Overview: Analysis of IS

An IS is a system, whether automated or manual, maintaining data records and organizing activities for an organization.

For this assignment, you will analyze the organizational impacts and challenges of the IS for an organization operating in a domain of your choice. You will focus on the processes and infrastructure of a selected case study for your organization. In addition, you will elaborate on the architecture of your selected case study and provide solutions to enable seamless processes in information systems security operations.

You will be completing this assignment in five weeks. In each week, you will work on a component of the report. By the end of Week 6, you will integrate these separate components into a final report.

The final project deliverable will be a report reviewing the information system architecture and summarizing the various aspects of the status of your information system security. The report will include:

• A description of the information system application for your case study
• The information infrastructure and systems of the case study
• Organizational impacts and challenges of the IS for your case study
• Strategic IS planning along with its evaluation
• The information systems security impacts of the constructed IS

Include a copy of all the references used in APA format.

Information Infrastructure and Systems

In this week, your task for the final project is to research in the South University Online Library and on the Internet to identify a case study of your choice with a pertinent information system application.

Some examples could be: a health care organization, such as a health care insurance company, a major hospital, or medical laboratory; an academic institution, such as a university or a professional institute; a commerce and transportation center, for example a major airport, or maritime port; a transportation carrier, such as an airline company, a railroad company, or even a car transportation service; a network service provider, such as a telecommunications service carrier/provider, an Internet and voice digital service provider, or a cloud service provider; a major media organization, such as television network, or a multimedia service operator; an industry firm that manufactures products, such as a computer products manufacturer, a car manufacturer, or a hardware manufacturer; a major retailer, for example a food retailer, a home maintenance retailer, or clothes outlet; an entertainment complex, such as a hotel, a vacation resort, or a large recreation and entertainment complex; a financial institution, for example a banking system, a credit card service, or an investment trading service.

The above are examples to guide you with your research, but you are not limited to these areas. It is important that you arrive at your own case study, based on your personal interests, and one that is well suited to explore from an information systems analysis for this course. Some criteria that you should consider in arriving at your case study are listed below:

1. Your case study may be based on an actual company, or organization, using facts from research, or it could be fictional, in the sense that you could entirely define it yourself as a hypothetical case, with your own assumptions.
2. Your case study must require an underlying information system as an essential element for its operation.
3. The information system must be reasonably complex. One way to determine whether an information system is reasonably complex is to think in terms of entities and relationships that you will need to model. Even without knowing exactly how the data model will look, having some early notion of how many entities and relationships you should expect to model the information in your case will give you an appreciation for your case’s complexity. A reasonable complexity would be at least ten entities and ten relationships.
4. At some point in your research you must be able to think in terms of use cases for your information system. Think of use cases as transactions that different end users will invoke when interacting with your information system. At the time you select your research area and define your case study, you need not know exactly the use cases you will be working with, but you should have some appreciation for the types of scenarios that you will explore as you progress with your project.
5. Finally, you must submit your area of study to your instructor via e-mail and have your instructor’s approval that you may go ahead with your selection.

Once you have selected your study area and case, and have received approval from your instructor, you may proceed to the next steps described below. Create a report that focuses on the IS used to support the operation of your organization in your case study and answer the following questions.

Getting Ready

In this week, create a report that focuses on the current status of your IS. In the report, identify at least two types of requirements that the IS has to comply with. Next, create a scope for your application that you’ll design. Finally, you need to hire three systems analysts whom you would manage. Develop a job advertisement to hire these analysts.

The scope should be a one-page section and it should consist of the following components:

• General project information (name, sponsor, and project manager)
• Problem or opportunity statement
• Project objective
• Project description
• Business benefits
• Project deliverables for the whole development cycle of the project, not just the design
• Estimated project duration for the whole development cycle of the project, not just the design

Follow APA standards to create the scope and cite any sources.

The job advertisement should identify the requirements, such as education, experience, security clearance, responsibilities, and the organizational reporting for these job positions. Before creating the advertisement, locate Web sites and newspapers that have similar job advertisements and analyze them for the skills required for these job positions. Next, list 10 interview questions that you’ll ask these candidates. In addition, create a scenario that you would use in the interview to test the skills of the candidates.

Finally, discuss the following topics under a section titled Enterprise-Wide System Considerations:

• Your application may use a wide range of ISs in its daily operations that may comply with governmental regulations or industry standards. Would you consider integration of these systems in an enterprise- or agency-wide system? Why?
• What features does an enterprise-wide system, such as SAP, provide? Do you think such a system would be beneficial to your application? Follow APA standards to cite any resources.

Create the report, scope, and advertisement in a single, 3 pages MS Word document saved as W1_A3_lastname_firstname. You will have at least four sections titled Report, Scope, Advertisement, and Enterprise-Wide System Considerations in your document.