ISM Draft Plan for Acme Mexico City Allan Henry Andrew Mitchell Charles Manu Darnell Carter ...

37 Pages·2010·0.34 MB·English

by  Patrick Simon

ISM Draft Plan for Acme Mexico City

Allan Henry
Andrew Mitchell
Charles Manu
Darnell Carter
Donna Bush
Isaac Robert Brooks II
Jerry Aziaka
Marcus Fleming
Oluyomi .O. Alabi
Patrick Simon
Paul Mathew
Peter Heliotis
Sandra Minion
Stacy Craig
Tia B. Coachman
Vincenzo Fragomeni

AMBA 640 Section 9047
Professor Dr. Peggy Lee
March 7th, 2010
Acme’s ISM Plan
TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY....................................................................................................................2

1. INTRODUCTION...............................................................................................................................4

2.
ACME’S
INFORMATION
SYSTEMS
MANAGEMENT...................................................................4

2.1
ISM
STAKEHOLDERS.........................................................................................................................................6

2.2
INFORMATION
REQUIREMENTS
FOR
STAKEHOLDER..................................................................................7

2.3
CULTURAL
DIFFERENCES
DEFINED................................................................................................................7

2.4
ISM
TRAINING...................................................................................................................................................9

2.5
ISM
BUDGET....................................................................................................................................................10

3.
PROFIT
CENTERS.............................................................................................................................11

3.1
GENERAL
INFORMATION
SYSTEMS...............................................................................................................12

3.2
DEPARTMENTAL
INFORMATION
SYSTEMS..................................................................................................13

3.3
BUDGET.............................................................................................................................................................16

4.
COST
CENTERS.................................................................................................................................16

4.1
HUMAN
RESOURCES........................................................................................................................................17

4.2
PAYROLL............................................................................................................................................................18

4.3
IMPLEMENTATION...........................................................................................................................................18

4.4
BUDGET.............................................................................................................................................................19

5.
INFORMATION
SYSTEMS
MANAGEMENT
TRAINING
AND
SECURITY.............................19

5.1
TRAINING..........................................................................................................................................................20

5.2
SECURITY...........................................................................................................................................................21

6.
EQUIPMENT.......................................................................................................................................21

6.1
HARDWARE.......................................................................................................................................................22

6.2
SOFTWARE........................................................................................................................................................24

6.3
NETWORKS.......................................................................................................................................................25

6.4
INTERFACES......................................................................................................................................................26

6.5
BUDGET.............................................................................................................................................................26

7.
STRATEGIC
ADVANTAGE..............................................................................................................27

7.1
AMC’S
STRATEGIC
ADVANTAGE...................................................................................................................29

7.2
FUTURE
IMPROVEMENTS
FOR
AMC............................................................................................................30

REFERENCES..........................................................................................................................................34


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Acme’s ISM Plan
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY


Acme Home Improvements has branched operation into Mexico City and will
need to leverage ISM to be effective in its pursuit of long-term and international growth.
The importance of ISM is the ability to store and retrieve information, secure personal
information and private data, increase portability of information through wireless devices,
and provide stakeholders the information that will make them educated and aware of
issues or knowledge that will help the overall success of the organization. Social and
cultural differences will need to be addressed when implementing ISM, from contracting
with local suppliers to acknowledging Mexican values. The CIO of Acme Home
Improvements will need to meet the needs of all shareholders through understanding
requests, and determining the appropriate means of providing solutions for those
requests. Costs centers such as Human Resources, Marketing, and Facilities use different
information to perform daily operations. While these cost centers will need security to
ensure vital information is not stolen, ISM will need to address how to interface these
systems with each other. Profit centers also need to address how information will be
stored, retrieved, and sent to suppliers and its corporate (home) office. Inventory tracking
and ordering uses ISM to allow sales floor employees to track inventory and reorder
based on sales trends or low inventory. Marketing can also use sales information to
predict future opportunities and will need to have access to that information.
When the departments needs are addressed the equipment for servers, terminals,
and all components needed to construct the infrastructure to handle the traffic, security,
and speed of transactions. Acme will use file servers, routers, and terminals located in
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Acme’s ISM Plan
the back of the store, and will be in a temperature controlled room safeguarded from
potential leaks and power outages. Backups will be taken nightly and stored at an offsite
location in the event of power or system failures. Choosing software and an operating
system will handle potential viruses and attacks while integrating with suppliers
information systems. In house programming will address customizations that are unique
to the organization. Acme will use a LAN or local area network to share information
across a series of computers. This will provide for real time transactional data and access
to documents on the file servers. The overall budget will include the equipment, training,
and support including upgrades and maintenance, and contractual service support. The
estimated budget for Acme Home Improvements will be approximately 2,933,075 MXN.
Fluctuations include the exchange rates between the Mexican peso with the US dollar.

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Acme’s ISM Plan
1. INTRODUCTION

With the expansion of Acme Home Improvements into Mexico City and phase 1
of constructing the foundation under way, it is important to define the roles ISM will
have in the success of the company. ISM will support the goals and mission of Acme by
providing support, ways to access data, secure information, allow departments to use
information to improve operations, justify changes and allow management to see trends
and make decisions on those trends. ISM will support cost centers such as marketing to
track advertising and its effectiveness, while also supporting profit centers such as sales
with fast processing of purchasing data and restocking inventory through wireless
handheld scanners. It will be crucial to have an ISM presence that will increase
processing speeds, store large volumes of data, and provide statistical representations that
will allow acme to adapt to our dynamic environment, and forecast weakness areas that
would not allow Acme to optimize its sales and goals.

2.
ACME’s
Information
Systems
Management



What constitutes an ISM team? An ISM team can vary depending on the size and
configuration of an organization. For a large organization such as Acme with locations
around the world, the ISM team is generally led by the Chief Information Officer, Chief
Technology Officer, Chief Security Officer, and a Chief Privacy Officer. These
executive level positions tend to reside at the corporate headquarters location. Typically,
each location has an ISM Manager. ISM at Acme Headquarters and Mexico City will be
organized according to the organizational structure pictured in Figure 1.
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Acme’s ISM Plan
Figure 1: Acme de Mexico ISM Organizational Chart
Skill set inconsistencies among IS staff is an area of concern for ISM. Lack of
technical skills and experience with large scale projects can negatively impact the level of
collaboration between regions and headquarters. Such inconsistencies can also prevent
the use of a parallel development approach to ISM. In addition, lack of knowledge by
headquarters of individual location business practices and culture can provide a hindrance
to the success of organizational expansion from an ISM perspective. According to
Akmanligil & Palvia (2004), some companies address this problem with a strategy that
attempts to gather representatives from different locations, organize and document their
local requirements, and then join everyone together at a central location to work at
conflict resolution which leads to definition of a common structure (pg. 47).
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Acme’s ISM Plan
IT personnel must be technically qualified to work with computer hardware,
software, and information systems. Employees are either hired with these skills or must
be trained to perform effectively with existing systems. Skilled IT personnel are critical
at the local level in order to obtain the knowledge needed to construct the various
subsystems which are then connected through bridges or integrated to the larger corporate
system. When called upon to complete such a task, a design team is formed consisting of
system and user personnel from multiple sites. Team members gather at a designated
location for months to work on the system design. Such interactive participation by all
parties not only creates a design that meets the requirements of all regions, but also
increases the likelihood of the software being accept from both a functional and standards
perspective. However, the cost of this strategy is reported to be high. Furthermore, the
team composition is very important to the success of the project (Akmanligil & Palvia,
2004). The overall goal of ISM is to provide the organization with the ability to deliver
information in a variety of ways to a variety of users at all levels.

2.1
ISM
Stakeholders


The stakeholders for the ISM group are located throughout the organization. The
Merriam-Webster online dictionary defines a stakeholder as one who is involved in or
affected by a course of action (Merriam-Webster, 2010). This definition means that the
stakeholders for ISM at Acme Mexico include: the employee working the cash register,
the employee cataloguing inventory, the employee working on the loss prevention team
and monitoring the surveillance cameras and the manager sending out an email to
corporate headquarters. In addition to these ISM stakeholders, Baltzan and Phillips
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Acme’s ISM Plan
(2009) indicate that the list also includes customer service, Finance, Sales and Marketing,
IT Operations, Operations Management, HR and Security (pg.8). Each stakeholder has
its own use for the data with some data being used by more than one stakeholder.

2.2
Information
Requirements
for
Stakeholder


Often shareholders require information, hardware or software that is commonly
used across functional areas. For example, most, if not all companies require access to
and use of Microsoft’s operating system with the Office software package that includes
Work, Excel, Power Point and Outlook. In addition, telephones, fax machines, and
copiers are common to cross functional areas and must be easily accessible. However,
there are some specific requirements that are intended for specific departmental use. For
example, the finance department needs to have access to financial software such as
QuickBooks or Quicken. Sales and Marketing requires a Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) tool such as Netsuite. Operations require a mechanism to capture
product inventory, as well as a method to track employee hours. SAP would be a good
option for handling both of these tasks. Rather than turn to an additional software to
meet HR requirements, SAP could be utilized for this function since it is fully adaptable
for this function.

2.3
Cultural
Differences
Defined


In every orderly society, there are certain behavioral patterns controlled by
different standards of values, that essentially establish the rules and regulations that
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Acme’s ISM Plan
govern the manner in which individuals react and behave in society. The complexities of
human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships between individuals and
their cultural values. There also exist similar patterns of relationships and agreements
between organizations that sometimes deviate from the orderly method of management
desired by a society. In today’s society of inevitable social relationships and the
sustainability of global organizations in dynamic economies, the actions of some
individuals in a society offers various forms of management adaptation challenges that
require a clear thought process in order to make the appropriate management decisions to
address systemic issues of an organization. The growth of most organizations relatively
depend on how effective their management focuses on cross-cultural values of various
societies where the organization conducts business and how well the management can
adapt to different societal cultural values. According to Fred Walumbwa’s (2007) article
on cross-culture investigation, we expect individual differences to play a critical role in
the way individuals respond to different leadership styles whiles the implicit leadership
theory suggests that perceptions of leadership are based on hierarchically organized
cognitive prototypes that help individuals interpret leadership styles that are compatible
with their own cultural values or orientations (Lord, Foti, & De Vader, 1984).
According Geert Hofstede, management is essentially the process of coordinating
the efforts of people such as subordinates, clients, customers, suppliers, authorities and
the general public towards a common set goal of an organization (Hofstede, 2007).
However, it is highly imperative to take into consideration the complexity of individuals
and applying the appropriate management practices in achieving these goals. He further
elaborates on culture as the collective programming of the mind, which distinguishes
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Acme’s ISM Plan
members of a certain group of people from another group, based on a set of shared
attitudes, goals, values, practices and work ethics (Hofstede, 2007). In the determination
of the appropriate management technique to apply, it is important to carefully evaluate
the cultural dimensions or orientation of the individuals involved in the task being
implemented and the overall cultural orientation of the society. The most important
cultural dimension that serves as the core element in determining an individual’s
preference of certain states of affairs over another is the cultural values. Management in
essence, is subject to the cultural values shared by individuals in society. According to
Lord, Foti & De Vader (1984), individuals in society process information and respond to
certain types of management styles similar to their prototype of effective management,
therefore responds positively and in a more accepting manner (Lord, Foti, & De Vader,
1984).

2.4
ISM
Training


In today's global context, organizations today have expanded beyond local shores
to increase organizational success. With global partnerships and expansion, locally and
internationally, workplace diversity seems to be a pivotal management factor for most
organizations. Thus, it is imperative for organizations to implement and develop its
organizational strategies while also increasing its workforce participation rates for the
diverse groups of individuals and cultures within an organization. The organizational
strategies are immensely influenced by the type of information technology culture
adopted, which consequently affects the ability of the organization to compete in the
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