.
2. Recovery Time Objectives Have Been Determined for Critical Assets
(RTO) is the targeted duration of time and a service level within which a business process must be restored after a disaster (or disruption) in order to avoid unacceptable consequences associated with a break in business continuity.
3. Recovery Point Objectives Have Been Established for Critical Applications
(RPO) is the age of files that must be recovered from backup storage for normal operations to resume if a computer, system, or network goes down as a result of a hardware, program, or communications failure.
4. A Comprehensive Risk Assessment Has Been Conducted On Critical Facilities. A Comprehensive Risk Assessment is the determination of quantitative or qualitative value of risk related to a concrete situation and a recognized threat (also called hazard). Quantitative risk assessment requires calculations of two components of risk (R), the magnitude of the potential loss (L), and the probability (p) that the loss will occur. Acceptable risk is a risk that is understood and tolerated usually because the cost or difficulty of implementing an effective countermeasure for the associated vulnerability exceeds the expectation of loss
5. Succession Plans Exist for Key Employees or Consultants
6. A Technology Backup Strategy Exists and Is Tested Regularly
7. Multiple Sources Are Available for Critical Supplies and Processes
8. People (an often overlooked critical business resource) Are Included in Business Continuity
9. Tools and Training Are In Place to Provide Advanced Warning of Incidents
10. All Projects Include a Disaster Recovery Component
11. Technology Domains Are Defined to Include Business Continuity and Security
12. Capacity Planning Includes Strategy for Increased Demand
IT Department Roles
The objective of this project is to develop, test and deploy a sales data warehouse and BI application.
Milestones
A discussion about the IT department 's role in supporting the organization 's other departments during the move.
The letter from Hugh McCauley of Riordan manufacturing to his management team regarding the relocation of the China facility in Hangzhou to the city of Shanghai as told the Riordan team the China facility will be relocating. . A five year plan will be put in place to determine, from an IT perspective, what needs to be done and when. The following is an overview of the one, three and five year milestones for moving the facility, specifically as it relates to Infromati0n Technology
Year 1 Milestones
The first year milestones will be broader in scope. The goals in the first year will be as follows.
Initiate the IT project move team
Gain executive support for the move.
Charter an IT Steering team
Charter a core team
Develop a project plan
Develop a project communications plan.
Conduct an IT Environmental Analysis
Conduct an External IT environmental analysis including:
Find an IT community and Advisory council in Shanghai to work with and help guide the move externally; regarding thins like finding ISP 's phone lines, etc.
Find higher educational resource
Benchmark schools for input on how Riordan can become a valued member of the community.
Conduct Internal IT analysis.
Conduct individual interviews with existing IT team members in Shanghai gathering all input.
Conduct interview with all areas within the organization to address concerns on IT moves.
Engage in regular think tanks sessions, discussing the move and potential pitfalls.
Identify all key issues
Finally, a primary year one milestone would be to develop a rough draft of an IT plan to move to Shanghai.
Year 3 Milestones
At the end of year three the IT milestones in place would be to
Finalize the IT move plan. Address detail items like:
Putting contracts in place for electrical system, ISP, phone system
Rough draft a disaster recovery plan for the move. What will be done as a backup if the move fails for various reasons?
The facility must be determined by the end of year three. Then, we need to ensure the facility if new, has correct wiring layout to accommodate growth, if the facility is not new, ensure all wring is up to the latest code. Year 5 Milestones
Develop tactics for implementing the plan early on.
Ensure all key players have the plan
Address all concerns in the plan.
Conduct the move.
Metrics
What metrics will we use to measure how well we are doing,
Review
Set up requirements for regular plan reviews and updates.
References
Apollo Group, Inc. (2013). Organizational Charts - Chief Information Officer. Retrieved December 14, 2014, from Virtual Organizations Portal: https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/cist/vop/Business/Riordan/HR/OrgCharts.asp?cio
Apollo Group, Inc. (2013). Riordan Manufacturing Information Technology. Retrieved December 14, 2014, from Virtual Organizations POrtal: https://ecampus.phoenix.edu/secure/aapd/cist/vop/Business/Riordan/IT/Networks.asp?overview
Corby, M. J. (2010, April 13). 12 Attributes of a Successful Business Continuity Plan. Retrieved December 13, 2014, from ChainLink Reseach: http://www.clresearch.com/research/detail.cfm?guid=D4E94B31-3048-79ED-999D-AA082603C6B2
Figures
Figure 1. Riordan China IT Infrastructure