Assignment

As you continue exploring topics related to business information systems over the next five weeks, many of your assignments will build toward your Final Project, which will be due in Week 7. Playing the role of a consultant to the general manager and/or CEO of your organization, your goal will be to make recommendations for how business information systems can best support the organization’s efforts in building and sustaining a competitive advantage, based on the weekly topics and themes:

• Week 2: Roles and Actions
• Week 3: Utilization of Data Resources
• Week 4: Driving Value from Business Information Systems
• Week 5: Process-Oriented Organization
• Week 6: Security and Ethical Issues
• Week 7: Business Continuity Planning

Your Final Project will include:

• Your recommendations for improving the organization’s use of data resources, data storage and processing, and related information systems that promote informed decision making by managers who are responsible for communicating business IT decisions across various functional and cross-functional departments within the organization.
• Your recommendations for how the organization can best uphold its legal and ethical responsibilities in relation to the management of information and information systems.
• Your recommendations for mitigating or eliminating security risks that your organization faces or could face.
• An explanation of the alignment between the organizational structure and the choice of information systems/technology, as well as the implications of misalignment between the two.
• The options the organization has to adapt its structure to its information systems, or vice versa.
• An annotated bibliography in APA format.

As a consultant, you will need to understand your organization from various perspectives. Often you will need to make assumptions about systems, processes, or operations if you are unable to find the exact information. In situations where you do not have access to such information, you are encouraged to study other organizations of similar size or in a similar industry that might have made such information public. Then you can draw conclusions about how that organization’s choices mirror yours. In other instances, you may have to make educated and reasonable assumptions based on what little information you can find, or what you think is true. When you make assumptions, be sure to document them. The validity of your assumptions could affect the soundness of your recommendations.

Please review the weekly Assignments, Discussions, and the Final Project Assignment. Also review the Final Project rubrics. Your Instructor will evaluate your work according to the associated rubric(s).

As a first step, you will need to select a company out of the three options provided. You will be researching and using this company as your own “case study” throughout many of the Discussions and Assignments for the balance of the course. Please review the following options to make your selection:

• Wal-Mart (large retail chain)
• Amazon.com (online business)
• MyPreschool (new small local preschool startup)

If you have questions about the organization you plan to use, please discuss your choice with your Instructor using the Contact the Instructor link in the classroom. Your choice of an organization will be important so that you can maximize your learning throughout this course.

From this point forward, for the Final Project, this organization will be referred to as “your organization.”

Once you have selected your organization, provide a (business style) memo addressed to the Instructor that does the following:

• Identifies your chosen organization and your rationale for selecting it
• Identifies at least five (5) resources you have found that you can use in your investigation and a strategy for further researching the organization or the industry in which it operates. Be sure to describe these resources and what types of relevant information they provide. You should provide the appropriate citation using APA format at the conclusion of your memo.
• Identifies the types of information system management issues your organization will likely encounter at some point (example: you can relate this to the issues that were identified in Week 1). Include some preliminary discussion about why these are important to address, and be sure to account for any assumptions you made in the process.

Refer to the Week 2 Application Assignment Rubric for specific grading elements and criteria. Your Instructor will use this rubric to assess your work.

General Guidance on Assignment Length: Your Week 2 memo to your Instructor describing your chosen organization will typically be 2–4 pages (1–2 pages if single spaced), excluding a title page and references (which are not necessary for this application).

Other Important Notes Related to Selecting the Organization You Will Study:

• You may not survey or systematically interview employees at a company. If you wish to pursue interviews or surveys, you will need to follow the standard university procedures to obtain prior approval from the Walden University Institutional Review Board (IRB). Collecting data from human subjects without IRB approval can result in dismissal from the program.
• You will need to produce your recommendations based on analysis of documents and information that is publically available or that we provide to you.
• You will need to be careful that no proprietary, sensitive, or confidential information is disclosed, should you have access to it.

Note: If you are unable to find relevant information, you may want to look for similar information at/for other similar publically traded companies. You may find relevant information that will enable you to make appropriate inferences about your organization and make reasonable assumptions so you can proceed with your project.

If you have questions about how to apply what you are learning or how to find the most relevant information for your organization’s needs, please discuss your choice with your Instructor using the Contact the Instructor link in the classroom.