A case study of Ark Royal College information system
Ark Royal College is a tertiary education comprising of four campuses. The college was started in 1991 with an enrollment of 250 students and having expanded over with time is enrolling approximate 2,500 students. The mission of Ark Royal College is to offer quality and affordable education to the students within Solent while targeting to enrol international students. The ability of the college to monitor the student progress and take early actions to address the upcoming issues, the college has maintained high pass rates among its students, a phenomenon that has functioned as a competitive strategy in the college. However, the college faces difficulties and hardships due to lack of an effective information system. As such, the goal of this report is to identify and analyse the problems facing the existing information system and propose an effective solution to address these problems.
Current problem in Ark Royal College
Currently, Ark Royal College faces critical information system problems. The college does not have a website where people can learn more about them or else promote its operations. Instead, the college promotes itself using analogue and manual ways such as using local newspapers and word-of-mouth. Ark Royal College has a computer-based information system made up of a server located in Portsmouth campus connected to the users PCS using local area network (LAN). Besides, computers in Ark Royal College have a minimum of five years while using Microsoft Windows XP as their operating system. In addition, the communication between sites in the college communicates using a broadband link operating at a limited bandwidth of standard British Telecom (BT) phone lines. With such limitations and unreliable connection, it becomes hard to access the system. Conversely, there is limited technical support with only one technician responsible for all the sites, which translates that a system or more might be down while the technician is working on one campus.
Apart from these challenges, the college also faces challenges with its storage where the server executes on the “L-Drive”. Files in this drive are loosely filed, whereas it stores important documents such as collaborative projects, campus directives, and financial data. As a result, there is less collaboration and effective communication between the departments in the college as documents are not properly managed. Considering the increasing number of students and staff members, this is seen to be a huge future problem. The mismanagement of the files in the L-Drive has constituted to the poor management of resources (Kumar, Saini, & Malik, 2015). As a consequence, the college has witnessed instances where it has made duplicates in purchasing of equipment, loss of resources, and poor deployment of its personnel. Along the scarcity of information system tools, teachers rely on one secretary in each of the campuses, since they do not have PCs. Processed documents are manually stored and retrieved from the filling system. As such, it becomes clear of the hardships that both the staff, students, and new individuals to the college face in the attempt of fulfilling their desires due to lack of an effective information system. This, therefore, necessitates for a new or an improvement of the existing system to solve these problems and improve the performance of the college.
Proposed Solution and Implementation Plan
The foremost step to take in addressing the existing problems is to change the IT infrastructure in Ark Royal College. These changes should involve purchasing new IT infrastructures starting from the computer hardware to the networking ones. This part of the solution should address the problem associated with the use of old and outdated hardware, which are slow and unresponsive (Ward & Peppard, 2016). As revealed by the case study, one major challenge facing Ark Royal College is the use of computers, which are at least five years as well as one single L-Drive. As such, purchasing new IT infrastructure will solve the problem associated with the use of these items. Moreover, the college should increase the number of computers in each of its campuses. This will not only solve the problem associated with the problem of using old computers but also it will equip the organization with a sufficient number of computers to embrace the transition to the digital era. In this case, the problems that teachers face by relying on one secretary to print their documents will be solved. Along these changes, the organization should purchase new networking tools that will support the expansion of the networking capabilities of the organization’s network. Moreover, these changes should be made to support wide area network (WAN) as a way of supplying its network to its students and staff members across all the departments (Ward & Peppard, 2016). While making these changes, the new system should purchase drives with huge storage. This will assist in addressing the problem caused by lack of sufficient storage. Moreover, the college should get backup servers at each of the campuses to cater for any breakdown. Once the right tools have been purchased, the college will be assured of better improvement in its performance following the efficient machines and computers as well as the motivated staff and engaged students.
Once the right IT infrastructures have been purchased and implemented, it is important to identify the appropriate software to use in facilitating the implementation of the new system. Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is one of the effective software to use in solving all the associated software problems in the college. Tambovcevs and Tombovceva (2013) define ERP as a comprehensive multimodal software application that attempts to combine the processes of an organization while seeking to achieve growth and perfection of its processes. As a result, ERP facilitates the integration of the various departments and functions of the organization to ease in the processing of its functions. Using an ERP system will be an effective step for the college to solve all the problems associated with sharing of information around the campuses as this system will integrate the functions of each department into one system where one can access the organisational resources using the system. Following the increased number of PCs, as proposed earlier, teachers can share their work with various departments and avoid unnecessary movements.
The implementation of the ERP system will facilitate the communication between the campuses. The use of ERP is effective in facilitating communication and data transfer of information across the four campuses (Tambovcevs & Tombovceva, 2013). In this case, teachers and other staff members can access and share real-time data following the customization of each position due to their different functions. This will, in turn, save the transportation cost and time used to move information from one campus to the other. Furthermore, the implementation of the ERP system in Ark Royal College will facilitate the organizational functions and the management of the organization, which will increase the output of the college. First, the ERP will promote the finance departments of all the campuses. Using the ERP, it will be easy to record, consolidate, and track the operational information from a central point of the system (Tambovcevs & Tombovceva, 2013). Moreover, the system will promote the functions of the human resource in the college. This will be effective in managing the progress of its teachers and other staff members by tracking their performance and their working hours. Moreover, it will be easy to develop and manage talents from the employees; thus learning of new ways of motivating them for great output from them.
The use of ERP system will as well facilitate the operation of the college in establishing effective customer relationship management (CRM). This function by the system will solve the problems faced by the organization to promote its operation using non-effective media such as a newspaper. Using this functionality of the system, it will be easy for the existing and potential customers to learn more about Ark Royal College using this functionality. The CRM comprises of the company’s information in the way it interacts with clients, customers, partners, and prospects through its marketing force used to reach the new market (Lira, et al., 2012). Besides, this function will contain the support information that can be used to solve customer-related problems. Along with this functionality, the ERP system contains the purchasing, and procurement functionality used to streamline the procurement process (Lira, et al., 2012). This function will be important in solving the problem experienced in the college of double purchasing as it facilitates in making procurement decisions. This follows the ability of this component to automatically approve the purchased orders and make payments.
The ERP system will also help in addressing the problems experienced due to lack of an effective storage mechanism in the college. The ERP runs on a unique database with the goals of facilitating the sharing of information around the entire system. Having a central point of data storage will be key to improving the data management of the organization. Instead of relying on the manual data storage mechanisms, the organization will automate its data storage through the data management component of the system (Tambovcevs & Tombovceva, 2013). Through this component, it will be easier for the organization to store and retrieve the document or files. Moreover, this functions records all transactions that have been recorded and processed; thus easing the process of the data monitoring and reporting in the organization. As a result, it will be easy for the Ark Royal to reduce data entry and monitoring using the tacit knowledge of this component exhibited by the data management personnel (Tambovcevs & Tombovceva, 2013). This function will enhance the experience of the staff members who usually faced difficulties in storing and retrieving their files from the cabinet. Losing of personal data will also be hard once the system has utilized this component; thus saving the organization the cost of data loss or recovery.
The effectiveness of the proposed system relies on the expertise used to exploit the capabilities of the system. Therefore, this translates to the need for the human personnel with the expertise of using the ERP system and orient the staff members of the ways of using it. As such, there will be a demand for more technicians in each campus to support the functionality of the system. This necessitates the organization to recruit more technicians instead of relying on the current technician who moves around the four campuses (Borkovich, Breese-Vitelli, & Skovira, 2015). The increased number of the technicians will facilitate the operation of the system by guiding the staff members of ways of using the system and even solving technical problems that may emanate from the system. In addition, the college should consider improving the number of personnel experienced in maintaining and troubleshooting the hardware failure (Kumar, Saini, & Malik, 2015). These personnel will play a substantial role in countering the problems from the newly upgraded hardware component of the information system. Along with this change, the college should consider increasing the number of secretaries in each campus as a way of enhancing the word processing functions needed by the staff members. Increasing the number of employees will be the final stage of implementing the new system who will ensure that the management and the staff members will exploit the newly upgraded system.
Conclusion
In essence, identifying the loopholes in the existing information system is key to the identification of the room for improvement. As the report has shown, Ark Royal College faces huge problems in its current information system starting from its hardware to software component as well as the IT personnel. In response to these challenges, the report has emphasized on the replacement of the IT infrastructures as the initial step in improving its information system. The second step is to get an ERP system that will integrate the activities and functions of the organization; thus providing a software solution. The new hardware should be capable of supporting the new software. The implementation of this new software will be the solution to all the problems solved by the organization thus saving on cost and time of the staff members. Likewise, there is a need for the number of the IT personnel to troubleshoot problems emanating from the system use as well as guiding the management and staff members on effective ways of using the system.
References
Borkovich, D.J., Breese-Vitelli, & Skovira, R.J., (2015). New Technology Adoption: Embracing Cultural Influences. Issues in Information Systems, 16(3), 138-147.
Kumar, A., Saini, M. and Malik, S., (2015). Performance Analysis of a Computer System with Imperfect Fault Detection of Hardware. Procedia Computer Science, 45(1), 602-610.
Lira, A., Parisi, C., Peleias, I. & Peters, M., (2012). Uses of ERP systems and their influence on controllership functions in Brazilian companies. Journal of Information Systems and Technology Management, 9(2). 323-352. http://dx.doi.org/10.4301/S1807-17752012000200007
Noaman, A. & Ahmed, F., (2015). ERP Systems Functionalities in Higher Education. Procedia Computer Science, 65(1), 385-395.
Patterson, D.A. & Hennessy, J.L., (2013). Computer organization and design: the hardware/software interface. New York: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
Tambovcevs, A., & Tambovceva, T., (2013). ERP System Implementation: Benefits and Economic Effectiveness. Retrieved from http://www.europment.org/library/2013/rhodes/bypaper/SCSI/SCSI-32.pdf
Ward, J. & Peppard, J., (2016). The Strategic Management of Information Systems: Building a Digital Strategy. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
