Individual Project by serving your local community

Many class projects involve case studies or simulations involving fictional companies or organizations. To create a database for a fictional company, students would face hypothetical problems, but a student would not have the experience of dealing with real people or the real-world problems of an organization.

In this service learning based project, you are expected to identify a local small business (for example, a grocery store) in your community, and apply your knowledge about IT and business to analyze the role of IT for this business, and develop an IT Plan for it. The plan would specify (at a high level) the key IT applications that the business should focus on, the underlying infrastructure technologies necessary to support these applications, how to go about achieving this (e.g., sequencing the introduction of major applications), whether services should be delivered via in-house resources or outsources, etc. Explain how the IT plan is consistent with (and whether it suggests changes to) the business needs, financial resources, competitive position etc. 

You can assume that you are hired by a local small business company as an IT consultant. You are given 500-10,000 dollars to improve or setup its information systems. What is your Information System plan for the company?

A useful way to structure your research and project results is the following.

1. Introduce the context: the small business company introduction, its products, markets, and mission.

2. Discuss the problems with its current information processing abilities – analyze whether it is inadequate in satisfying computing requirements, misaligned with firm strategy, not cost effective etc.

3. Develop and justify your proposed IT strategy. What new technologies should be introduced? What applications would they support, and who would use them to do what differently?

4. Summary.

5. The template of the report can be found in “Course Content” in the blackboard.