Protecting organizational assets and information within the company has become a top priority for many organizational leaders. 

Review the article titled “Missed Alarms and 40 Million Stolen Credit Card Numbers: How Target Blew It”, located here.  

Write a four to six (4-6) page paper in which you:

1. Determine the fundamental challenges that organizations face in general in regard to protecting organizational assets and information. 
2. Specify the red flag(s) that Target overlooked or ignored before the retail attack and give your opinion as to why Target overlooked or ignored the red flag(s).
3. Determine the main actions that Target took after the breach occurred and evaluate the efficiency of such actions. 
4. Conclude the main reasons why the attack on Target occurred. Give your opinion as to whether or not the attack was mainly due to the poor infrastructure or the inability of management to act accordingly. Justify your response.
5. Use at least three (3) quality references. Note: Wikipedia and other Websites do not qualify as academic resources. 

Your assignment must follow these formatting requirements:

• Be typed, double spaced, using Times New Roman font (size 12), with one-inch margins on all sides; citations and references must follow APA or school-specific format. Check with your professor for any additional instructions.
• Include a cover page containing the title of the assignment, the student’s name, the professor’s name, the course title, and the date. The cover page and the reference page are not included in the required assignment page length.

The specific course learning outcomes associated with this assignment are:

• Outline the strategic implications of information assurance and security in an information technology environment.
• Explain how information technology systems influence organizational strategies.
• Outline the challenges and strategies of e-Business and e-Commerce technology.
• Evaluate the ethical concerns that information technologies raise in a global context.
• Use technology and information resources to research issues in information systems and technology. 
• Write clearly and concisely about topics related to information systems for decision making using proper writing mechanics and technical style conventions.

Grading for this assignment will be based on answer quality, logic / organization of the paper, and language and writing skills. Click here to access the rubric for this assignment.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-13/target-missed-alarms-in-epic-hack-of-credit-card-data#p1

 

Read and answer the question below.

In early 2006, San-Antonio, Texas-based CPS Energy, the nation’s largest municipally owned energy provider, was by all accounts riding the road to riches. The company had the highest bond ratings of any such utility provider. Its workforce and customer base in general expressed satisfaction. And most importantly, it was profitable. In other words, there were no external signs that the company was about to launch a technology program that would redefine the way it did business and reshape its workforce of roughly 4,000.

 

There weren’t external signs, but for those in the know, including Christopher Barron, CPS Energy’s vice president and chief information officer, it couldn’t have been more clear that a change was imminent—and that the future of the company might depend on it. “We had a much larger workforce than a business our size maybe should have,” Barron says.

 

Barron looked at other companies with large mobile workforces like its own, companies like UPS and FedEx, and saw a huge disparity in the way his business was operating. For instance, specific CPS workers had little or no access to IT systems and resources while away from the office or warehouse. They were often required to visit work sites or customer locations to diagnose issues or suggest fixes before reporting back to the appropriate departments or parties, which would then initiate the next step of the resolution process. That could mean dispatching additional workers, and the whole ordeal could take days.

 

“If we kept with the amount of manual labor that it took for us to accomplish that work, we would not be in the position to be competitive in the future,” Barron syas. From this realization, the company’s Magellan Program was born.

 

Barron and his colleagues envisioned the Magellan Program as a way to better mobilize and connect its its traditionally siloed workforce to the people and systems the needed to do their jobs. The goals of the program Extend CPS’s networking infrastructure, build its own secure Wi-Fi networks in offices and warehouses, and deploy smartphones and custom mobile applications to all CPS staffers who didn’t currently have a laptop or other mobile device. For Barron, the first and most significant challenge in deploying smartphones to such a large user base was getting executive buy-in. “One of our biggest headaches has been, and continues to be, the perception that the technology and continues to be, the perception tht the technology brings little to the table other than e-mail, and it costs a lot,” Barron says.

 

“For a CIO to try to eliminate all the resistance from a senior executive might take forever,” Barron says. “So rather than try to get to the execs and mollify all their fears about cost, usage and safety, we’ve gone to specific groups, engineers, line workers, office workers, and because it’s so cheap we’ve been able to give the devices out on ‘experimental basis.’ There’s so much value in these handheld devices and two or three applications that they prove themselves,” he says. “You just have to get them into the hands of the people that actually need to use them in order to demonstrate that.”

 

Here innovative ways CPS staffers employ their smartphones are as digital cameras at work sites, as GPS tracking mechanisms, and as emergency notification receivers. In the past, CPS might have had to dispatch a small group of “generalist” workers to a service call to make sure the correct person was there. Today, a single worker can visit a site, take a photo of a damaged piece of equipment or infrastructure, and then send it back to headquarters or the office. Hen an expert diagnoses the issue and sends along instructions to fix the problem or dispatches the appropriate worker—who’s available immediately via voice, e-mail, and SMS test via smartphone.

 

“The Magellan Program, through the use of smartphones and other technology, has or will empower all employees, no matter what work they perform, to become part of the greater company’s ‘thought network’,” Barron says. “Each person is now like a node in or network.” The company is also seeing significant gains in supply chain efficiency related to Magellan and the smartphone deployment, he says. For instance, smartphones help speed up the purchase order process, because in the past a specific person or group of people needed to be onsite to approve orders. Now the approvers can be practically anywhere with cellular coverage. The company’s supply chain buyers an also visit warehouses to work with the people who actually order parts, leading to faster order times, and more proactive supply chain management and procurement deals decreased by more than 65 percent. Also, inventory levels were reduced by more than $8 million dollars since the Magellan Program began.

 

Additionally, both employee and customer satisfaction levels are up, Barron notes, due to the fact that staffers now have more access to corporate systems and information and feel closer to the business. Because CPS can now resolve more customer issues with fewer processes, they’ve reduced the time it takes to complete most service calls, leading to happier customers. In fact, the company received the highest score in J.D. Power and Associates 2007 Gas Utility Residential Customer Satisfaction Survey.

 

The technology, however, is no longer the exclusive purview of large companies with significant IT budgets, at least not anymore. Lloyd’s Construction in Eagan, Minnesota, might not seem as though it needs flashy phone software. The $9-million-a-year demolition and carting company has been run by the same family for the past 24 years. Lloyd’s takes down commercial and residential buildings, then hauls them away. What could be more simple? 

 

That is, if wrangling 100 employees, 30 trucks, and more than 400 dumpsters can be called simple. Coordinating those moving parts is crucial to growing the business—and to saving the sanity of Stephanie Lloyd, 41, who has run the company for the past four years. Until recently, Lloyd’s used a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, paper ledgers, and accounting software on company PCs to keep track of its workers and equipment. To make matters worse, the company used radios to coordinate with its workers on the job, and the more cell phone towers that came online in Minnesota, the worse Lloyd’s radio reception got. It was time, the Lloyds decided, to drag their company into the 21^st-century world of smartphones.

 

Lloyd’s considered a half-dozen mobile-productivity software suites before settling on e Trace, which happened to come from a company called GearWorks based just across town. Not only was GearWorks local, but its software worked on Sprint Nextel’s i560 and i850 phones, which are aimed at the construction industry. Lloyd’s had already started buying these push-to-talk phones to wean workers from their dying radios. Immediately, there were troubles with technophobic staff. Employees had to be guided u a steep learning curve in order to master even basic features on their new phones. For 18 months the two systems ran side by side: e Trace as it was phased in, and the old paper-and-pencil system as it was phased out. Accounting inconsistencies quickly crept in.

 

And e Trace gave rise to a delicate labor problem. The software featured integrated mapping and travel data that showed the rea-time locations of all company assets. To their chagrin, the Lloyds discovered that those assets were spending too much time parked outside the same lunch spots—ones that were not on prescribed routes. Lloyd was sympathetic to workers’ needs for breaks- “we’ve all worked demolition here,” she says—but quickly clamped down on unauthorized ones.

 

GearWorks’ CEO says the challenges Lloyd’s faced are to be expected. “All these products operate under the ominous pendulum of challenge and opportunity,” says Todd Krautkremer, 47. “But our software does a good job of letting the customer control that rate of change in the business.”

 

Once the deployment dust had settled, the savings became clear. The company employs 12 drivers, 22 foremen, and seven office workers who use 41 phones running e Trace. The company buys an unlimited data package for each phone, which totals about $4,000 a month. Add other networking charges, and Lloyds spends about $50,000 a year for a complete business, accounting, and communications solution. Before e Trace, eh company paid an accountant 40 hours a week to do the books. Now that person comes in one day a week for six hours, saving roughly $1,000 per week.

 

Data entry and job logging by the dispatcher and foremen, Lloyd says, is roughly 1 ½ times faster than paper and radio. More efficient routing has cut fuel costs by about 30 percent. And employees have stopped making unauthorized stops. Lloyd estimates a net improvement in performance of 10 percent to 12 percent, or roughly $1 million for 2007—not a bad return on $50,000.

 

 

 

1. In which ways do smartphones help these companies to be more profitable? To what extent are improvements in performance coming from revenue increase or cost reductions? Provide several examples from the case.

2. The companies described in the case encountered a fair amount of resistance from employees when introducing smartphone technologies. Why do you think this happened? What could companies do to improve the reception of these initiatives? Develop two alternative propositions.

3. CPS Energy and Lloyd’s Construction used smartphones to make existing processes more efficient. How could they have used the technology to create new products and services for their customers? Include at least on recommendation for each organization.

 

Drawing from your own experience, select a process (a set of specified steps to accomplish a task) used at your place of work or in your interaction with a health care organization that you would like to see improved.  Explain why you picked that process.  Explain how you would go about improving it.  Who should be involved with you?  What are some of the questions you should ask about the current process?  How will you know if the process was actually improved?

 

First, we need to be sure you can identify a process; many students have difficulty with that, so refer to your textbook and other readings.  I am also interested in the method to be used to improve the process, not a solution.  (For example, I am not looking for something like:  “The clinic where I work is new and has few patients so far. We should use social media to advertise more.”  The discussion here is about identifying a process and how the clinic would go about deciding how to improve that process, who should be involved, what should be considered, and what steps should be taken.)  You should employ the techniques discussed in class or those that you find in your research.  Keep in mind that outside resources strengthen your responses.

 

Remember, members of Group B should create a posting in response to the questions above by midnight Thursday. These postings need to thoroughly respond to the questions.  Then members of Groups A, C and D will respond to at least two students’ postings with comments, questions and further discussion.  (Remember “more than 2” substantive postings are required for an “A.”)  If questions are posed, they should be responded to by the original poster.  Let’s have a great discussion and some interesting examples to take a look at for improving processes! 

 

Your first assignment, Stage 1, requires you to analyze a process and suggest ways it can be improved. This discussion is to help prepare you to successfully complete that assignment.

 

Note: Substantive comments should be included in your thoughts and responses for all class participation.

Attitudes and Perceptions

It is important to be aware of others’ perceptions in an organization. Sometimes a manager’s attitude can affect an entire department and its functions. Have you ever had to work for a person, such as a teacher, an instructor, a coach, or a supervisor, whose attitude caused everyone to be miserable? If no, you can choose a leader with whom you did not work directly but witnessed taking such an attitude with another subordinate. If you have never experienced this type of person, you may think of a television or a film character.

Answer the following questions based on your understanding of different perceptions and obstacles at a workplace:

• What, according to you, did that person do to create negative situations? Was the individual bossy, rude, or interfering, or did the person make disparaging remarks or speak negatively about the people who were not present?
• What was your or the subordinate’s attitude toward the person in that particular situation and in general?
• Based on your observations of that person, as you reflect on the work situation, was your or the subordinate’s attitude the right one? Why or why not? Would you show a different attitude given a second chance or if you were in the same situation? Why?
• How does a negative management attitude affect trust among the employees? When a manager is not trustworthy, does this information spread to other departments, who may also form a negative opinion of the manager?
• Suggest at least two ways you would solve the problems if you were the manager. Why would you adopt such measures?

Now, reflect on a situation where you experienced a positive leader who valued the team, shared his or her visions, and encouraged the team to develop and answer the following questions on the basis of your understanding:

• How do you describe your feelings and attitude when working for a leader who is positive and supportive versus a negative manager? How does a positive supportive leader affect trust among team members?
• How influential are perceptions of certain employees either in your team or in other departments? Does your perception of a manager or a team member carry weight, even though there may not be a personal encounter with the person and the perception is based on someone else’s comments?

PLEASE:  Zero Plagiarism and Cited all references in text