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CASE SUDY: SMITH & SONS ATTORNEYS

All the questions are based on this case study.

Smith & Sons attorneys is a Law firm based in Durban. It has 200 employees and has the following departments: Human Resources, Finance and Operations departments, and a small ICT department with a staff complement of 30 employees. Smith & Sons run the following systems: PeopleSoft for Human Resource (Off-the-shelf package, which runs on SQL database), Oracle (Finance applications, which runs on Oracle database), and Operations Management (In-house developed, uses SQL databases), Documents and Records Management System (in-house developed) and MS Word, PowerPoint and Excel for end-user computing. The IT infrastructure is managed in-house/on premise, except for the electronic messaging service where employees have been using personal emails for work purposes. In terms of backup of corporate data, it is done on an ad-hoc basis using local servers. Some employees have backed up their work information on the cloud using their privately owned cloud storage services, i.e., Dropbox/Google drive. The firm has not made investments over the years to ensure that backup and restore services are managed regularly. It is a more significant challenge when employees resign or retire as some information leaves with them.

There is also a static company website that is outdated and is due for a refresh. There have been talks about upgrading the existing website into an e-commerce platform, allowing for the online purchasing of standard contractual agreements, but this has not taken off.

Due to high staff turnover within the ICT department, Smith & Sons attorneys are considering the digital transformation of their ICT Department. As an information and knowledge management specialist, you have been consulted to advise the Chief Information Officer of S&S Attorneys on how they can digitally transform their ICT Department and offer stable, efficient, resilient state of the art technology for the firm.

Question 1 [35 marks]

As part of your recommendations, you need to give guidance on whether, from an application system perspective, they should maintain the status quo of having a mixture of in-house and off-the-shelf systems or they should consider other alternatives. Your recommendations must consider the type of application systems and infrastructural requirements and their functions, financial implications, proposed enterprise architecture changes (if any), change management, best conversion plans and resources considerations