Strategic Planning Process

Question 1

A) The strategic planning process that I would be presenting to the CEO would primarily be broken down in 3 segments, which would be headed by risk to the company as a whole. Including profits, attaining and maintaining customers and profit loss due to faulty IT.

The main focus would be on failed security system that could cause potential catastrophic failure to the company as a whole if not addressed immediately. If the company cannot prove to be a secure company, not only will the downtime be a direct loss of income but the future equities would also be affected because of the shady persona FC would give off to its customer base.  The 500k price tag would be miniscule in comparison to the amount of money the company would lose if this weren’t addressed immediately.

My second issue would be the company infrastructure. I would address the importance of an integrated system across all departments in order for the company as a whole to be on the same page. IT integration would give us a huge competitive advantage (i.e cutting employee time/costs, customer satisfaction by ease of scheduling/changing rooms/activities) and also be the foundation of future IS endeavors.

I would introduce porters five forces model and give a variety of examples evaluating entry barriers, suppliers, customers, substitute products and rivalry. With examples of what other companies are using to gain advantages through IS and how we could gain competitive advantages using IT.

I would then set the implementation process for the new system to be integrated using a parallel conversion method to unite the legacy systems with current up-to-date models. This would limit down time if any were expected.

B) On the committee for IS strategic planning I would include managers of each of the departments that are directly affected by the information system. I would also like to have input from the some of the board members including the COO and perhaps occasional input from the CEO to maintain IT-Business alignment as well as strategic alignment with the company scope. The main tasks of this committee would be to improve managements understanding of IT opportunities and limitations, assess current performance, identify capacity and human resource requirements and clarify the level of investment required. We would draw out business processes and determine what the most efficient outcomes would be with an interactive system. Then we will cohesively come up with the best outcome for company integration for both employee use and customer use. The committee would also be in charge of doing a SWOT analysis and coming up with the reasons to upgrade the company’s IS.

C) The tools and methodologies that would be used to assist with the strategic planning process would be Porter’s 5 forces model, SWOT analysis, competitive and market analysis. As well as positioning to exemplify the advantages of upgrading our systems and possibly use KPI’s to further show the amount of money and time that will be saved through an upgraded IS.

Question 3

A) Project portfolio lists major resource projects this include infrastructure, application, data and security services that are consistent with long-range plans of company. Applications portfolio is a list of major approved IS projects that are also consistent with the long-range plan. These portfolios are typically developed during the strategic business plan as a medium term plan since these projects are intended to be driven by the business strategy and tend to extend over several years.