COIT20274: Information Systems for Business Professionals - Case Study

Internal Code: MAS4098 Business Case Study Case Study: Cougar Couriers Cougar Couriers is a local delivery company that relies on cyclists to deliver cross-town parcels. The business’ staff includes: - Anjal, part owner, CFO, who has an Bachelor of Accounting, - Asmita, part owner, Anjal’s wife, CEO, who dispatches cyclists, - Bridget, Anjal’s cousin, CIO. Customers make delivery requests by phone or using a form on the website. The details of the delivery requests are entered, either automatically, or by Asmita, into a Quickbooks-like application, to invoice the customer. Asmita then chooses a cyclist based on their last known location. Asmita then offers the delivery to a cyclist by texting their mobile phone. Jenny is one of the cyclists. If Jenny accepts the delivery, she rides to the pickup location. At the pickup location, she fills in and signs a pickup acknowledgment form to give to the customer. While riding to the delivery location, Jenny will often pass other Cougar Courier cyclists, riding in the opposite direction. Anjal would like to improve the efficiency of cyclists by having them carry up to five packages at a time. For delivery distances under five kilometres, Cougar Couriers is the fastest and second cheapest delivery company in town. For deliveries over five kilometres, Cougar Couriers is slow relative to the van-based delivery companies. Anjal also wants to improve the speed of deliveries over five kilometres using motorbikes and vans. At the delivery location, Jenny fills in a delivery acknowledgement form for the customer to sign. Occasionally, Jenny will make it back to the Cougar Courier office for lunch. She hands over her delivery forms to Asmita. While Asmita enters the details into the Quickbooks-like application, Jenny puts her feet up and shares stories about her trips with the other cyclists and they share tips, e.g., which streets to avoid. About once a month, Asmita needs to work overtime as she goes to OfficeWorks to pick up additionally stationary. This really annoys her as she needs to pay for after school care. Anjal’s friend recently suffered a ransomware attack. Anjal has spent a long time building trust with his regular customers. He thinks this trust is vital to his business. He thinks that even one day of downtime would destroy this trust and consequently his business. He wants you to recommend what he should do to prevent and deal with a ransomware attack. The following is Anjal’s current backup and security plan. - The main server has an external hard drive attached to it. Each day, a backup service performs an incremental backup of files, copying those that have changed since the day before across to the external hard drive. - He rotates the external backup hard drives roughly once a month. He has three hard drives and keeps the two that not in use at his home. - The office PCs run Windows 10 and they automatically update both the operating system, and all applications such as web browsers. The PCs have an antivirus, firewall, and malware detection software installed. - Most of the office devices are connected by wire to an Ethernet switch. However, there is a new printer, used to print marketing materials, that is connected by WiFi. This new, upgraded printer is too big to place in the location of the old printer. - The router has the WiFi SSID turned off and WiFi encryption (WPA) turned on. The router also has an NBN modem. In most years, a new competing delivery company will start. Anjal finds they will often undercut his prices for several months. The new companies do not last long though. Two years ago, Bradley, one of Anjal’s best cyclists left Cougar Couriers and started his own delivery business. Bradley took customer details with him. Anjal lost quite a few valuable customers to Bradley. Anjal wants to put in place some procedures to stop this happening again. Due to tax reasons, Anjal is willing to spend up to $2,000,000 to bring his IT infrastructure and policies up to date. Case Study Questions 1. Identify the components of information systems components that are currently used by the organization and how the components fit into the current value chain. 2. Summarise the competitive forces that the organisation is experiencing. Choose one or two competitive strategies that the organisation should follow. 3. Identify at least three new Information Systems that the organisation could implement: a. At least one Information System that supports the competitive strategy you identified earlier, b. At least one that incorporates decision support. Identify the decisions that need to be made, the information requirements of those decisions, including the decision structure and information characteristics and attributes. c. At least one that uses Internet of Things, virtualisation, cloud, data mining, mesh, virtual private networking, or microservices technologies. Determine the business benefit that each of the information systems would provide to the organisation. Narrow your options down to one new Information System which you recommend should be implemented. 4. Discuss the feasibility of implementing your new Information System. Identify the Information Systems components that will be needed to implement the new, priority Information System that you chose in the previous question. Give recommendations for new staff, hardware, applications, services and policies. 5. What are some of the possible security and ethical harms and risks that might arise with the introduction of the information system? What could be done to resolve such issues? 6. Create a draft COBIT IT governance plan by addressing at least four codes from Figure 14.10 of the textbook, e.g., DS7 educate and train users.