Assignment

Submit an Action Plan Report that builds upon your presentation. The report should include more detailed steps and narrative as to what specifically should be done to address the various performance and latency issues experienced by the County of Everstone.

Overview: The second portion of the final project will assume that you successfully presented to the board of directors, convincing them to move forward with your project to improve the functionality of the database. As such, you are asked to develop an action plan that builds upon your presentation and provides more detailed steps and narrative as to what specifically should be done to address the various performance and latency issues experienced by the County of Everstone.

Prompt: The County of Everstone is a large county in a densely populated state in the United States. This county has a total of 34 incorporated cities within its boundaries. Overall, the county has a population exceeding 4 million residents. The county employs a proprietary database management system that is responsible for the county's property tax assessment, parcel, and payment information. In a recent initiative, the county has been highly promoting the use of its online property tax payment and lookup information to reduce mailed payments and in-office visits. The marketing campaign for online property tax payments and information lookup has been highly successful. However, the county's database systems have not sufficiently handled the increased traffic. As such, the web application available to residents often experiences high amounts of latency, frequently locks up, or in many instances is unavailable.

The board of directors has asked executive IT management to look into the issue and provide a prompt resolution to the matter. A review of the hardware and software systems that the database management systems employ reveals that these systems "should" be able to take the capacity and load. Therefore, the IT management has ruled out hardware systems as being the issue. Upon further investigation, a lead database systems administrator preliminarily reports that the issue appears to stem not from the hardware, but rather from a need to provide performance tuning on the database. The database design seems to be the culprit, since this database systems administrator noted large quantities of duplicated data, poorly written database queries, and triggers.

Furthermore, the chief information officer (CIO) has also directed the web programmers and web developers to look at the web application for potential issues. The web development team has reported that while no design or programming issues were found with the web application, the stored procedures (queries) that it runs from the database server take long periods of time to run and frequently lock up the web servers. They suspect the queries were not designed for efficiency, since they were created before more individuals started using the online property tax payment system.

Your action plan will be in the form of an APA report, as is professionally acceptable.

Your action plan report should address the following critical elements:

I. Executive Overview: Provide a general, high-level overview outlining the key issues, high-level recommendations, and important considerations to remediate performance and latency concerns. II. Performance Tuning.