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CS782 Assignment No. 5 ~ Expanding into New Markets

Introduction

The purpose of this assignment is to have you think through various topics in this week’s material in light of real-world examples. We will focus on four topics from this week's material, one of which is outsourcing.  In considering outsourcing, for example, think through its impact on relationships, as well as different aspects of the business that you can outsource.  For this assignment, you would consider the impact of outsourcing on trust and relationship building.

The Organization

The EducateUS Corporation delivers software (educational platforms), which allow an institution to be able to deliver educational content to their students.  

Customers of EducateUS are corporations, institutions, community colleges and universities. 

Due to a huge shift in education, it has become imperative for EducateUS to provide an off-premise educational platform (running in the “cloud”). 

Today, the organization provides an on-premise solution for their customers, where the customer hosts the software themselves, within their own data center.

The manufacturing costs by producing and shipping software are high in this model as well as the deployment and support costs.  

Customers can download the software and install it on-prem (locally).

A typical cost heavy situation that the EducateUS faces is as follows:

A customer calls about a software problem that is on-premise.  In this situation, EducateUS often needs to send out an expert to fix the problem, which is typically due to misconfiguration or a software incompatibility.  This is very costly for the EducateUS organization.    

The EducateUS Corporation recognizes it needs to reduce their costs and at the same time globalize and increase margins for creating their software platform.  

Today, all employees of the EducateUS  organization are in the United States.  

You are the CIO for EducateUS and have been working with executive management on a new strategic direction for the organization.  

Strategically, the executive team has determined to move the delivery educational software platforms to Software as a Service model and the company to a SaaS competitive strategic model (see Module 1).   You are participating in business decisions at the highest levels of the company.

You have been asked to move the EducateUS software development platform to an off-premise Software as a Service model.  You need or provide a roll out and transition plan, balance and globalize their organization to accommodate this new SaaS model and produce a plan around contingency and disaster recovery.   

Remember, outline what business strategies are driving your change!  Start there!   

Deliverables

For each of the following topics below, in your own words, create a strategy describing the organizations plans around:

· System roll out and transition

o Think about the different aspects of planning.  Remember, how do you go about creating a plan?  Use the stages of planning, initial, system and implementation planning.

o How would you plan for this roll out?  What would this roll out look like?  How would it impact the management, culture and other operational aspects of the organization?  What about the existing product you have in place?  What would you do with those people and that product?  Think about and create a POWS analysis and the different aspects of planning.  How does this play into your system roll out?

· Globalization and resource balance

o How does globalization and resource balancing align with your plan above?

o Specifically describe where you would globalize.  Would you have this new SaaS project be a totally separate organization?  What aspects would you globalize?  Would you outsource, offshore or both?   If you would offshore or outsource, where would you outsource or offshore to and why?

o Remember, you do not need to outsource or offshore just people, you can also apply this to equipment and infrastructure!

· Disaster recovery

o Describe a disaster recovery plan specifically for the organization; Describe the investment the organization would make in disaster recovery.  Outline the risks to the business, weight them, prioritize them, provide likelihood of them, impact and then outline which ones would you address and how you would address them.

· Business continuity

o Describe a business continuity plan specifically for the organization.  Describe the investment the organization would make in business continuity.  How is your business continuity deployment different than your plans for disaster recovery?  How would your business continuity plan intersect with any possible outsourcing plan you’ve created?

o Think about secondary sites and the best ways to facilitate those sites.

For each section provide information which would describe a strategic plan and direction for the organization.  Each section does not need to include a fully tactical outline, however, being descriptive as part of the strategy is a good idea.  

Remember, to do research on how other organizations might have planned around the topics above and make sure to leverage the lecture notes and readings!

If you wish, you may add assumptions concerning the company, please make them clear in the beginning of the paper.

The content page limit on this assignment should a maximum of 10 pages, single or 1.5 spaced of 12-point font.  This does not include supplemental materials such as references, introductions, etc.  Appendices with the usual conditions are permitted.  

The average core content for this assignment is roughly 6-8 pages. However, we are far more concerned with the quality of your paper than the exact page length.  Please refer to Module 0 for formatting and on how to write an executive level paper.

End with a list of references following the standard reference format, as described in References and Citations document.
Use the Ask Your Facilitator Discussion Board if you have any questions regarding the objectives of the assignment or how to approach the assignment. 
Save your assignment as LastnameFirstname_assign5.doc and submit it in the Assignments section of the course.