Case Study
Cozant is a local financial services firm that faced critical problems delivering
services demanded by their customers. Their primary customers are small
banks and credit card companies. They have run the same servers for over
five years with limited operational problems, and the current infrastructure
was not designed to manage the workload. It evolved as the business grew
and servers and tools were added, so many generations of hardware and
software were based on different technologies. The datacenter supports
about 50% of their storage needs, 40% of critical data backups, database
servers, Exchange servers for email, file servers, and servers supporting
security and network software. The end users have productivity software of
various types and versions; there is no standardization.
Cozant has aging, legacy technology that no longer manages their clients’
data’s growth and complexity. Across the enterprise, staff complain that the
system infrastructure processes are manual and need human intervention to
discover and alert about problems. Clients are asking for the ability to run
their customizable reports. For example, they realized their database
management system could be improved to provide better security and
reliability for the data they received. Data analysts often complain their
models and algorithms used to analyze the data took a long time to run,
sometimes as much as two hours per report.
Cozant acknowledges changes need to be made to support their customers
and staff better. Management has allocated money in the budget for an
integrated solution to address pain points. Key customer improvements
could include enterprise resource planning (ERP), data warehousing,
inventory system, server consolidation and management, and others.
Pick any area you would like to make improvements. Then create an
integration plan for your recommended solution. Note any assumptions you
make in developing your integration plan.
1. Create an integrated solution plan to address the scenario given. At a
minimum, include the following:
a. Business drivers, stakeholders, and requirements
b. Assessment of the current state of the environment
c. Integration strategies considered, assumptions used, and your
recommendation
d. Security considerations and scope of implementation in your
approach
2.
3.
4.
.
e. Technical integration architecture—enterprise-wide or limited
f. Service integration architecture—define the application or system
architecture.
g. If using an information approach—define the business
information need and systems involved.
h. If using a process integration approach—define the end-to-end
business process.
i. If using a composite application approach—define the specific
technical problem, and explain the specific implementation.
Present the steps to the solution's delivery, what information you
gathered, what assumptions you made, and why. How did you include
the stakeholder, if required?
Provide an overview of the company and the computing environment;
current state, then future state.
Use the following headings to organize the information. You may have
more than one slide to communicate the information based on the
headings.
Introduction
a. Scope
b. Key Participants (Stakeholders)
c. Recommended Solution
i. Architecture
ii. Integration
d. Conclusion
. Key benefits
e. Speak clearly and use effective presentation methods to
deliver the information.