SSL is a 30 year old security services provider from the UK which is headquartered in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire and had £98.4 million of turnover in 1997 and profitability growth of 9.2% The company provides a range of service that include armoured transport, business security, and domestic security. The company has four major divisions that include Private Transport Division (PTD), Business Security Division (BSD), Domestic Security Division (DSD), and Home Office Services Division (HOSD). This report goes deep into studying the operations of the company to understand the IS strategy of the company and explores its potential for future growth by selection of appropriate strategies.
The company provides some key security services that include armoured transport, business security, and domestic security. Armoured transport takes care of transfer of cash, cheques and high value items between banks and businesses. In business security services, the company provided guards to companies, analyses their security system and provides security devices. Domestic security services includes domestic security analysis and security devices provision. Within this service, the company has also started helping courts and police authorities with transfer of prisoners on contract basis.
The company has expanded itself over the years through acquisitions and has shaped itself into an entity with four major divisions including Private Transport Division (PTD) in Bedford, Business Security Division (BSD) in Liecester, Domestic Security Division (DSD) in Newscastle, and Home Office Services Division (HOSD) in Central London providing services all over England and Wales. Each division is autonomous and carries out its operations exclusively.
The company has four major divisions each operating autonomously and have their own systems in place. These include:
PTD: This division of the company has four key sections operating and these include –
BSD: BSD targets hi-tech marketplaces and helps companies facing computer theft in managing their physical security. This division of the company has three key sections operating and these include –
DSD: It is the most recent division of SSL that has domestic security specialist working for them through an acquired organization. The division has a sound infrastructure, reasonable customer base, and has been focused on financial growth through business expansion. The strategies that division would be adopting for this include increasing customer base, launching new services such as audits, and providing maintenance to existing systems. The division has offices at area levels with each locally managing sales, procurement, and installation of security equipment’s. Cost and revenues are also managed locally with little intervention from the division head office which only collects financial data from different offices and passes the same to the headquarter of SSL on paper. This division has no IS section or staff working for it (Toma, et al., 2012).
HOSD: This division was set 3 years back with an order received for prisoner transfers between court and police cells. The division office is in Central London which is supported by 6 other offices at regional level located in regions of England and Wales. These offices carry out transportation of prisoners and coordinates staff for transportation and police station services. The primary responsibilities of the headquarter are coordinating with regional offices, ensuring contractual arrangements are legally followed, managing costing of services, and processing accounts. The division has an IBM AS/400 minicomputer used for financial ledgers, budgeting and costing purchased from KCB Ltd in the headquarter and each regional office has a routing and rostering software running on regional AS/400 PC. Divisional head office also has a few PCs running spreadsheets and other business management packages. A hybrid manager with both IT and financial skills manages the computing at head office and is helped by one analyst and one operator (Karim, 2011).
IS at head office only consists of the manual reports that are received from divisions that are keyed manually in mainframe systems for financial management. The IT systems are outdated and mostly manual. The headquarter has a DP manager and six data entry clerks, three programmers, a systems analyst and two computer operators.
The company has a very limited uses of IS systems with a few computers as running separate software such that the reports coming out from them are manually sent to the headquarters where they are collated. The company does not have any IS strategy currently and it needs to be formulated.
An information system strategy describes how hardware, software, networking and data systems would be managed including what to be done, who would be made responsible and where would be the storage facility (Kornkaew, 2012).
In order to use the IS strategy and put the systems in place, the company would need to establish IT systems. As the current system is mostly manual, the company would need a reengineering to be able to do that. The IS strategy can be defined for the company as follows:
Hardware: The company can upgrade the existing computers to latest configuration so that higher data requirements and advanced management applications can be run on them. In each department, a PC may be provided to every employee working in the organization. The hardware would also include servers for application and database. Each of the office would need a personal computer with each divisional office needing an additional application server and the headquarter needing a database server with application servers to manage centralized data systems (Alshubaily & Altameem, 2017).
Software: Instead of running multiple legacy software in multiple divisions, the company can deploy one single MIS solution that would be able to handle operations across the organization and can be accessed through multiple user provisions in each regional office and divisional offices. This would require a complete reengineering of operations and the staff would be required to be trained on using systems instead of manual processes for managing data (Pearlson & Saunders, 2006).
Networking: Latest networking equipment’s like routers and cables can be deployed based on the new infrastructure that would need a real time integration between different systems deployed in different offices of the company. Communication facilities scan be used for bringing coordination between different teams working across the organisation. For appropriate communication facilities, appropriate communication components would have to be installed at the health quarter as well as individual offices allowing internet connectivity for building coordination between different teams (Chen & Teubner, 2010).
Data: The data generated from each divisional and regional office can be directly entered into a centralized system that stores all the data in the centralized database that is accessible to all office personnel with rights given for access based on their division and work responsibilities. Instead of manual reporting, the centralized database would allow managers to cull out reports themselves based on what and when they would need. Reporting templates can be set in the systems for data reporting such that reporting also becomes automatic and needs least intervention from the people (Merali, et al., 2012).
A number of strategic benefits can be achieved with the deployment of this strategy for managing information systems in the company such as:
SSL has divisional offices that have their exclusive IS infrastructure and sub-offices with their own systems including computers with applications and those taking manual data entries. The reporting of data is done manually through papers that are printed in individual offices and then sent to the head office where the data is keyed to a central information system. The company wide information system can thus be said to be location only in the headquarter while other offices only support with information manually. The company has options to locate there IS in divisional offices as well as the head office or continue expanding from the head office upgrade. Installation of IS systems in individual divisional offices can provided out to be costly and thus, it is recommended that all the IS systems including database server and application server are located in the headquarter while other offices are provided with software modules in their personal computers to take care of end point data collection allowing them to store the data directly into the server located at the headquarter (Kaplan & Norton, 2005).
Conclusions
This report explored the case of a 30 year old security organization that provided armoured transport, business security, and domestic security to companies and people in England and Wales. It was found that the company did not have any organized IS system and all its divisions operated individually taking care of various operations individually. A need was realized to create a centralized IS infrastructure at the head office and install MIS system modules in each offices of the company to manage data entry and make the data available in the real time across the organization. This would a variety of benefits to the company such as reduction in administrative costs, improvement in productivity, enhanced customer service, and real time visibility of the system.
References
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