Mgmt 408 - Midsouth Chamber of Commerce

Case Study: Midsouth Chamber of Commerce

MGMT 408

July 14, 2012

Due to security concern, MSCC’s been operating their information system as individual workstation connecting to print server rather than having server and full time system analyst. But due to growth and information system need, the Vice President of Marketing and Membership had negotiated the right price for UNITRAK information system which would allow the need of MSCC.

MSCC had significant growth in staff over the years and reduction in cash reserve. When economic slowdown, they projected budget deficit and hired a new Vice President of Marketing and Membership, Leon Lassiter to help with marketing strategy. With his marketing and sales reorganation and help from Operation division’s manager Ed Wilson’s aggressive management of expenses MSCC once again experiencing strong financial growth. The two men are primary responsible for the success, but continue to clash when it comes to believes. Lassiter believes that a fulltime systems analyst should be hired to meet the growing information needs but Wilson thinks that small nonprofit agency had limited funds and worried about the cost of the information system.

With the current system, all division staff handles everything manually such as the marketing division’s primary duty is to track membership activities include developing membership database, making daily changes to databases, processing call-record activities by territory managers, creating audit trails for reviewing changes and many others. These activities sometimes backed up as much as two to three days and feel that with new system, he hope to achieve in a two-hour turnaround.

The marketing supporting area also handle large volume of calls and additional duties and the Operation Division handles the financial information and account control. Wilson also plans to track legislative bills from introduction through the passage, or veto by the governor. And don’t forget to add human resources division maintained personnel records and few other tasks.

Since the currently system cannot handle the task from all the department, Lassiter feels that they need new information system that will allow all the tasks that the staff had to handle be done by the system and allow the staff to access the database that would allow them to perform their job. At the same time, Lassiter need to realize that by allowing staff to have access to uncontrolled data would be a security risk and that not all staff needed to have access to all the information. But new system would allow some of the tasks that need to be done manually to be done automatically and free up some of the staff time or even reduce in staffing to save cost.

Their current information system is maintained by Simon Kovecki, a young graduate