Analyzing Information Technology and Business

¶ … Business

Categories of risk associated with sourcing of IT/IS services

Performance Risk

Delays at third parties may lead to a decline in end customer performance levels and timely delivery. As a product/service is outsourced, this risk gets heightened severely. Several factors can cause delays such as factors that are not within the outsourcing company's control. For instance, delays at the port/custom, weather, labor disputes, and political crisis. More severe examples are delays caused by terrorist activities and uncertainties and interruptions from outbreaks of deadly and contagious diseases like SARS or Ebola. As variability and lead-time increase, the need for greater stock levels and all other expensive buffers also increases, whereas generally, supply chain confidence reduces.

Operational Risk

Also, the outsourcing alteration phase may not succeed if budgets and schedules are not actualized as a result of lack of resources or adequate planning. It is possible to run an outsourcing using the same planning and discipline as an implementation for an efficiently-run large-scale system. Outsourcing is all about replacing service or production functions, and such functions have direct effects on the ability of the company to meet every of its responsibilities to shareholders and customers. The quality of products or services can equally be affected during outsourcing, which in turn affects the satisfaction of the customers. Companies are expected to be careful in selecting, qualifying, contracting with, and effectively working with their outsourcing partners to make sure there is no deterioration of quality. This mostly requires effective periods of transition or parallel manufacturing as well as efficient cross-training among different companies. Cost savings efforts are often responsible for the neglect of these aspects.

Financial Risk

It is possible that the suppliers are not financially stable, which puts the company at the risk of supply interruptions. Unpredictably, the financial stability effectiveness basis scored a much lower mark below the others in the results from the survey, which indicates that a large number of companies stand the risk of facing supply interruptions or other related problems due to the lack of financial resources on the side of the supplier (O'Keeffe & Vanlandingham, 2004).

2a. Why Organizations Outsource IT/IS Activities

Need for Specialized Capability from a Supplier

More companies are beginning to realize that outsourcing some decisions should be tied directly to business strategy as well as good knowledge of major competencies. Third-party suppliers are also able to raise the entire value chain performance once every participant in that chain has the right understanding and pays attention to their individual major competencies. Major competencies can equally involve abilities like technical innovation or rapid flexibility/response. The production industry most times graded the need for special ability from suppliers to be a bit lower than every other option. Most often, functional management graded the need for special ability from the suppliers as very vital. Companies whose revenues ranged between $500M and $1B graded special supplier abilities as more essential than every other company.

Maximize Restructuring Benefits

When the company is restructured to increase quality, costs, speed, or service, business functions that are not regarded as core may be pushed aside. However, they still require handling, and outsourcing is the best way to do this.

2b. Why organizations might choose to keep all IT/IS activities in house.

It is difficult to outsource certain IT functions. The effects of IT are felt all over the organization, from the daily simple tasks done by employees to complex automated tasks. Therefore, these are very essential systems for which the company may make such functions in-house. This is as a result of the risk of losing control. An outside salesperson may not be as efficient as the full-time company worker who is under the same administration with every other employee. Other concerns are data confidentiality and recovery. However, there will be the need for a supervisor with the knowledge of how to handle IT staff members.

It is possible for organizations to get locked in. Once the vendor fails to get their work documented on the company system or network, or if the firm is forced to buy their proprietary software, it is easy for them to end up feeling like they can't possibly go anywhere else or take its network back. Most outsourced companies need organizations to sign yearly contract, which places a limitation on their flexibility (CCS, 2016).

3, Criteria used to identify articles as being authoritative in academic terms

What qualifications does the author have? Academic authors are expected to emerge from institutes or universities, and a university press often handles the publication of each academic writing work.

Are all the sources mentioned? Search for a reference list of bibliography.

Is the writing a peer-reviewed work? Every peer-reviewed journal includes a committee or editorial board listed, or will give the authors the instructions that describe what a standard peer review should look like.

Is the paper an objective writing? Blatantly one-sided sources are not likely to be academic.

Which audience does the paper target? Put the writing style into consideration, advertising presence, where the source was found (Massey Library has a more comprehensive selection of academic sources than public libraries, for example) ( Massey University, 2012).

3. Why it is important to make the distinction of authoritativeness among informational articles.

Assessing information sources is a vital aspect of the whole research process. Some information is unreliable as it is untrue, and not all information will suit a project or paper. There is a vast variation between Print and Internet sources when it comes to accuracy, authority, currency, coverage, and objectivity. Users are expected to carry out a critical assessment of the suitability of every type of information source before making use of such information. Therefore, identifying the writer's expertise and qualification becomes very important. A source from an author who is an established authority in a particular field is most likely to be more reliable (although it is wrong to blindly accept expertise).

4. How time-based services differ from project-based sourcing.

Not being able to arrange a highly skilled workforce, finances or substructure to back the organization's problems cannot be considered a barrier any longer to acquire organizational goals devoid of the problem of dealing with the necessary logistics, particularly in case the organization requires deployment of specific skills for a specific time-period devoid of the need requirement to have those skills permanently designated to its system or perhaps not being of perpetual requirement to the organizational goals. This has been a situation of time centered sourcing. Instances of these services include legal counsel as well as IT services

Project centered services are services that are sourced by the organization often for a specific number of weeks or months until the project is finished. The services may or may not be domiciled at a location, use organizational equipment, or work full time on the project.

5a Reasons why ERP implementations fail

Setting impractical expectations originally

Failure to Deal with Organizational Transformation

Not Including Important Stakeholders

Low-Level Project Management Skills

5b.

Setting impractical expectations originally

Most projects are started with the anticipation and enthusiasm of success and triumph. However, for success to be achieved, it is important for details that may not be needed until towards the concluding part of the paper to be planned out. At the start of any large, promising project, what people experience is lots of excitement about the advantages it will ultimately bring to the company-bottom-line savings, stream-lined processes, more efficiency, top line growth, better customer satisfaction, and reduced waste. The problem comes up when the hurry up and get things done approach is adopted.

When properly done, ERP will and can transform a business by re-engineering and automating its heartbeat: the business process. Therefore, it is in the firm's best interest to take time and learn how the business truly runs; most importantly, if the firm has utilized a lot of M&A for growth over the years. Understanding the amount of resources, the project will gulp is also of critical importance. Gaining full knowledge of factors such as allocation of resources, time-to-cost value, change management, cost, employee training, and adoption, all get down-played to favor the supposed benefits brought about by the software. To prevent these during the project description and project initiation stage, do the following;

Develop a personal benchmark; avoid relying on the vendor's benchmark. Vendors are able to provide templates that can help an organization go far with the project, but not any farther than that. Organizations have to decide what they believe are success and failure, progress and setbacks, delivery deadlines and must-haves, the as-is state vs. real to-be state constitutes.

Define every aspect of the business process beforehand. Never allow the software to define the business processes. Most companies make the mistake of not knowing anything about their business processes practically until they suddenly discover they have lost all the problem solving and expediting knowledge.

Failure to Deal with Organizational Transformation

Inadequate attention to company change management, communications and ERP

These activities were seen by most companies as activities that are both optional and nice to have. But, these became critical necessities as these companies realize the hard way. As known by everyone, change is the only constant factor in life. So that knowledge, when accompanied by Murphy's Law, which says whatever will go wrong, will go wrong, adding an ERP project will give perfect ingredients for a Perfect Storm. Considering the fact that ERP technology works generally, organizations have taken the effort and time to set realistic goals beforehand, so the next vital step is to make sure the particular organization is ready for the vast change represented by ERP. There will be need for managers to understand the processes of the business from one end to the other and not on paper alone. There will also be the need to discover people in the company that understand how the business runs totally, making sure they are involved as early as possible. Taking time to understand the culture of the company early is also important.

Not Including Important Stakeholders

Stakeholder buy-in is a necessity for ERP implementation. If the management is always too busy dealing with the real issues of running the business or any of such stupidities, and have no time to allocate resources and money required to handle emergencies, then they should be ready for some difficulties. Moving the cheese is one solution to getting on board the executive team, but getting and keeping executive attention is not that easy. By ensuring to recognize, compensate and reward, the board goes exactly where it is needed and not where they really were. The most interesting part of the job must have to be assigned to the people who came on board before everyone else, while the other group members would follow along, eventually. It is a great idea to get the executive team educated on the risk and scale of an ERP installation. Most executives get so caught up in the daily execution of their executive duties that they may not be able to understand the real meaning of ERP to the company. To them, it may just be another IT project or another way to automate already existing process. If the management finds itself in this type of situation, it should know that big-time compensations come with big-time risks and it takes participation and attention to reduce the risks. The project initiation stage with the vendors is a good place to begin.

Low-Level Project Management Skills

Managing projects poorly is pervasion. A number of books have been written on this important topic because when managers gather people to do something as a group, especially something as serious as ERP, it is normal to encounter challenges. It will require some leader with strong leadership qualities to make sure things remain on track and that people are held accountable, so first ensure there is a reliable hand leading the team with some good experience on ERP implementation. Make sure to hire such people if they haven't been hired already, even when all they have to do is sit and watch how things get done, initially. This is a very critical issue. Spending some thousands of dollars on their salaries before they are really needed is far better than the multi-million dollars' price tag the ERP package comes with.

If organizations find it hard to find a good hand to hire, they should hire a professional and reliable third-party consultant. After all, it favors the SI and vendor most, for installations to last long, since they will always have people on ground all the time, charging for services (Bernard, 2013). These consultants ought to be on ground at the first meeting with vendors to give advice and oversee the project execution.

6.a Ways being used to improve the security and reliability of cloud services

Embedded Security

The nature and structure of VM can equally help boost security since its disk files involve not just the needed operating system, applications and middleware, but also the configuration settings as well. As companies expand their use of cloud, they mostly build several machine images for carrying out different workloads. Once these images are properly managed, the enclosed security details can help ensure the automatic application of proper settings as new VMs are built. When poorly done, a chaotic sprawl of server images can be created, mostly when new images with new identities are developed as patches with the application of updates to the original images.

Automated Provisioning

Because human errors cause several security vulnerabilities, automating the right server configuration automatically enhances security. With the cloud environments containing several dozens, hundreds and sometimes thousands of VMs, configuring things manually would be more expensive and time-consuming.

Costs are reduced by automated server provisions tools, business agilities are increased, and variations that can lead to vulnerabilities are prevented.

Whereas not every automated server tools for provision blend well with all cloud providers, such tools can enable organizations standardize on the normal system of operation, the appropriate patch level, and the right middleware configuration, load balancers, databases and management agent. They equally help administrators to control common security-sensitive settings easily, such as the services, which are running and the ports that are open.

Good practices adopted in cloud management, which are aimed at minimizing expenses are also known to improve security. Take, for instance, the tools for discovery, which show the number of applications and other systems in use in a company, making a comparison between those findings with a list of all the applications officially found on the books.

These practices-mostly employed when making an estimate of the capacity needed by a company in the cloud-enable a company to reduce costs by removing duplicate or unneeded applications and integrating one-off licenses into an agreement for volume purchase. Security managers are also given a complete list of services and cloud applications they are required to secure.

The side benefits flow the other way, sometimes-from the security tools to other processes involved in the business. While improved security is the major single benefit of Genomic health, for example, it equally makes it easier to know which of the employees that have undergone the necessary online training program (Scheier, 2012).

6 b. Commercial providers of cloud computing services and type of service they provide

Google

Google Apps include a set of online business tools such as email, calendaring, word processing and easy web site creation tools; Postini, a set of web security and email services; and the Google App Engine, a platform in the form of a service, which enables developers to develop new Apps and host their Apps on Google infrastructure. A good example is Google sites, which allows the user to create a website easily from scratch, even with no coding experience.

Enomaly

ECP-Enomaly's Elastic Computing Platform is a software responsible for the integration of enterprise data centers with offerings on commercial cloud computing, which allows IT pros to manage both external and internal resources using a single console, whereas it becomes easy to move around virtual machines between data centers (Brodkin, 2009). A good example of how one can easily make use of this service is to transfer the hosting information of any customer from one data center to another, using the touch of a button.

7. Business web services quality dimensions (two technical and two non-technical) relevant to buyers of online services and type of measures or meaning associated with each dimension of quality you list.

Security

A good definition of this dimension could be freedom from danger, doubt or risk during the processes involved in the service. One of the factors that limit the purchase of products and services on the internet is security so there should be an indication of how secure it is to shop on any site like the way they handle credit card details (Cox & Dale, 2001). This will help the customers relax since they know their transactions would be handled safely using maximum security techniques.

Ease of use/Helpfulness

This is linked to an URL address that is easily remembered, well-structured, well-organized, site navigability, easy-to-follow catalogue, understandable and concise content, available terms and conditions to provide necessary help to the customer on the website. Customers expect that help should be available whenever they need it. For instance, finding the relevant links for the products the customer needs, help to fill out the order form, clearly defined help pages, guidelines, FAQs, etc.

Appearance/Aesthetics

The attractiveness of the website helps define this. This means that the layout of the page must be approachable and suitably user friendly to encourage the customers to keep coming back for purchases. Its application in an online setting can be assessed using images and graphics, animation, pictures, zooming and moving objects effects that interests the customers in order to ensure the site does not appear boring to site visitors.

Reliability

This is known as the consistency of dependability and performance, which is vital to the design of the site. There are two aspects to reliability, viz: the ability of the customer to make use of the order process on the website effectively and the extent to which the company fulfill its obligations and promises to customers whenever they make purchase from the site (Pather & Usabuwera, 2010).