The CEO’s Challenge Asaignment

Use the Week 3 Assignment Template to complete this assignment.

Choose a company to base this paper on. You may use a current or former employer, but do not disclose anything confidential. Or, you can pick another organization if you are familiar with their internal (not customer-facing) information systems. You can disguise the organization and populate it with famous names. Made-up companies are problematic because of the amount of detail and realism they require.

You’ve just left an all-hands meeting at this company. The CEO was very upset at the rise of shadow IT projects, a major indicator that the company’s internal information system has failed to meet its needs. Because the current information system is inadequate, inefficient, and outdated, the CEO is inviting everyone in the organization to propose a new operational, decision support, or enterprise information system to replace it. The executives have allocated $5 million to fund the most promising idea.

This is your chance to make a difference in the company (not to mention your own career). Write your proposal as a memo that the entire C-suite will review. Include at least these points, in your own words, to be persuasive:

Identify the main functions of your proposed information system and why they are important to the business.

Describe what types of data your information system will hold and how data quality will be ensured.

Explain how the old information system handles the functions you mentioned, the problems that occur, and why your information system will handle things better.

Offer evidence of feasibility: Show that similar information systems have been built successfully and that they save more money than they cost.

The executives are busy, so keep your memo to 1–4 pages and avoid any extraneous content.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.