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Details of the task
This will be a distinct piece of assessed work concerned with the
application of cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing.
Assessment details:
Charity
goes digital: A case of Cloud Computing adoption in ‘Action for Children’
Background
Action
for Children (AC) is one of the UK’s largest charities that respond to the
needs of over 250000 children, young people, their parents and carers through
600 projects across the UK.
Founded
in 1869, today the charity specializes in offering services including adoption
and fostering, family support, and specialist schools for children and young
people who are in care or disabled. To maximize their revenues to 198 million
pounds and increase their outreach, the company recruited 5000 employees and
2000 regular volunteers. An efficient collaboration among those individuals and
relevant stakeholders would not be feasible without adopting a multidimensional
information system. It was necessary to share information in a real-time base
and serve a bigger number of vulnerable children and their families.
During
the last 3 years, AC relied on an independent agency to develop a web-based IS
on a pay- as-you-go agreement. This reliance, however, created two problems for
the charity. First the charity was locked into an agency and a host service
with substantial cost and time to change.
“…Every
time you want to change , you have got to lift the website up and move it
somewhere else, it's become very time consuming and expensive” [AC’s business technology director].
Second,
demand spikes could easily overwhelm the servers and disable the charity’s
website, for instance due to social media events when news was released.
“…Stephen
fry’s tweet encouraged five million followers to visit our website and our
shared services infrastructure could not cope with that much pressure”
[AC’s Marketing Director]
This
prompted the charity to consider alternatives: either using a dedicated server
or adopting the cloud. Moving the website to a dedicated server could be very
costly and time consuming. Data scientist explains:
“…In addition the cost of having a website on
the dedicated server, we lost about four days of not being able to edit the
website because once it’s moved into that dedicated space nobody connected to
it. You have lost the whole organization if we cannot edit the website for four
days. In addition, analysing the charity’s data was another issue of concern”
Recent Events
AC decided to adopt
cloud computing regardless the ongoing resistance of government officials and
other partners in the charity business. They needed to organize the data of
multiple stakeholders, including customers, donators, fundraisers and potential
foster parents’ data collected from multiple sources. AC aimed to integrate all
unstructured data from social media such as Facebook and Twitter with other
structured data.
However, the charity
still investigates several major cloud providers and was subsequently convinced
that the open platform hybrid model is the best way forward for them. Hence,
the charity moved the website and some business applications into the open
platform cloud in order to manage web traffic spikes more effectively in terms
of costs and come up with a better stakeholder data analysis.
Your Task
You
are a member of the SBS Consultant Team employed by the AC charity.
Please
write a professional report that
explores the risks associated with adopting cloud computing in the charity
business and presents your analysis and recommendations for AC. Your discussion
should help AC to successfully adopt cloud computing and integrate their open
platform with the central UK charity on-line system with less resistance.
- Identify key business and technical challenges of AC transitioning to a cloud computing strategy.
- Creativity is Key
- Use theoretical models to define and solve the challenges mentioned above.
- Criticize the framework used with examples.
- Consider barriers to implementation and how these might be overcome.
- Build a persuasive argument that can be presented to the Executive Team.
- Identify and recommend technologies that might be useful to encourage communication across the staff (blogs, wikis) as the charity expands its international portfolio.
- Future recommendations for action for the AC team.
The word count is 2000
(NOT INCLUDING THE REFERENCES).
You must reference your
report with a range of recent practitioner and academic publications (Include
at least 10 references. References will not be included in the word count).
70+
grade: Submission reflects critical review
of the relevant theories and
up-to-date readings on the topic to explain the social and technical setting
that surrounds the cloud adoption in Action for Children’. A distinguished
piece of assignment conducts a stakeholder analysis and develops a template of
different challenges and benefits that face each stakeholder group while
adopting this new technology. It also offers future recommendations for Action
for children management team.
For References
You
must use the Harvard Referencing Style
for your work.
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