Challenges and Issues Faced by SIA
1. In the present days the business organisations, both SME (Small and Medium Enterprises) and the large organisations are dedicated towards improving the processes to foster in the commercial market. These organisations are required to work with a large amount of data. Study in Australia (SIA) is one such organisation that needs to work with a large amount of data as it specialises in the recruitment of the foreign students for the admission in the universities in Australia. The investigations of the case study shows that SIA needs the implementation of an information system that would be effective in the facilitating the processes within the organisation.
An information system is that type of an organised system that is used for performing different operations of information such as the collection, storage and organisation. In simple words, it can be said the information system are implemented by the enterprises to collect, process, filter, distribution and creation of data (Bajdor and Grabara 2014). There are a several types of information systems available in the market that would be beneficial for the business. Some of the examples of such information systems include the data warehouses, enterprise systems, enterprise resource planning, office automation, global information system, geographic information system and expert systems (Gallagher and Sixsmith 2014). An information system that is computer based is composed of the some components that are hardware, software, databases, networks and procedures.
2. The recruitment firm of Study of Australia (SIA) is facing a lot of issues and problems recently. This is the reason the company of SIA is facing a lot of issues and problems in the recent days of development. The following are the problems and the challenges that the company of SIA are currently facing. The processes in the SIA were manual driven before the implementation of the information system (Eniola and Entebang 2015). The SIA was facing a lot of problems as the processes were manual driven.
The business processes included recording of the student details, filling out of the forms for the offer letters, tracking of the several letters of confirmation and the offers of enrolment, processing of the several types of payments and ultimately the issuing of the receipts for the deposition of the fees on the behalf of the people who are providing education to the students. The SIA used to maintain the student data with the help of a spreadsheet. The company of SIA also used to organise the appointments in the Microsoft Outlook. During the initial days of the services of the company, SIA used to carry out these business processes with ease due to the existence of student base that was small in number. In addition, the company faced a lot of problems in managing the databases as they were paper based. The company was also facing a stiff competition from the competitors.
3. From the above paragraphs, it is clear that the Company of SIA is facing a lot of issue in maintaining the records of the students. This suggests that the company of SIA is very much in need of an information system that would serve all the purposes of the company in the maintaining with the stiff competition in the commercial market. The key information requirements of the company is that the information system to be implemented must be able to maintain the databases of the students with the use of a cloud based platform over the internet (Simmhan et al. 2013). The information system must be able to come up with a suitable plan that would dictate the working processes of the execution of the programmes to be held.
The management information system would also be able to limit the workload by automation of many of the business process. This way the workload of the company will also be reduced (Miwa et al. 2014). In addition as the business processes of the company would mostly be automated minimum amount of the resources would be used to meet up with the requirements. In addition the information system will also be able to keep a track on the various types of activities of the competitors that fall in the same domain and take actions accordingly. The information system will also be able advertise about the company on various social platforms.
4. With the types of the problems, that the company of SIA, the specific type of information systems that would be suitable for the facilitation of the business processes of SIA is the ERP system or the Enterprise Resource Planning and the data warehouses. As SIA is a business that focusses on the recruitment of the foreign students in the universities to the various universities of Australia, the ERP system will bring a boost to the business with the various modules of service such as the proper distribution of the supply chain management, accounting, human resource, corporate performance and governance, business intelligence, asset management of the enterprise and the social promotions through the help of the social platforms (Kurbel 2013).
The Data warehouses on the other hand will be able to boost the enterprise by managing the records of the insights of the students effectively. The management will not be requiring any kind of assistance separately to find out the exact information about a particular student during the time of need (Vaisman and Zimányi 2014). The various modules of the data warehouse that will be effective in solving the problems of the recruitment of SIA includes the data sources, staging area, warehouse, data marts and the end users. The data sources will include an operational system and the flat flags. The warehouse will be including the meta data, summary data and the raw data. The data marts will be including the purchasing, sales and inventory that would focus on the recruitment processes.
5. The manually driven information system of the SIA was being unable to cope up with the present requirements of the company for which the organisation demanded an information system that would bring solidity and integrity to the system and would facilitate the business processes. With the help of the information system, the company of SIA would be able to strategically use the internet, intranet and the extranet effectively. The few ways through which SIA could effectively use the internet include the gathering of information from the community of computers and the online storage.
Proposed Solutions for Growth and Expansion
The internet will also allow the enterprise to advertise on the websites that in turn would open the doorway of opportunities for the enterprise. This will engage a lot of stakeholders into the system for the smoothening the business process. The intranet on the other hand will allow the organisation to maintain secrecy and integrity as it is the restricted version of the internet. With the intranet, the servers of the information systems will be interconnected that will carry the information about the students and internal employees (Tredinnick 2014). This will help the enterprise to avoid the prying eyes of the hackers and other vulnerabilities. The extranet on the other hand will provide flexibility by allowing the external stakeholders to get a limited access to the databases of the enterprise (Wims 2013).
6. In any kind of project, the management process becomes effective with the help of the change management procedure. To make the change management effective, it is important to figure out the changes that are going to take place at first. The management authority of the SIA enterprise should figure out the changes before the implementation of the information system and document the required changes within the organisation. The change management is a dynamic concept for which it is the should be communicated to the existing members of the organisation.
Change management may result in the resistance to change by the employees. Therefore it is the responsibility of the management authority to look into the fact that the changes can be brought into the organisation with a relative easier way (Hayes 2018). To effectively bring in the changes into the system, a number of factors must be considered. These factors include the scope, the schedule, the related costs, the quality, human resources, communications and the associated risks. One of the popular change management models that the management team can apply is the Information Technology Information Library or the ITIL. This model will help to bring in the structural changes in the software development and the IT infrastructure.
7. As the enterprise was sinking under a lot of files and was manually driven it highly required the implementation of a new information system that would serve the purposes of the enterprise and eventually help the organisation to facilitate the business processes within the system. With the introduction of the management information system many security and ethical issues that may arise (Raveendranath et al. 2014). For various stakeholders at SIA, including its customers and employees, some of the possible security and ethical issues that may arise with the introduction of their information system include the resistance to change, customer dissatisfaction, lack of skills and knowledge, leakage of crucial information, IT security issues such as vulnerability to hacking threats and malware attacks and other issues.
These security and ethical issues can be resolved by the engagement of a separate body of members whose objective would be keep a track on the emergence of these issues. Special care is required to inhibit the leakage of crucial information. The IT security issues can be resolved by renewing the licences of the secured socket layer and upgrading the firewalls (Alnatheer 2014). Customer satisfaction can gained with the help of launching new offers. Change management can be effectively applied with the help of prior notification.
References
Alnatheer, M.A., 2014. Secure Socket Layer (SSL) Impact on Web Server Performance. Journal of Advances in Computer Networks, 2(3), pp.211-217.
Bajdor, P. and Grabara, I., 2014. The Role of Information System Flows in Fulfilling Customers’ Individual Orders. Journal of Studies in Social Sciences, 7(2).
Eniola, A.A. and Entebang, H., 2015. SME firm performance-financial innovation and challenges. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 195, pp.334-342.
Gallagher, S. and Sixsmith, A., 2014. Engaging IT undergraduates in non-IT content: Adopting an eLearning information system in the classroom. Interactive Technology and Smart Education, 11(2), pp.99-111.
Hayes, J., 2018. The theory and practice of change management.
Kurbel, K.E., 2013. ERP System Implementation. In Enterprise Resource Planning and Supply Chain Management (pp. 159-188). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Miwa, M., Thomas, J., O’Mara-Eves, A. and Ananiadou, S., 2014. Reducing systematic review workload through certainty-based screening. Journal of biomedical informatics, 51, pp.242-253.
Raveendranath, R., Rajamani, V., Babu, A.J. and Datta, S.K., 2014, July. Android malware attacks and countermeasures: Current and future directions. In Control, Instrumentation, Communication and Computational Technologies (ICCICCT), 2014 International Conference on (pp. 137-143). IEEE.
Simmhan, Y., Aman, S., Kumbhare, A., Liu, R., Stevens, S., Zhou, Q. and Prasanna, V., 2013. Cloud-based software platform for big data analytics in smart grids. Computing in Science & Engineering, 15(4), pp.38-47.
Tredinnick, L., 2014. Why intranets fail (and how to fix them): a practical guide for information professionals. Elsevier.
Vaisman, A. and Zimányi, E., 2014. Data warehouse systems. Data-Centric Systems and Applications.
Wims, P., 2013. The potential of agribusiness extranets to improve communications with farmer clients: a case study from Ireland. International Journal of Electronic Business, 11(1), pp.24-41.
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