Suppose that you formed a company with some friends two years ago. The company is in the broad sector of retail, healthcare, education or manufacturing Lite (i.e., use 3D printers to produce products) located in any country (including small islands). It has grown significantly in the last two years and is now a solid company. You have to first develop a complete business strategy and a strategic plan before getting into detailed technology issues. However, the company wants to be a digital enterprise to compete and succeed in the marketplace. You can make the following assumptions:

The company plans to have one head office (30 employees) and 4 branch offices –outlets (20 employees) each.

The company wants to diversify and expand rapidly

The company wants to exploit IT to compete and succeed in the marketplace

Partnerships and outsourcing are supposed to strengthen business. Any other opportunities to grow the business are sought (looking for ideas).

You must select one of the companies briefly described in (Umar, Ch. 3) as a model that you can use for making your decisions. You may also use any other small to medium company as a model.

The objective of this project is to develop a Business Strategy and an Information System Plan. Your final deliverable is 10- 20 slide management presentation (ppt slides annotated with notes for details) that contains the following information:

Part A: Business strategy of the company (16 Points).

Use the typical management models (customers versus products, Porter, SWOT, others) to capture the main ideas. Please follow the strategic planning methodology (mission statement, internal analysis, external analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation & monitoring) explained in Chapter 4.

Show the role of IT to support the business strategy in the next 2-3 years. Specifically, you should use the Internet-stage model and the four dimensional model to develop a strategic vision. What stage should the company start and why, can the company go from stage 1 to stage 3 in 3 years, what are the specific benefits, risks, etc for choosing a stage. The company wants to be a next generation enterprise – advise in favor or against it.

Suggestion: Please use (Umar Ch.4) and Attachment A for supporting information.

Part B: An information system and enterprise application plan (24 Points). The objective is to clearly understand the role of information systems and automation in digital enterprises. You need to:

Determine what will be automated when, why and how. Create a year 1 view that shows about 40 business processes (BPs) to be used by the company and the enterprise application packages (EAPs) that will automate the business processes. This should be done as a matrix where BPs are rows and EAPs are columns.

Use the Porter Value Chain Model as a basis for automation. In particular, identify five applications that are critical to the success of the company (very high in the value chain). For each application, also show the implementation strategy (buy, rent, outsource development, develop in-house, or extend — BRODE). Briefly explain why you chose a particularr strategy