QUESTION
MSC 220 SMALL BUSINESS SYSTEMS REPORT 1
Assignment 1 – MSC 220 Small Business Systems 2012
Report on the information systems and information
management needs of a small business or organisation
In this assignment you will write a 2500-3000 word report on the information systems
and information management needs of a small business or organisation. In the
report, you will describe possible strategies, systems and technologies to help the
business manage those information needs. You are to take on the role of a consultant,
and will need to identify a small business or other organisation that could potentially
benefit from your advice.
Although there are a number of formats or outlines for reports, there is no one correct
report format. All reports will include the same basic components, but each report will be
tailored according to the size and scope of the business and its systems.
The report for this assignment will contain the following major sections:
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Title Page
Table of contents
An overview of the business
How information is managed in the business now.
Necessary changes in information management and information systems
How the changes can be implemented (IS and IT acquisition)
Recommendations
The textbook has useful information on business activities that you may find useful for
this report. Please see the textbook references for relevant topics in the study guide.
Below is the more detailed description of the assignment components and content.
Title Page
This should include:
• Title of the report
• Code and name of the unit
• Details of SME:
Business name, Business logo,
Business address, Business phone, facsimile and email addresses,
Names, titles, addresses and phone numbers of owners or corporate officers
• Month and year of issue of report
• Name of the preparer (you and your group members).
Table of contents
The table of contents should follow the title page.
MSC 220 SMALL BUSINESS SYSTEMS REPORT 2
Include all of the section headings (and maybe subheadings) used in your report, together
with the page numbers.
Main body of the report: Information systems and information
management needs of a small business or organisation.
There are five main sections to your report:
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An overview of the business
How information is managed in the business now.
Necessary changes in information management and information systems
How the changes can be implemented
Recommendations
These sections may be further broken down if necessary.
1. An overview of the business
This section should contain a description of the business including if relevant,
What do they produce?
What staff do they have?
Who runs the business?
What equipment do they use?
Where do they operate from?
Who are their customers?
Who are their competitors?
How are they going in the current financial climate?
The business
This should cover all the important details about your business such as its size, setup and
structure. The four main structures are: sole trader, partnership, private company and
trust.
What do they produce?
This section should be used to detail what kinds of products and/or services form the
basis of your business. What are you selling and what are the benefits? Describe each
type of product and/or service. For instance, if you have a computer repair shop you may
also sell business and entertainment software and also have a booth set up for the trial of
children’s games.
What staff do they have?
Outline the key people who make up the management and operational teams, even if it is
only one or two staff members.
What equipment do they use, and where do they operate from?
In this section, activities of the company are described in detail, and, if you are a service-
based industry, this includes how these activities are organised. Details of company
facilities should also be included and a description of where your business is located and
if this has any special application or impact on the type of company you have.
MSC 220 SMALL BUSINESS SYSTEMS REPORT 3
Who are their customers?
Detail who your target customers are: their spending habits (what they like spending on,
how much they spend), age, gender, where they live and what likely influences affect
their choices.
Who are their competitors?
If applicable to your business, you should note down the various business relationships
you have formed such as strategic alliances with other companies, suppliers and noncompeting
partners.
Business relationships
If applicable to your business, you should note down the various business relationships
you have formed such as strategic alliances with other companies, suppliers and noncompeting
partners.
How are they going in the current financial climate?
This section can be used to detail the company’s past and present performance.
2. How information is managed in the business now.
Identify the way the business handles information now and the gaps in the way they
do this. This section should be set out to answer the questions below.
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Do they have computers or do they use a paper based system,
What data do they collect,
What forms do they use
Who does this in the business,
What information gaps do they have,
What information do they want or need to know,
How would they be able to use new information?
How can information be better managed?
Do they have computers or do they use a paper based system?
Explain how the business carries out its work- what computer equipment and software do
they use, or what paper book keeping do they do? Do they outsource the accounting
work?
What data do they collect?
This is the data from their transaction processing system, information about suppliers and
customers, accounting information, creditors – so both tacit and explicit data and
information which they collect and keep to be useful in their operational and strategic
planning.
What forms do they use?
This means a list of the invoices, data entry sheets, and other paperwork needed to run
their business. It can include menus if they are a food business, catalogues etc. You may
include them in your hard copy assignment submission
Who does this in the business?
The people who actually do this work – are the managers, employees, family members
who don’t work in the business, or is the work outsourced?
What information gaps do they have?
This means, the information they are missing out on and that would be very useful or
even of critical importance to their business. Such as, do customers find that the business
website is very hard to follow? Or do their creditors hate that they pay after 30 days when
most of their competitors pay in 7 days?
What information do they want or need to know?
MSC 220 SMALL BUSINESS SYSTEMS REPORT 4
This is about the important information that they may already collect and keep, or the
important information that they don’t collect and may not know how to collect.
How would they be able to use new information?
This is for you to explain what business advantages they would achieve if they were able
to use the information from the information gaps you have discovered.
How can information be better managed?
This is where you highlight what business process or jobs need to be done better.
3. Necessary changes in information management and information
systems.
Identify the businesses needs for changes in information management and the
systems that they could use.
This section should detail the results of your investigation into the business carried out in
section 2 above.
Identify all the problems with the current system, even relatively minor ones.
Seek opinions from the users of the system.
What additional features would make them able to do their job more efficiently?
If the organisation uses the services of an external accountant or other business
professional, discuss what systems will best facilitate transfer of data to them.
If the organisation makes or receives electronic payments then this is the time to
discuss what systems will best facilitate transfer of data to and from the bank.
Consider what position the business is expected to be in, in two to five years
time. Will it outgrow the present system?
Examine direct competitors and their systems. Do they have a system that is
giving them a competitive advantage?
Before implementing any changes to the current system, it is important the business
adequately identifies the need for such a change. Small and medium businesses often
operate with relatively small budgets and tight margins, making any unnecessary or
mistaken expenditure an expensive liability.
Firstly, the business should identify all the problems with the current system, even
relatively minor ones. Inefficiencies can have a relatively significant effect on the
operation of a smaller business. Seek opinions from all users of the system. What
additional features would make them able to do their job more efficiently? If the
organisation uses the services of an external accountant or other business
professional, discuss what systems will best facilitate transfer of data to them.
Similarly, if the organisation makes or receives electronic payments then this is the
time to discuss what systems will best facilitate transfer of data to and from the bank.
Then, consider what position the business is expected to be in, in two to five years
time. It is pointless to buy a system adequate for now if the business will outgrow it
inside five years.
Finally, examine direct competitors and their systems. Do they have a system that is
giving them a competitive advantage?
It is important to document the requirements of the organisation. List the modules
required (for example, general ledger, sales order entry, customer database, online
catalogue, receivables, inventory), and for each module list the required features. It
may also be helpful to categorise them as (a) essential, (b) highly desirable or (c)
would be nice but could do without it.
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MSC 220 SMALL BUSINESS SYSTEMS REPORT 5
4. How the necessary changes can be implemented (IS and IT
acquisition).
In this section you should consider and explain the possible solutions including the
business needs they will meet; their costs and the implications of the business in putting
the system in place – include training, licences, new IT and IS costs, etc.
Make a shortlist of possible solutions including the business needs they will meet,
their cost and the implications of the business in putting the system in place – include
training, licences, new IT and IS costs, etc.
Survey the market – this will involve finding out what systems are available, what
systems their competitors or professional associations use and evaluating the
cost-effectiveness of these systems for the business.
Start with a list of every software product that may be a candidate. Sources of
such information may include personal knowledge from employees or
consultants, advertisements, reviews in computer publications or on the Internet,
and possibly other organisations in your industry.
For each product on the list, set up a spreadsheet to record the cost and identify
the features included. Consider issues such as vendor stability and support, the
software provider’s upgrade policy, and the availability of third-party assistance
for implementation, training and ongoing support. List the cost and benefits of
each of these issues for each package.
Evaluate each of the candidate products carefully and eliminate any that don’t
have all the essential features from step 3. Also eliminate any solutions where the
technology required is beyond the current resources of the organisation.
If there are still more than four or five candidates eliminate those that provide
fewest of features listed under (b) and (c) in step 3 or where there are any
reservations about support issues.
If the organisation is considering a mid-range accounting package, for example, then the
vendor will usually be happy to demonstrate the software and make a sales presentation.
At the demonstration, ensure that the vendor carefully considers the needs identified in
step 3 and how the proposed solution will meet them, rather than attempting to change the
way the business operates to fit the demands of the system. Prepare a list of questions for
the vendor and ask them for site references you can contact.
5. Recommendations.
Make a recommendation for the business in terms of changes to information
management needs and systems.
This section needs to make a good case for your recommendation. You should
outline the reasons for your recommendations, basing them on the previous 4
steps so that the business can clearly see why this is the “best” choice.
SOLUTION
An overview of the business
TheSportsCampus is a global sports media conglomerate with a staff size between 30-50 employees. It has a small corporate office based out of New Delhi, India while most of its journalists tend to work from the field covering sports events all over the globe. The organization is privately held and has opted not to share any financial information for the purpose of this report.
Products
TheSportsCampus is in the business of sports news production. It does so in two forms
a) Syndicated News
b) Exclusive Stories
Syndicated News is general sports news which the organization publishes on its own website – TheSportsCampus.com, sends out through news feeds to mobile operators all over the world, and syndicates to sports websites, blogs and media houses all over the world.
Exclusive Stories are specific sports stories which TheSportsCampus prepares exclusively for its clients to use. Such stories are not published through TheSportsCampus’ channel partners, but are instead developed for use only by its clients.
Syndicated News has a limited shelf life and is a highly competitive market place. TheSportsCampus deals predominantly with news related to Cricket, Tennis, Soccer, Golf and Motor Racing. It also reports on Basketball, Rugby and Boxing.
The organization’s staff is divided into
a) Business Operations – editors, reporters, photographers and photo editors
b) Corporate Functions – systems, marketing, human resources, finance & accounts, business development.
Being a Small Business, a number of people where multiple hats in the organization, often handling roles in both corporate functions and business operations.
Organizational History
The company was founded in 2008 by Mr. Arjun Wadhwa. Mr. Wadhwa is a management graduate by profession, and is a multi-sport national level amateur player. He excelled at tennis and chess, playing both sports at highly competitive levels before becoming a sports coach. In 2000 he decided to pursue a degree in business management, joining a top 5 business school in India. He is currently both the business and content head of the organization and wears the twin hats of CEO and Editor-in-chief.
The two keys teams within the organization are
a) Reporters – These are largely of two types – sports centric or city centric. Sports centric reporters cover a larger geographic area reporting on events within a geography, while city centric reporters cover a smaller geography but tend to cover a larger breadth of sports. For example the organization’s chief tennis correspondent is based in Europe and covers all tennis events which take place in that part of the world, while a Mumbai based journalist tends to cover multi-sport events in that particular territory.
b) Business Development – a significantly smaller team of individuals whose job is to find new clients for either the syndicated news business or for exclusive news.
Both teams report in to Mr. Wadhwa.
Customers
The organization has defined anyone and everyone who consumes sports news as its potential customer. That gives it a large mass market of about a couple of billion people to target. Since the organization does not predominantly focus on American sports (Baseball, American Football, Basketball, Ice Hockey, etc.), that reduces its ability to penetrate North American markets significantly.
A sport like soccer though has global appeal and opens up a large international market. At present though soccer is not covered in great depth by the organization and it focuses only on the two most popular annual events – the English Premier League and the UEFA Champions League. Additionally it also covers events like the FIFA World Cup, European Championships, Copa America, etc. However, it does not cover local football leagues across the rest of the world, limiting its market potential.
Tennis is one event that it covers holistically across the globe, and it does so similarly for cricket, which does not have as much international appeal, but has a tremendous fan following in the countries in which it is played.
Motorsports is also not covered in too much depth, with the organization focusing predominantly on the exceedingly popular Formula 1 championship, but currently ignoring events like Nascar, World Rally Championship, Moto GP, SuperBike racing, etc.
Like MotorSports, Golf also has sporadic coverage with the highly popular USPGA and European PGA Tours not covered in depth, but the Asian Tour and Women’s golf given huge weightage, in addition to the Major tournaments.
End-customers (consumers) who use the company’s own website and news-feeds for their news consumption are believed to be largely males between 14 and 36 years. Asia and Africa are the two largest markets that the organization caters to.
Syndicated and Exclusive story partners (called clients) generally tend to be sport specific and could be based anywhere in the world.
Competitors
The organization believes that its primary global competitor is ESPN, though it suffers a huge disadvantage in the sense that at present it has no video based content to genuinely compete with an organization the size of ESPN.
Other competitors include News Websites with a strong sports readership, but such competitors have the prospect of being future clients for its sports syndication business. The same holds true for sports specific websites like Goal.com (soccer), Cricinfo (now owned by ESPN), etc.
Business relationships
TheSportsCampus enters into strategic partnerships with mobile companies to have its content featured on their applications. Its first partner in the mobile space was the Israeli aggregator Snaptu, which was acquired by Facebook in 2010. Facebook has since shutdown the application choosing to use the team for internal product development.
TheSportsCampus’ new mobile partnerships are an American based product called Pulse and Australia’s biNu. The company sees the mobile space as a massive growth industry and has increased its focus in this space with some new hires with experience in this sector.
Economic Health
The organization is less than four years old and still very much in start-up mode. It has 0% debt financing and has turned an operating profit in every year of its existing. It has not been significantly affected by the prevailing economic climate, but due to it being privately held refused to disclose actual data about revenues and profitability.
How information is managed in the business now
The entire business is automated, and they use largely laptops – specifically netbooks – for reporting purposes from the field. Such computers are small and very light, have limited capabilities, but are perfect for providing a word processor and internet access. They are also significantly cost effective in comparison with other laptops. The netbooks are branded and Samsung is their product of choice due to its battery life of 8 hours which enables reporters to carry them into the field and around the media room without having to necessary plug in.
The corporate office is in New Delhi where largely desktops are used; these are largely unbranded and are made to order depending on the processing power needs of individuals. For example the photo editors need higher processing speed, while the Human Resource (HR) department does not.
The accounts department is completely outsourced as the organization felt that it is a non value adding function and didn’t want to add overheads. The HR department processes salaries and sends it out to the accounts team which handles all financial transactions. The travel billing system is automated and works in a way through which travelling reporters submit their bills online. Bills are approved by bosses, while are then cleared directly to the outsourced accounts department which processes travel bills once a month. All employees are required to submit their physical travel bills once a month before the date for final clearance. All salaries are processed on the last working day of the month to ensure that employees receive their paychecks on the 1st of every new month.
A legal team is also crucial because of the number of contracts that the organization needs to sign. Legal is once again outsourced and hired on a consultancy basis.
Photographers are predominantly not on the company’s payrolls and the organization uses largely freelancers on an assignment basis. They have taken this decision because the latest digital camera equipment is very expensive and the costs of sending the organization’s own photographers to cover an event from which at best 2-3 photographs a day will be used was deemed too costly.
The HR department handles all hiring. All CVs are received in electronic form and in an attempt to maintain a paperless office, they are not printed. Since a large number of the staff are located outside the corporate office, most interviews conducted are not in person. The company follows a process of a telephonic interview followed by a Skype interview. An e-version of the contract is that mailed to successful candidates, who sign, scan and email the same back to HR to commence work. They are also required to post a physical copy – which often takes anywhere between a few days to a week to reach the corporate office.
The sports news content generation is the biggest business function and works in a quasi-virtual space. Depending on the skill level of the reporters, they are either given direct access to the company’s content management system (CMS) or are asked to send in their stories by email to their respective editors. The editors are given a maximum of 5 minutes of turnaround time to review stories and post them to the CMS.
A photo editor meanwhile receives a collection of photographs from the onsite photo journalist. He shortlists 2-3, resizes them and uploads them to the company’s server (based in the US). The sports specific editor chooses the photo (s) he deems most appropriate and adds them to the story while publishing it. An automated system updates the story on the website’s twitter and Facebook pages, and also updates the news-feed. The news-feed goes out to the syndicated news partners, who have their own auto-refresh settings, varying from every 5 minutes to 15 minutes.
Due to the speed at which stories need to be reviewed and published, the organization’s staff has been provided with USB internet sticks which allow them to connect to the World Wide Web on the go. This also means that the organization doesn’t really require ‘office-space’ for its distributed journalist network, with a large number of the reporters based outside the home base of the company.
The automated activities have been coded into the system at the time of software development, but these often require upgrades. The organization uses largely freeware software for its work. Cloud computing is popular with Google Documents used to share news stories between reporters and publishers, while Joomla is the CMS of choice. Photo editing happens using freeware software called GIMP. By using open source freeware software, the company has reduced cost of operations significantly.
Necessary changes in information management and information systems
The head of Information Technology shared that the biggest change that the company needs to make is to speed up their website. This is because search engines now use website speed as a crucial parameter in their website rankings, and a faster site will enable the organization to garner more traffic. Additionally, customers interviewed also felt that the speed of the site was not to their liking, and hoped that the organization would take the necessary steps to make the site quicker.
Editors interviewed said they wanted an automated alert system to be sent to them from the CMS when their junior team members submitted stories to enable them to accelerate their approval process. Writers in turn were largely unhappy with the quantum of edits their bosses made, and would like a review system to be put in place where editors would consult them before editing their work.
The support function teams largely had no new requirements, with the exception of the business development team who would ideally like a global database of potential clients to be constructed. They also wanted a system to record competitor intelligence to be put in place.
How the changes can be implemented
There are multiple ways in which the speed of the website can be accelerated. Some of these will cause significant differences, while others will have a smaller impact. The options that we present are:
1. Switch to a dedicated server – 4GH plans are available for as low as $4.24 / month if booked for a 3 year window.
2. Switch from Joomla to a faster CMS as Joomla is known to eat up a lot of site bandwidth. Will require extensive research and costs will depend on whether a unique system is developed exclusively for the site or whether an off the shelf product is purchased.
3. Hire a SEO / SEM Joomla specialist to tweak the website. Costs would vary between $100 – $500.
4. Buy own dedicated server and locate it in country which gets the most traffic.
The editor alert and writer discussion forum would require a change of CMS too, and is probably best applied when a custom made CMS is developed for the organization.
A database of potential clients has the following needs
a) Database design – this can be put together by any technology programmer after understanding the system requirements from the user. It is a project that might take 3-4 weeks after including time for testing.
b) Data gathering – an intern can be hired to gather this information. This exercise is estimated to take 1-2 months because of the plethora of websites that exist, and the absence of owner / editor information displayed on most websites.
Finally, gathering competitive intelligence is an ongoing exercise, and it is best done if the project is assigned to someone within the organization. A simple format can be put together in conjunction with the Business Development team. Perhaps what is most crucial is that it becomes a systemic exercise and is not individual driven.
Recommendations
1. Switch to a dedicated server – Godaddy.com, the world’s most popular hosting provider, is currently offering extremely competitive rates for Indian firms after its launch in the country. A dedicated server which is hosted externally is a cheaper option in the short term because the organization will not need to hire a server manager to locally look after the server, and will also not incur additional costs of a server room which will need to be air-conditioned 24*7.
2. A custom CMS option will need some exploring, and this could be a 6-8 month project. Finding the right designer and developing the relevant components could take time, and might cost the organization in excess of $10,000. It is probably best if this is evaluated after getting early quotations and determined if it is something which needs to be addressed immediately, or could be handled later.
3. A potential client database is an activity which should definitely be undertaken, and there is no simpler approach than the one shared in the section above.
4. Gathering competitor intelligence always makes sense, but at this point of time, the organization doesn’t necessarily have very well defined competition. It is too small to feature on the map for an ESPN, and at the same time it is no point for it to compete with other firms of the same size, as they are unlikely to be as professionally run. It is recommended that this project too be put on hold till the organization grows to a relevant size and has clarity about what information it really needs.
References
Wadhwa, A. Interviewed by: Student Surname, Student Initial. (19th April 2012)
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