ISEM 500: Project 1 -- Developing Strategic Plan for a

Small Company (80 Points)

Organization: Team of 3 or 4
How to Get a Good Grade – A Checklist
 Read the project description yourself very carefully. Not reading the project
description and listening to “seniors” can be very dangerous to your health
(problem statements are changed subtly).

 Read the attachments carefully, they provide helpful hints and information for the
project

 Please listen to the voice annotated discussions on the project. They answer many
questions

 Slide decks, especially diagrams, must include annotations and explanations

 Clearly specify the references used

 Provide full names (first and last mandatory) of all team members on the first
slide
 Include the effort (percentage contribution) of the team members .

 Do not submit multiple files. Each team must submit one deliverable file (zip your
multiple files into one, if needed)

 Most Important: make sure that you have answered all questions in the deliverable

Organization: Team of 3 or 4

Overview
Suppose that you formed a company with some friends two years ago. The company is in
the broad sector of ecommerce, healthcare, education or retail located in any country
(including small islands). It has grown significantly in the last two years and is now a
solid company. You have to first develop a complete business strategy and a strategic
plan before getting into detailed technology issues. However, the company wants to be a
digital enterprise to compete and succeed in the marketplace. You can make the following
assumptions:
 The company plans to have one head office (30 employees) and 4 branch offices –
outlets (20 employees) each.
 The company wants to diversify and expand rapidly
 The company wants to exploit IT to compete and succeed in the marketplace
 Partnerships and outsourcing are supposed to strengthen business. Any other
opportunities to grow the business are sought (looking for ideas).
You must select one of the companies briefly described in (Umar, Ch. 3) as a model that
you can use for making your decisions. You may also use any other small to medium
company as a model.

The objective of this project is to develop a Business Strategy and an Information

System Plan. Your final deliverable is 10- 20 slide management presentation (ppt slides
annotated with notes for details) that contains the following information:

Part A: Business strategy of the company (30 Points).

 Use the typical management models (customers versus products, Porter, SWOT,
others) to capture the main ideas. Please follow the strategic planning
methodology (mission statement, internal analysis, external analysis, strategy
formulation, strategy implementation & monitoring) explained in Chapter 4.
 Show the role of IT to support the business strategy in the next 2-3 years.
Specifically, you should use the Internet-stage model and the four dimensional
model to develop a strategic vision. What stage should the company start and why,
can the company go from stage 1 to stage 3 in 3 years, what are the specific
benefits, risks, etc for choosing a stage. The company wants to be a next
generation enterprise – advise in favor or against it.

Suggestion: Please use (Umar Ch.4) and Attachment A for supporting information.

Part B: An information system and enterprise application plan (40 Points). The
objective is to clearly understand the role of information systems and automation in
digital enterprises. You need to:
 Determine what will be automated when, why and how. Create a year 1 view that
shows about 40 business processes (BPs) to be used by the company and the
enterprise application packages (EAPs) that will automate the business processes.
This should be done as a matrix where BPs are rows and EAPs are columns.
 Use the Porter Value Chain Model as a basis for automation. In particular, identify
five applications that are critical to the success of the company (very high in the
value chain). For each application, also show the implementation strategy (buy,
rent, outsource development, develop in-house, or extend -- BRODE). Briefly
explain why you chose a particular strategy.
 Play the Business Strategy Planning Game available on the Space site
(www.space4ict.com -> Games Section -> Planning Games) and determine the
value of this game to this project. Each team member must show the following
information (if you do not show this info, you will get a zero on this part):
o Name of the team member plus the SPACE Login ID used to run the
games (just show a screen shot with your login id for this game)
o Key lessons learned (2-3 bullet items)

Suggestion: Use Attachment B to get started. The material in (Umar, Ch 1 and Ch. 5) has
great deal of information on this topic.
Part C: Reference Materials and Annotations Used (10 Points):

IMPORTANT: The slide deck must have a title page that clearly specifies the team
members. After the title page, a “Team Contribution” slide must be included that shows
what each member has done in the project (one line) and a percentage of contribution by
each team member (total must add to 100%). For example, in a team of 4, the total
contribution will ideally be 25% for each member. This Contribution will impact your
grade. Any disagreements about contribution must be resolved by the team members
through voting.

The slide deck must be properly annotated (by using Powerpoint Notes) that explain the
diagrams and also the key ideas presented (5 points).

In addition, a References slide must be included to list the materials that were used to
develop this solution. This must include the following:
 Specific names of case studies from the text that were helpful in this assignment
 Specific topics in the text (chapter, section) that were helpful in this assignment
 Outside materials (give specific links) on the Net that were helpful in this
assignment

Guidelines and Suggestions

You should use lessons learned and insights gained from case studies in the texts (plus
other sources) to produce a first rate deliverable. In particular, use the examples of
successful companies such as Dell, Walmart, Amazon and UPS to help this company.

 Specifically mention what examples are you using where in the deliverable report
(e.g., “as shown in the Amazon Example in Chapter 2). .
 Possible Sources of Information for additional case studies and examples: CIO
magazine (www.cio.com), CIO-insight magazine (www.cioinsight.com),
Information week (www.informationweek.com), etc.
 Use web as a resource for additional information. Many Websites have great deal
of information about ERP systems. Please, look at some vendor sites (e.g., SAP,
Oracle-PeopleSoft, Microsoft-Great Plains) to develop a conceptual model of the
system you have chosen.

Your grade will depend on clarity of report, use of knowledge acquired (classroom
discussions, case studies, external sources used, and references of the sources used).
Attachment A: How to Develop a Business Strategic Plan

The strategic planning methodology discussed in Chapter 4 consists of several steps

(mission statement, internal analysis, external analysis, strategy formulation, strategy
implementation & monitoring). This methodology, shown in Figure 0, is used widely at
present for business strategic planning throughout the world.

Figure 0: Strategy Formulation

Attachment B: How to Develop an Information Systems (IS) and Application

Plan

The IS planning process consists of several steps such as identifying business processes
(BPs), information flows between BPs by using business process patterns and then
developing the application matrix. The core of this process is the business process
pattern (BPP), shown in Figure 1, that captures an overall view of enterprise functional
areas (e.g., sales, corporate management, back-office operations), the major business
processes in each functional area (e.g., purchasing and payment within procurement) and
the key interactions between these processes. Such high level views of businesses are of
great practical value to identify business scenarios, automation strategies and enterprise
applications. BPPs can be used to conduct quick sensitivity analysis such as the
following: a) if one BP is eliminated, then what other BPs will be impacted, b) if an
application package that supports a BP is replaced with another application, what other
applications/BPs will be impacted, c) which application, if replaced, will have the most
impact in terms of integration, d) which application, if replaced, will have the least
impact in terms of integration.
 Selling Sales
Warehousing &Distribution
Chain
Mgmt purchasing
Inventory

Order Shipping
Customer processing) Customer
payment
Services
Customer
Corporate Mgmt Supply Chain Management
Support
BI CP
MC Procurement
EP
CRM
KM BMC

Scheduling
Customers, Partners,
Resellers Supplier,
Human Resources
Distributors
Payroll Hiring
Marketing
Research estorefronts

Finance & Accntg

BI=Business Intelligence
BMC=Business Monitoring & Control Finance accntg
CP = Corporate Planning
EP = enterprise purchasing
KM = Knowledge Management Employees,
MC= Monitoring & Control Managers

Figure 1: Business Process Pattern for a Retail Store

The next step is to convert this is to develop an application plan, identify the applications A1,
A2… An that are needed to automate the business processes BP1… BPn identified in Figure1.
In reality, one or many applications (apps, application packages, ERP systems) may be
needed to support a given business process. and a given business process may need multiple
applications. For example, a customer information system may support many business
processes such as purchasing, marketing, and payment. Similarly, purchasing business process
needs support of many applications such as order processing, inventory management, and
shipping/receiving packages. The result of this step is a table that may resemble Table 1.
Table 1: Applications to Support Business Processes (High Level IT Applications Plan)
Application Application Application Application
Package1 Package2 Package3 Package4
Business X X
Process1
Business
Process2
Business X
Process 3
Business X X
Process4
Business X X
Process 5
This table (matrix) shows which application packages (e.g., CRM from SAP) may be used to
automate which business processes. You can determine the business processes from Figure1
(e.g., BP1 may be finance and BP2 may be accounting). In addition, you should surf the Net
to determine the most appropriate application packages that automate different business
processes. Your choices are indicated by X in the table cells.
This application plan can be further refined. For example, once the key applications have been
identified, the next main activity is to develop an automation strategy with different options of
buy, rent, outsource develop in-house, or extend-re-use (BRODE). It is also desirable to
determine how the BRODE strategies could be implemented. For example, it is important to
select the COTS (commercial-off-the-shelf) application packages that can be bought and
identify application service providers (e.g., Oracle and SAP) for rental and outsourcing.

Note: This information is extracted from the text “Strategic Planning of Digital
Enterprises” (A. Umar, 2019 – Draft version).