SBM4101 FOUNDATIONS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS Assignment 1 Weight: 15 Marks + 5 Marks on presentation Due Date: Week 6 - (15/04/16) Description You are required to deliver a business report that focuses on the use of information systems within a company of your choice. The company you should pick has to have a strong profile of employing Information Systems to support the business strategy. Information Systems used in this company, should have made it succeed and gain more competitive advantages. Your report should focus on how information systems contributed to the success of the company. The report should answer the following areas: 1. Industry and company profile – (2 marks) Provide a thorough description of your company that includes: a) Background and history, products or services it is offering b) What is the overall organization business strategy 2. Information Technology – (13 marks) a. Explain the IT strategy and how it served to achieve the organization business strategy. (2 marks) b. Explain in depth how does the company use Information systems to support or enable its operations, business processes and competitive strategies? (3 marks) c. What information systems and technologies does your company use in each of its departments? (3 marks) d. Does the company build its own information systems or does it outsource them? (1 mark) e. How much of the company's success do you attribute to its use of information systems? (2 marks) f. What is the role of the CIO in your company? What decisions does s/he make and what is his/her span of authority? How does he set his/her department strategies? (2 marks) 3. Extra Credit Question (3 marks) Suppose your selected company wants to increase revenues from its existing customers. How can data mining be used to accomplish this objective? Specifications of the Report  Length: 2,500-3,000 words, not including title page, abstract, notes, and references.  Use of scholarly sources: You will need to relate to the design of several corporate portals from the contributions of at least eight (8) scholarly books/articles/reports, in addition to any materials that have already been assigned for the course. These scholarly sources should specify the issues involved with the design of corporate portals.  You should apply the findings of the scholarship you have consulted/referred for developing a comprehensive framework for the content-incentive-usability aspect of the proposed corporate knowledge Web portal design.  Format and layout: Typewritten using a 12-point Times New Roman font and 1" margins throughout. Reports should include a cover sheet giving the title of the paper, the author, the name of the course, and the date submitted, as well as a 150-word abstract summarizing the contents of the report. All pages except the cover page should be numbered consecutively with numbers appearing at the bottom of each page.  Citations and references: All sources should be cited parenthetically in the text and included in a reference list at the end of the paper according to American Sociological Association style guidelines provided by the instructor. In APA citation style, all sources cited parenthetically in the text must appear in the reference list and all sources appearing in the reference list must be cited parenthetically at least once in the text. Guidelines for using APA citation style are posted to the "assignments" page of the OLS.  SUBMITTING THE COMPLETED REPORT  Your completed report must be submitted to the instructor no later than 9:00 A.M on Friday, 15th of April 2016. Post your report to OLS as an MS-Word file titled: YOURLASTNAME_Assignment1.doc A NOTE ON SCHOLARLY SOURCES  Appropriate research/theory sources for this assignment include: o Scholarly books written by Information Systems Professionals or other researchers employing approaches consistent with those used by IS/IT practitioners that design corporate portals; o Scholarly articles on designing corporate portals published by Researchers/ IS/IT practitioners in scholarly journals (i.e., journals aimed at an academic audience, not a general readership and o Published research reports written to foundation funding sources or for government agencies (e.g., the U.S. Department of Justice, the Government Accountability Office, or the U.S. Bureau of the Census).  You can locate appropriate sources by using on-line databases available to you.  You are welcome--indeed encouraged--to include company product reports, brochures and articles on your bibliography, but these citations do not count towards the minimum number of scholarly citations.