What is Supplementary Assessment?

Supplementary assessment is awarded if students fail the course but score 45% or more (subject to other conditions). This supplementary assessment replaces assessment item 2 for the purposes of calculating your final course mark. Your mark in the supplementary assessment will be added to the original marks achieved in their other assessments in order to calculate this. As such, this assessment is weighted at 45%. You must still achieve 50% in the course overall to pass (combined marks of assessment items 1, 3 and 4 plus the mark from the supplementary assessment). This means you may need to score more than 22.5/45 from the supplementary assessment in order to pass overall.

Students who are awarded a Supplementary Assessment are unable to defer their assessment any further except in extenuating circumstances. Extensions are not possible.

The only passing grade available to a student who achieves more that 50% in the course on completion of the supplementary assessment is Pass (P).

What do I have to do?

This assessment item requires you to submit a response based on the scenario outlined below. If you wish to seek clarification on any aspect of the assignment, please contact the coordinatorimmediately.

Be aware that ALL assignments will be subject to plagiarism checking via Turnitin.

Scenario

You are a junior member if the IT section of a not-for-profit health and aged care organisation. The organisation has around five-hundred (500) employees and multiple hospital, aged care and catering facilities spread over three regional centres in Queensland. There are less than five (5) IT staff members to support a number of loosely integrated legacy systems. These include Finance, HR, Payroll and a specialised Patient Management System that handles admissions and patient medical records. Interestingly, IT largely relies on expert users in functional areas to provide support to users, with only infrastructure and software upgrade tasks falling to the IT staff.

Decisions relating to major IT projects are made by a form of IT governance committee. Membership consists of the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), who acts as the Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the small IT team, representatives from the operational (health and aged care) and support (finance & HR) areas and selected members of the organisation's governing board (who are mainly members of the community). None of the committee have any experience in selecting or implementing ICT although most have basic IT literacy (i.e. they can use a computer to browse the web and read email).
The organisation is highly conservative and would be categorised as change resistant. However, technology implementations have typically benefited the organisation greatly, although technology, especially information systems, are regarded as subordinate and non-critical to the organisation's functions and processes.

A recent committee meeting discussed the possibility of implementing an ERP. The issue was raised by the CFO, who had read a lot about SAP in a magazine while flying to a conference. Unfortunately, the CFO was not knowledgeable enough to answer all the committee's questions. Given you studied ERPs in University, the CFO has passed on the questions to you:
Task

Your task is to answer the committee's questions:

What exactly is an ERP and why would an organisation like ours want one?

What costs are involved with implementing an ERP? [Describe the items that will cost money - not the actual dollar estimates].

What are the risks associated with adopting and implementing an ERP?

Once we have implemented an ERP, what are the implications for staff and ongoing costs to the organisation?
Importantly, you need to use simple, non-technical language (but not slang). Think of trying to explain these issues to your parents or grandparents. Your language needs to be business/organisationally focused, but avoid jargon and overly technical terminology. Where necessary, explain terminology as part of your answers. You are also required to compile a list of five (5) online resources that would be helpful to the committee members to read to help improve their knowledge about ERPs. For each resource, you should explain how it would help a committee member - i.e. what concepts or details it expands on. The selection of these resources (these can be web pages or links to other online resources such as papers or trade articles) needs to correlate with the low level of technical understanding of the committee members - i.e. the resources should be simple to understand but informative. Note you only need to include the Title and the URL; you do not need to reference these in Harvard format.

There is no minimum or maximum word count for this assessment, however it is suggested you keep your question responses to less than 500 words each. The short explanations that accompany the resource links should be less than 100 words each. The aim of this assessment is to demonstrate that you can clearly explain, in simple terms, some of the key concepts associated with ERPs: this is not a function of response length. In other words, longer responses are not necessarily better. Note that apart from the web resources, there should not be any need to use other external references - these responses should be your own words based on the knowledge you have gained from this course. This does not mean you can copy or paraphrase from other resources without citing them - i.e. normal referencing rules apply.