Information Systems homework help. Project and Change Management
Write an analysis of the attached business problem following the framework of the Ten Steps Method. For each one of the Ten Steps, describe in detail how you would apply the step to this problem. Justify your answers based on statements given in the business problem.
Step 1: Define Business Need and Approach
Step 2: Analyze Information Environment
Step 3: Assess Data Quality
Step 4: Assess Business Impact
Step 5: Identify Root Causes
Step 6: Development Improvement Plans
Step 7: Prevent Future Data Errors
Step 8: Correct Current Data Errors
Step 9: Implement Controls
Step 10: Communicate Actions and Results
Business Problem
The ABC Company buys a certain type of financial information from a large number of companies. ABC compiles the information into research reports and other products and services which it sells to business customers. The data Compilation Department manages the processing and building of the products and maintains an up-to-date master list of data providers each with a unique master identifier. A different department, the Sales Department, markets and delivers to the clients who buy ABC products and services. The Sales Department maintains its own customer master system giving each customer a unique identifier.
A data quality assessment has shown that about 60% of the companies providing data are also customers buying ABC products and services. The analysis was difficult to conduct because the Sales Department has its own customer master management system that is independent from the one used by the Compilation Department. The data provider master data management system was internally built several year ago. The customer master data management system was recently purchase from a commercial vendor. These systems assign different identifiers. So even if the same company is both a data provider and a customer, it is assigned different master identifiers in the two systems.
The CMO does not know, but would like to know, which data providers are customers and which are not customers. The CMO believes there could be many lost sales opportunities in converting data providers into customers, especially by offering pricing incentives to providers. The CDO also believes the products and services from the compiled data could be significantly enhanced if more of the customers could be converted to data providers as well. The CDO would like to know which customers are not data providers and see if they could be incentivized to contribute data.
The IT department has provided estimates for the two solutions. One is to keep both of the current MDM systems, but internally develop a bridging system to maintain a “cross-walk” between the identifiers in the two systems. They estimate the bridging system would cost about $750,000 and 8 months to build, and would have about $400,000/year of additional ongoing operational cost to keep current. The second solution offered by IT is to migrate the information from the custom-built, legacy data provider master into the commercial customer master. The vendor for customer master has given a bid of $2,300,000 one-time charge and 3 months to make the changes needed for its system to service both the data provision and sales operations. For this solution, there is essentially no differential in the ongoing operational cost to maintain, because the additional maintenance cost for the consolidated master system is offset by retiring the legacy data provider master system.
