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Information Technology IssuesView Template for: SHU Information Technology Issues Systems Architecture Issues
The purpose of this section is to highlight and to discuss current and future systems architecture issues in order to ensure that the horizontal unit is effectively leveraging information technology. Assessment of Existing Information Systems
This section is used to identify all existing applications employed by the horizontal unit, to evaluate them, and to provide a brief definition of each. In practice, even a one sentence description of each system is very helpful. The system descriptions presented here should be very brief. Longer descriptions should be presented in the glossary. Complete systems descriptions should be maintained in a separate systems document which should be referenced at the beginning of this statement of direction in the section "Other Relevant Documents." The user rating should indicate the satisfaction level of the users of the system. Users may or may not like the system because of the user interface, the system functionality, the reports, and a host of other reasons. The technical rating refers to the technical design and maintainability of the system from the point of view of the information systems professional. The future priority rating should indicate whether or not the future of this system is important to the horizontal unit. The purpose of this information is to clearly communicate with the systems department to help them plan for the future corporate architecture. Example for a Centralized Personnel Department of Company XYZ
1. The Employee Profile System is a mainframe-based system written in FORTRAN that is used by the human resource department in order to best utilize the skills of employees in order to maximize employee productivity. The system, which was written 15 years ago, is easy to use but difficult to maintain. The original programmers left the organization years ago and only a few of our current staff members can make changes to the system because we stopped using FORTRAN ten years ago. The system is very important, and it must be maintained or rewritten. 2. The Officer & Employee Compensation system is a PC-based system used for corporate wide salary planning. The system was purchased from Vendor XYZ in early 1995. It is generally well liked by the users, easy to maintain, and likely to be used for at least five years. MIS OverviewThe purpose of this section is to briefly summarize the status and usefulness of the current management information systems (MIS) used to make decisions in operating the horizontal unit. Although most MIS systems today are automated, this analysis is equally relevant for non-automated MIS systems. Good decisions require good information; and data from within the firm and from the industry need to be accessed, manipulated and reported on efficiently and effectively. Current Information Technology Summary
The purpose of this section is to profile the horizontal unit's information technology inventory in terms of hardware, software, communication facilities, and data used. Each building or physical location used by the horizontal unit should be listed if they are few in number. If there are many locations and some of those locations have a similar type of systems architecture, it is often easier to group similar locations and present an average configuration. This is a simple tool to give management a quick idea of what technology is located where. One or two pages should be sufficient to cover most people at most locations. Even for the horizontal unit that has hundreds of locations around the world, it's best to keep the number of pages to three or less which is long enough to describe the top 16 locations. In such a case, at the beginning of the SHU document in the section "Other Relevant Documents" identify the name of the document with the more extensive listing of all physical locations used by the horizontal unit. Example of Centralized Sales Department of Company XYZ:
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