INFORMATION SYSTEMS

Aim of the assignment

The aim of this assignment is to assess the information management challenges that face business and the role that information technologies and systems may have in addressing these challenges.
Learning outcomes

After completing this assignment you will have gained experience of:

• The issues raised in the exploitation and management of information technologies and systems

• Current technological opportunities and solutions for meeting business needs Brief

Choose one of the two topics below and prepare an academic report answering the problem posed by your chosen topic. You are required to analyse the business and information management issues posed by the topic and to provide a credible argument for addressing the issues. You should illustrate your discussion with exs taken from an operational context.

Topic

You have been appointed as part of a consultancy team that has been commissioned to assess the management issues concerned with the delivery of an online system for the submission of personal tax returns for a large European country. The expectation is that this system will collect and process returns for 50% of the population within the first three years of operation and that this will represent taxes worth ~€93bn (£65bn, $132bn).

The system will be built and maintained by a private sector company with established expertise in the running of large-scale systems and the management of data centres. The credit rating of the company is AA.

The users of the system will be Government employees (who will have access to all data relevant to their job) and citizens (who will only have access to their personal data) using passwords generated by the Government but modifiable by the citizen.

The operational system will be run from a primary data centre located in a suburb on the outskirts of the capital city. A secondary back-up data centre is located in a nearby town approximately 25km from the capital.

Access to the system will be via a secure Government network (for Government employees) and via the Internet (for citizens). Citizens can download tax return software from the Government’s web-site to complete their returns off-line.

Your client wishes you to assess the business continuity and security issues that will need to be addressed by the supplier of the system in order to assess independently the supplier’s level of preparedness. Your specific role is to identify the ten key risks to which the system will be exposed and to suggest the best technological or procedural solution for mitigating each risk. You should also provide a justification for prioritising the individual risks.

Format

The assignment is individual-based and should be between 3,000 and 4000 words (excluding title page, To C and references). Any wordage in excess of 4000 will be ignored for marking purposes. A statement of the word count must be placed immediately following the main text.
The aim is to set assignments that allow you to demonstrate your understanding of the topics covered in the course and we want you to have the best opportunity to record results which truly reflect your capabilities. However, you will not get credit for material which is not related to the topic so ensure that your assignment is focused on what has been requested.

Structuring your assignment

It is always a good idea to work out a structure for your assignment in advance, and to decide what parts of your explanations and arguments are going into each section, before filling in the detail. It is helpful both to you and to the reader for longer assignments if you provide headings for each of the main sections.