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During Modules 5 and 6, you’ll perform several tasks, all involved with learning about opportunities and challenges that Vology and its customers might face as they plan for some of these revolutionary migrations. In Module 5, we focus on discovering their key objectives and goals, with an eye towards identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) for such migrations; these KPIs become part of their overall performance measurement and management process. Module 6 will build on this as you develop an information management, including mobile device management (MDM) techniques, that can also address their Information Security (Infosec) and Information Assurance (IA) needs.

It helps if you put yourself mentally into the scenario. What do key people at Vology, or its customers and potential customers, want to achieve? How should their business objectives and goals help them prioritize their efforts?

This takes a fair bit of imagination. Play with this. Start to imagine what could go right, successfully, and also what could go wrong. Hypothesize about new capabilities, new ways of thinking outside the box of 20th Century MIS concepts. This may also require you to do some independent inquiry, via the Internet or the library, to help you develop your thinking and your scenarios.

It is Strongly Suggested that you share, early and often, what you are thinking. Talk to your teammates. Ask questions, seek help. You’re building an individual product, but that certainly shouldn’t stand in the way of “picking each other’s brains…” Just don’t copy each other’s work!!

Remember, you are a TEAM, not a Group. Discuss together, as a team; help each other improve your individual work as you do this. That does not mean that you all turn in one identical answer – there are many possible right approaches to situations like this. But the logic, the rational for making decisions and recommendations, the knowledge that drives that logic… that ought to have strong points in common!

NOTE You may find Quick Start Guides 5 and 6 (in the BYOD textbook) useful in your deliberations this week.

Module 5 – Team Investigation Activity

1. Each team member should start by generating two lists of site survey items, ones that you would want to see, get “read-aheads” from Vology about, ask questions or otherwise investigate and understand, as if you were preparing to actually do site survey visit to Vology later this week:
A. Systems already in place, or with projects to implement them. We already know that Vology has some mobile app questions it is wrestling with, that pertain to a few of its business areas. It might be good to make a list – or a systems architecture diagram or map – that shows what you think they already have in place, and how they are changing it to revolutionize with the concepts we’re studying.
B. Business Process-Specific Opportunities and their potentials for information risks. Vology seems to have some core business processes that are unique to its business, which probably present both unique opportunities for even further migrations to BYOD, Cloud or Big Data implementations; these might also bring with them new forms of information risk. Focus your thoughts in this list on key gains for these key processes – and key risks related to them. Think about how these could be measured or assessed – can these gains or risks be expressed as key performance parameters?

2. PLAN AHEAD by building a Balanced Scorecard perspective. You know that both your CEO and the senior leadership at Vology are going to like to see things in top-down, easy-to-digest formats that support their drilling down for the details. Right now, Vology (believe it or not!) doesn’t use a Balanced Scorecard for this! So your answers to 1A and 1B ought to suggest some first-cut draft Balanced Scorecard views – for the company as a whole, and then a supporting one below that for the migrations you’re advising them about.

3. POST your individual DRAFT BALANCED SCORECARDS in your team’s Group Discussion area, no later than the fourth night of the Module week, so that other group members can review, comment and discuss. FORMAT for these: no specific format; you can use simple Outline-format lists in Word, or find and use some Balanced Scorecard templates on the Web if they help you think this through.

4. REVIEW AND COMMENT upon what your teammates have shared, and post your thoughts about their work.
Your review and comments should also address these questions:

A. What key performance indicators do you believe you ought to find in-place at Vology for their current systems?
B. What net effects on those KPIs should your migration proposals (to BYOD, etc.) have, if they are implemented successfully?
C. What kind of lower-level KPIs, specific to your migration proposals, would you suggest be used to assess whether those migrations are successful in their own right, or are in fact in need of intervention, correction, or substantial redirection?

This week, the Team Collaboration Rubric guides you in working together as a team, and helps your instructor evaluate that team interaction.