27 Mar CS782 Assignment No. 2 ~ Technology Working Together

CS782 Assignment No. 2 ~ Technology Working Together

 

Revised: 2-18-2024

Assignment Summary:

The ITCertificates.com corporation recognizes there is a huge market for people who need to get trained in IT jobs (this is a fictitious organization).  

 

You are the CIO at ITCertificates.com. You have been asked to drive a business strategy and approach that will enable the organization to compete more effectively and drive improved operations across the organization. 

 

 You are also expected to participate in business decisions at the highest levels of the company and your budget currently is unlimited.

 

ITCertificates.com readies IT professionals for jobs which include: 

 

1. Providing maintenance / configuration for existing server, storage, and network hardware 

2. New server, storage, and network hardware installation

3. Designing and creating enterprise system architectures

4. Building software

5. Hosting and maintaining Cloud-based products (i.e., SaaS/PaaS/IaaS) 

 

Courses vary but they all last at least six months, are full-time, and they frequently involve multiple subjects. ITCertificates.com’s business includes advertising, tuition finance counseling, hands-on training sites, distance education, internships, and placement.

 

You are free to add assumptions and details concerning ITCertificates.com if they are consistent with the description above and if you specify what these are.  

 

Assignment Expectations:

You will be expected to write a professional internal email to the CEO and CFO (see formatting below), which includes:

• A brief Introduction of the company’s history and its current issues.

You will then address several major ways in which the organization can compete more effectively and drive operational efficiency.

 

1. Identify a set of strategies and approaches which will drive competition for the organization and improve its operational efficiency.  

a. We suggest starting with an association of the topics to the competitive strategies and approaches that we covered in Module 1 (e.g., differentiation as a strategy with a decision-based approach).

 

2. Identify four (4) of the topics from the list below which you believe will help drive competition and operational efficiency forward.

a. You need to tie together four of the topics below to outline how you will drive the strategy and approach. Focus on how a set of topics, together, would provide competitive or operational advantage for the organization.  

 

3. For each topic, then you will want to describe the “relevance” and “application” of each topic.  Describe the application of the technology that you would use in driving the competitive advantage or operational efficiency forward.  You will also want to (in your own words) describe the relevance and application of four (4) of the topics in the list below from the online notes this week as they apply to ITCertificates.com.  

a. An approach can be for each topic; outline the competitive or operational nature in which it will provide an advantage and provide examples of technologies or services that ITCertificates.com could leverage.  

b. For example, if you chose Communication and Collaboration, explain the operational and competitive benefits surrounding this topic and outline the technologies that could be leveraged to fulfill the topics needs (e.g., Zoom), based on research about the topic.

 

Below are the topics that you need to focus on.  Choose four (4) of them.  

 

Technology Topics:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)

• Platform as a Service (Paas)

• Big Data

• DevOps

• Microservice Architecture

• Mobile Communication

• Communication and Collaboration

• Augmented Reality

 

A “topic” here corresponds to a specific technology presented in the notes. “Application” above refers to the way the topic is applied or implemented in this company.   

Assignment Guidelines:

As an example, you should number the sections in your e-mail homework 1 through 9 and make the section headings as follows (yellow are the most critical to focus on).  

 

The sections of your internal e-mail response should be as follows:

 

TO: (CE0, CFO, etc.)

FROM: (You, CIO)

RE: (Subject)

DATE: (date)

1. Executive Overview & Introduction

2. Section 1 – Strategic direction — covering the organization and outlining competitive strategies and approaches from Module 1 which are driving your technology choices.

3. Section 2 — Why you think that the following four topics are most important competitively and operationally for ITCertificates.com IT and how they work together to drive competitive advantage. 

4. Section 3 Topic 1 – deep dive into that specific technology and how it applies to the organization.

5. Section 4 Topic 2 – deep dive into that specific technology and how it applies to the organization.

6. Section 5 Topic 3 – deep dive into that specific technology and how it applies to the organization.

7. Section 6 Topic 4 – deep dive into that specific technology and how it applies to the organization.

8. Section 7 — Why I think that the remaining topics in this week’s notes are less important competitively and operationally for ITCertificates.com IT.

9. Section 8 – Actions Required & Conclusion

10. References (Bibliography)

 

Please keep your content to a maximum of 3 pages of 11-point type, single or 1.5-spaced. This does not include references and other supplemental material such as appendices. On average it should be ~2 pages.

 

An example is “Section 5. Big Data.” 

 

* If you were to choose Big Data as a topic, in section 1, outline how Big Data coincides with other topics to drive competitive and operational advantage. Moreover, bring it back to strategies that we discussed in Module 1 (e.g., since we are talking about Big Data, you could bring it back to taking a Decision-based approach). Then in the topic section, explicitly outline how Big Data would help drive competitive advantage (e.g., improved decision making) and/or operational advantage.  With that include technologies that might support Big Data (e.g., a Hadoop cluster).

 

End with a list of references following the standard reference format, as described in the References and Citations document.

 

Use the Ask Your Facilitator Discussion Board if you have any questions regarding the objectives of the assignment or how to approach the assignment. 

 

Save your assignment as LastnameFirstname_assign2.doc and submit it in the Assignments section of the course.