COMPUTER SCIENCE

CASE STUDY Company XL is a mobile telecommunications company whose main business is providing mobile phone services. It has several million customers who are on a wide range of tariffs. The company is 15 years old and has had significant growth in customers in each year. The company has a significant investment in information systems and the current information infrastructure is complex and unwieldy. The main reason for the infrastructure being unwieldy has been the fast growth of the company which has meant that applications have been developed quickly to respond to the changing circumstances. This reactive approach has led to the development of a number of applications which have been developed and implemented independently. XL is now becoming a mature company and its strategy is still to increase customer numbers but the growth is expected to slow considerable. So it is now part of its strategy to become more efficient and reduce costs. The current application portfolio consists of 55 applications of which 25 are classed as support application e.g. payroll, HR, and 30 applications which are classed as key operational. These applications have been implemented in a reactive manner as the company has grown. There is little integration between the applications which provides problems for management obtaining integrated management information and with providing an integrated service to customers. XL has decide that going forward with it IS provision it wants to be proactive and wants to have a portfolio of integrated applications. It has decided to replace the current 55 applications with new applications that are integrated and in the long term will be less costly to run than the existing applications. The strategic decision relating to the new applications is that those that are classed as support will be replaced by an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application and those that are classed as key operational will be replaced by a new set of bespoke applications. The company wants implementation of the new applications to be complete years after commencement of the replacement programme. Up to this point development and implementation of applications has been done by the in-house IT Department. The Department has a range of skills and experience and has in depth knowledge of the current applications and business processes. The staffing of the Department is based on having resources to support the entire fix on fail work, small enhancements and the ability to resource one development of a new application at any one time. This means that to deliver the new portfolio of applications within the stated management timescales there will not be enough in house resource. Although the in-house staffs have experience of implementing packages as support applications they have no experience of implementing ERP systems. Questions 1. Draw up a resource proposal for the management team of XL for the delivery of the new applications. The proposal should highlight the possible options that are available to resource the new development and should contain a recommendation for which option to select. The recommendation should be supported by a detailed justification. (350 w) 2. Critically appraise the resource proposal you have produced for question (150w) Guidance 1. Referencing should be in the Harvard format. 2. To produce this assignment will require wider reading. Note: Please make sure you understand the case study to write what required for the assignment question. Right points of answer require in this case. There are other questions which need to be writing but at the moment I have only release question 1 and 2 for you to write. If this goes well the rest of the question will follow 500WORDS COMPLETED WITHIN 4 DAYS