Chapter 7
IT Infrastructures
Business-Driven Technology
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Presentation Overview
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Organizational Goals and Strategies
Increase Employee Productivity
Enhance Decision Making
Improve Team Collaboration
Create Business Partnerships and Alliances
Enable Global Reach
Facilitate Organizational Transformation
IT Infrastructures and The Real World
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Opening Case Study
What’s The Difference Between
Napster and Gnutella?
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Napster and Gnutella have similar products
that use different IT infrastructures.
Why is it important that a company build a
solid IT infrastructure?
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Introduction
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IT infrastructure -
includes the hardware,
software, and
telecommunications
equipment that, when
combined, provide the
underlying foundation
to support the
organization’s goals.
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Major infrastructure elements and tools of esupply chains are:
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Extranets
Intranets
Corporate portals
Workflow systems and tools
Groupware and other collaborative tools
EDI and EDI/Internet
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Organizational Goals and
Strategies
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Increase employee productivity
Enhance decision making
Improve team collaboration
Create business partnerships and
alliances
Enable global reach
Facilitate organizational transformation
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Increase Employee Productivity
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Client/server network - a network in which
one or more computers are servers and provide
services to the other computers which are called
clients.
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Thin client - a workstation with a small amount of
processing power.
Global reach - the ability to extend a
company’s reach to customers anywhere there is
an Internet connection, and at a much lower
cost.
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Increase Employee Productivity
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Intranet - an internal organizational Internet
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Extranet – is an Intranet that is restricted to an
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Backup and recovery
that is guarded against outside access by a
special security feature called a firewall.
organization and certain outsiders, such as
customers and suppliers.
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Increase Employee Productivity
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Disaster recovery plan - a detailed process for
recovering information or an IT system in the event
of a catastrophic disaster.
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Hot site
Cold site
Disaster recovery cost curve – charts
1.
2.
The cost to your organization of the unavailability of
information and technology.
The cost to your organization of recovering from a
disaster over time.
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Increase Employee Productivity
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Availability
Accessibility
Reliability
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Data cleansing - the process of ensuring
that all information is accurate.
Scalability – how well your system can
adapt to increased demands
Flexibility
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Increase Employee Productivity
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Performance - measures how quickly an
IT system performs a certain process.
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Benchmark - a set of conditions used to
measure how well a product or system
functions.
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Capacity planning - determines the
future IT infrastructure requirements for
new equipment and additional network
capacity.
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Enhance Decision Making
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Integration - allows
separate systems to
communicate directly
with each other by
automatically
exporting data files
from one system and
importing them into
another.
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Enhance Decision Making
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Enterprise application integration (EAI) the process of developing an IT infrastructure
that enables employees to quickly implement
new or changing business processes.
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Enterprise application integration
middleware (EAI Middleware) - supports
different levels of integration from the
information level to the business process level.
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Improve Team Collaboration
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Document management system - manages a
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Enterprise information portals (EIPs) - allow
document through its life cycle.
knowledge workers to access company information
via a Web interface.
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Collaborative processing enterprise information
portal - access to workgroup information such as emails, reports, meeting minutes, and memos.
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Decision processing enterprise information portal
- corporate information for making key business
decisions.
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Improve Team Collaboration
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Workflow - defines all of the steps or business
rules required for a process to run correctly.
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Workflow systems - automate processes.
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Messaging-based workflow systems - send work
assignments through an e-mail system.
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Database-based workflow systems - store the
document in a central location and automatically asks
the knowledge workers to access the document.
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Create Business Partnerships
and Alliances
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Customer relationship management (CRM)
systems - use information about customers to
gain insights into their needs, wants, and
behaviors in order to serve them better.
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Front office systems - the primary interface to
customers and sales channels.
Back office systems - used to fulfill and support
customer orders.
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Create Business
Partnerships and Alliances
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A sample CRM infrastructure
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Create Business
Partnerships and Alliances
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Sales force automation (SFA)
systems - automatically track all of the
steps in the sales process.
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Electronic catalog - designed to present
products to customers or partners all over
the world via the Web.
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Create Business Partnerships
and Alliances
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Supply Chain
Management
(SCM) Systems -
track inventory and
information among
business processes
and across
companies.
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Enable Global Reach
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Internet service provider (ISP) - a company
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Application service provider (ASP) - a
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Service Level Agreements (SLAs) - define
that provides access to the Internet.
company that provides an outsourcing service
for businesses software applications.
the specific responsibilities of the service
provider and set the customer expectations.
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Enable Global Reach
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A sample ASP infrastructure
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Enable Global Reach
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Collocation - a company rents space and
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Server farm - the name of a location that
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Web farm – is either a Web site that has
telecommunications equipment from another
company, or a collocation vendor.
stores a group of servers in a single place.
multiple servers, or an ISP that provides Web
site outsourcing services using multiple servers.
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Facilitate Organizational
Transformation
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Enterprise resource planning (ERP) - the
method of getting and keeping an overview of
every part of the business (a bird’s eye view, so
to speak), so that production, development,
selling, and servicing of goods and services will
all be coordinated to contribute to the company’s
goals and objectives.
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Facilitate Organizational
Transformation
Enterprise software - a suite of software
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that includes:
1.
2.
3.
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A set of common business applications.
Tools for modeling how the entire organization
works.
Development tools for building applications unique
to your organization.
Computer-aided software engineering
(CASE) tools - software suites that automate
systems development.
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Facilitate Organizational
Transformation
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A sample enterprise software infrastructure
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Facilitate Organizational
Transformation
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Legacy systems - are IT systems
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Business process reengineering (BPR)
previously built using older technologies
such as mainframe computers and
programming languages such as COBOL.
- the reinventing of processes within a
business.
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IT Infrastructures and the Real
World
Remember to ask yourself the following
questions before approving the IT
infrastructure design:
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How big is your department going to grow?
Will the system be able to handle additional users?
How are your customers going to grow?
How much additional information do you expect to
store each year?
How long will you maintain information in the
systems?
How much history do you want to keep on each
customer?
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