GCQ is a professional services firm who charges by the hour for design and consulting work in the ENR space. In the past 10 years GCQ has grown rapidly by expanding their existing business lines primarily through multiple acquisitions. They are now a company with 10,000 employees, gross annual revenues of $2 billion, offices in several countries and customers in multiple industries spanning both the public and private sectors. In the next 10 years they hope to continue growing revenue at a 15% annual rate by reinvesting free cash flow in additional acquisitions.
Their information systems are a conglomeration of multiple purchased and in-house developed applications that have outlived their useful lives. The board of directors has ordered your group to recommend a new suite of information systems to replace GCQ's existing systems. The board has made it clear that they don't wish to develop any new software in-house and instead prefer to purchase applications from well established software vendors and implement them using well established consultancies.
Current problems that need to be addressed by the new systems include:
? A lack of standardized project management practices that give upper management a view of current and future workforce needs.
? How much work needs to be done when?
? What resources will be available to do the work?
? Difficulty locating expertise within the organization when bidding and performing work.
? Which employees have experience with particular types of work and when they will be available?
? Lack of consistent view of customers across the enterprise
? Multiple offices do business with the same customers without awareness of the relationships that other offices have with the customer.
? The same customers are identified by different names in multiple systems.
? Highly customized purchased applications
? Making upgrading extremely expensive and difficult.
? Multiple reporting platforms and technology
? Multiple data-marts and data stores across the organization.
? Reports that give different answers to the same questions.
? Extremely difficult time restating history and modifying reports when reorganizing the company.
? Trouble closing the accounting books in a consistent and quick manner.
? A geographically distributed, aging, highly specialized knowledge worker employee population with no formal knowledge management methodology.
? Existing information systems will require nearly linear staff growth to support business growth. Your group's job is to:
? Determine what information systems the organization needs.
? Research possible options for replacement systems and make a recommendation for each system.
? Estimate the cost of software licensing, maintenance and implementation.