Dear Board of Directors,

         Our past meeting with the IT consultants has been a pleasant enrichment experience; as our company looks forward to continue in growing and expanding our clientele.

         Unfortunately, I won’t be able to participate in our next meeting this coming Tuesday. As our company approaches one of our biggest challenges to retain our customer market share and continue expanding. For this reason, I am committed to contribute my personal view of our company and what I believe we should focus and learn from our IT consultants.

        Our IT consultants clearly understand our challenges and our advantages against our competitors. We have learned and disrupted our business model by using closed loop marketing. As we continue to grow we might face new challenges to retain our customers. New threats for competition may arise as businesses learn from our business model that infrastructure investments are not as profitable as closed loop marketing investments and IT software investments.

         Our IT consultants have recommended a suitable re-designed website that connects our card rewards programs to our customers. Here customers will be able to manage and choose their best deals as we continue to learn from them what they like to continue inducing them to play more with us. Our IT consultants clearly understand our objectives which are increasing revenues by giving customers more reasons to play at Harrah’s.

         In addition, the IT consultants have recommended us to opt for the Online Gambling industry. They have shown us that although online-gambling is not allowed in the U.S. it is one of the fastest and growing business in the world. As this approach is new to our company some questions have aroused from this recommendation. As Harrah’s wouldn’t be able to benefit our U.S. stockholder’s from online-gambling due to illegalness in the U.S., Will Harrah’s operate internationally under another entity? Questions of maintaining Harrah’s culture and reputation have also been brought up in our last meeting. Our separate entities will allow us to gain new international market and use projected profits for future infrastructure investments.

         In conclusion, although our competitors possess with larger amounts of capital investments. Harrah’s has a main competitive advantage among our major competitors; the advantage of experience on what customers like/prefer. This advantage will enable us to continue improving our home-base customer retention by enhancing our IT software with newer investments. While also continuing disrupting our business model internationally by looking new industries such as online-gambling.

Harrah's Reflection

Dear Board of Directors,

                Our past meeting with the IT consultants have been a pleasant enrichment experience; as our company looks forward to continue in growing and expanding our clientele.

                Unfortunately, I won’t be able to participate in our next meeting this coming Tuesday. As our company approaches one of our biggest challenges to retain our customer market share and continue expanding. For this reason, I am committed to contribute my personal view of our company and what I believe we should focus and learn from our IT consultants.

                Our IT consultants clearly understand our challenges and our advantages against our competitors. We have learned and disrupted our business model by using closed loop marketing. As we continue to grow we might face new challenges to retain our customers. New threats for competition may arise as businesses learn from our business model that infrastructure investments are not as profitable as closed loop marketing investments and IT software investments. 

Our IT consultants have recommended a suitable re-designed website that connects our card rewards programs to our customers. Here customers will be able to manage and choose their best deals as we continue to learn from them what they like to continue inducing them to play more with us. Our IT consultants clearly understand our objectives which are increasing revenues by giving customers more reasons to play at Harrah’s.

In addition, the IT consultants have recommended us to opt for the Online Gambling industry. They have shown us that although online-gambling is not allowed in the U.S. it is one of the fastest and growing business in the world. As this approach is new to our company some questions have aroused from this recommendation. As Harrah’s wouldn’t be able to benefit our U.S. stockholder’s from online-gambling due to illegalness in the U.S. Will Harrah’s operate internationally under another entity? Questions of maintaining Harrah’s culture and reputation have also been brought up in our last meeting. Our separate entities will allow us to gain new international market and use projected profits for future infrastructure investments.

In conclusion, although our competitors possess with larger amounts of capital investments.   Harrah’s has a main competitive advantage among our major competitors; the advantage of experience on what customers like/prefer. This advantage will enable us to continue improving our home-base customer retention by enhancing our IT software with newer investments. While also continuing disrupting our business model internationally by looking new industries such as online-gambling. 

Harrah's preparation case

Lessons learned:

In order to execute their business strategy Harrah’s needed to invest in Information Technology that was required to integrate data from a variety of sources

o   Patron database

o   Marketing workbench

· Harrah needed to understand critical concepts such as understanding and managing relationships with their customers

o   Where customer gambled

o   How often customer gambled

o   How much customers gambled

o   What games customers played

·         Understand other business strategies investments and costs experiences

o   Analyze Las Vegas hotels and casinos that invested a lot of money and resulted on great costs that cut their investments returns in half

o   Obtain a more cost-effective route to attract, maintain, and enhance customer relationships.

·         Building stronger customer experience by using marketing and business strategies

o   Loyalty cards or reward credits

§  Tracking of expenditure

§  Customer behavior and preference

o   Data warehouse

o   Closed loop marketing  

Actionable items in future project in reference to lessons learned

Executing learned business strategy to continue expanding.

Having learned customer’s behaviors and likes Harrah’s won’t need to spend much in investments in order to learn customer’s preferences. This will allow Harrah to focus on other types of investments such as enhancing software and technology infrastructure in their business. This action will allow them to focus much more on their retention level while achieving a strong growth expansion.

·         Harrah’s experience on rewards card should bring it to the next level and find out better ways to attract new customers in different areas to continue their expansion.

·         Harrah has gained a lot of experience from reducing costs and increasing profitability for the company. Harrah can use this knowledge to enhance their data warehouse and loop marketing strategy.

Recommendation

·         Harrah should invest more money on IT finding new ways of interacting with clients. Ex: implement mobile apps to see rewards points, redemption offers, or special targeted offers for those who can be high potential customer. Features in apps could include:

o   Variety of visual options for hotel rooms, shows or entertainment options for them

o   Could easily access through their app and hit accept offer

o   Develop new technology that links apps with games inside the casinos

§  Devices could easily scan the machines where they would play and avoid carrying cards

Harrah should maintain their competitive advantage on customer retention and fast expansion. They would be to accomplish this goal by investing in new ways to interact with customer and continue building stronger relationships. 

Bombardier Reflection

Dear Board of Directors,

With great honor I commend our fellow IT consultants for giving a great presentation on the result of the implementation of our ERP.  After having doubted the success of the implementation because of the failure we had concurred on the first attempt back in 2000 and our company severed a $130M loss.   

After reviewing my notes on the presentation, I felt confident to have a team that is driven and that is able to deliver such great data accuracy as they did with the Saint-Laurent Plant with a data accuracy of 97%. 

I truly believe that this success was driven to our company because more employees began taking ownership of their programs.  The implementation of the integrated system allows employees to interchange data from one plant to another and become more accurate when extracting data.  The system had been evolved by experts in their fields.

After many hours of dedication and team training that went in to developing the process we were able to implement a successful ERP.  The success for our company will continue to always grow because our employees take ownership of their work and have clearly defined roles.  I am confident that Bombardier will continue to be successful as long as they continue to have a strong relationship with their work.          

                The IT consultants shared with us their level of importance for their Saint Laurent Grading chart. I agree that “Maintain Right Governance Model” should be noted as 10 for level of importance. The IT consultants graded this with an 8.5 under the Saint Laurent implementation. Our company should focus in bringing this grading of an 8.5 to a 10. This qualification should be measured to ensure better project governance in terms of decision making, cooperation, transparency and communication between the project team and business side.  

The IT consultants graded the criterion of Ensuring Project team with Competence with an 8.5. It is very important that we know our team is capable of doing a task before it is given to them.  We must add more sophisticated training for our staff. This will create a competitive advantage in our company by adding more skilled workers and improving productivity. As a result, we will improve our grading to a 10. This action will influence our next Criterion of “Deliver post go-live support” to improve by creating a knowledgeable staff followed with proper and advanced training.  The establishment of employee functions is very important. Goals will never be met, if employees do not complete their tasks because they either neglect their task or are unsure that a task is supposed to be given to them. 

             In addition we will continue delivering Strong Executive Sponsorship. In the past, executive sponsorship was not always ensured.  Directors would lead to failure by example when they did not delegate the proper tasks.  Directors that were supposed to attend workshops would send managers in their place, in which then managers would send buyers to go in their place.  Therefore instead of having directors be experts in a certain field they relied too much on their employees to carry out the new processes. 

              In conclusion, I believe our grading chart shouldn’t include too many requirements. We should focus in those that were graded low in the Saint Laurent implementation and bring them to a grade of a 10 while continuing improving our other criterions. These actions will allow us to focus in avoiding possible further losses and learning from our mistakes as of those in year 2000.  

Sincerely, 

Ronald A Rojas

MS Project

Dear Mr. Garner,

         After our recent conversation of considering MS project for our current acquisition process, I have cautiously analyzed and researched it. 

       Our company is going through a major acquisition process by XYZ Bank. XYZ Bank Fund Services has acquired our hedge fund administration business. XYZ Bank now will benefit by expanding internationally at the London Headquarters and in the Cayman Islands.  This major acquisition from December last year has influenced major changes for our offices abroad and our local offices in New Jersey. XYZ Bank total investment in infrastructure and software development totals $15 million.  These major IT management infrastructure decisions and Project management decisions needs to be accompanied by a project management software that will add value to our infrastructure and software development through our acquisition process.

     M.S. Project certainly addresses all of our needs in terms of planning, testing, and going live. Project managers can facilitate this software acquisition by organizing, planning and developing projects. MS Project offers a unique software that helps them to create a time-line for the project. In addition, it gives the tool for the project manager to easily add cost and working hours in certain schedules that are needed to complete different tasks. Our recent acquisition by a major Bank required us to always make our deadlines and always be time efficient, as well as run statistics of duration of project and cost of project. Microsoft Project includes tools that help analyze and give statistics on the duration of the project and to when to expect our project to be culminated. Our acquisition project includes tasks of software proposal, infrastructure planning, software and hardware development, staff training and launching of software.

      The following screen is an example of how a project breakdown would look by attempting to all of our tasks for the recent acquisition. The Gantt chart shown in the screen shot will help project managers to input costs, time schedules, working hours, etc. In addition, Project managers can use the Project Statistics chart to have a summary of what they expect from the project.

         The cost of Microsoft Project is $1,159. We currently hold six project managers that are currently working in London, Cayman Islands, New Jersey, New York, California and Wisconsin. The total investment for using MS Project will be our current project managers would be of $11,590 + tax this total cost will include our 6 project manager plus our 4 board of directors that will need the software to review the project.

In conclusion, MS Project has been used broadly for civil engineering projects, manufacturing projects, cost allocation management projects etc. This investment will add value and efficiency to our recent acquisition process by keeping connected our project managers with our IT and support department followed by future building infrastructure planning.

            

Bombardier Preparation Case

      Bombardier, a large enterprise in the aerospace industry had been using the same ERP system for over the past two decades.  The past ERP had been sufficient, but as the world’s third largest designer and manufacturer of commercial aircrafts, Bombardier strived to become more efficient.  In order to keep up with the competition, with one of their bigger competitors’ a Brazilian-based companies, Embraer, it was necessary to come up with a wider focus ERP.  “One Company” was the name of special project that was envisioned by the Vice President of Operations and Project Sponsor.  As an outcome, a new integrated system would be implemented in which employees can interchange data from one plant to another by using a universal system with the same processes.  As a result, this was thought to become more a business transformation instead of technology implementation.  The company vision had also been outdated and the sponsorship model was weak.  The failed attempt was due to insufficient involvement of internal employees. 

       The first attempt to implement a new ERP was made in 2000.  After spending $130M, the project had been terminated because it had failed.  BMIS would be carrying out the second attempt at integrating and implementing a new ERP.  The system began with a vision, made by more internal team members as opposed to many third-party consultants to handle the project.  The ration of employees to consultants was now 10:1, the ratio was reversed on the first failed attempt when the employee to consultant ratio was 1:10.  Once the system had been designed by many experts in their field, the implementation phase would take over six years instead of a ‘big bang’ approach.  BMIS would be implemented at one branch at a time.  The first plant to have implemented the ERP was the Mirabel plant.  The first roll-out at the Mirabel plant was considered to be a controlled pilot.     

Once the implementing of the new ERP begun, the enterprise had determined that the individual businesses would be responsible to cleanse their data.  The BMIS team extracted, mapped, staged, and consolidated all data which was required before uploading and implementing to the target systems before Go Live.  BMIS managers also prepared many integration tests all which lead to the successful Go Live.   Less than one year after Go Live, the ERP helped save $1.2 billion in inventory expenses at the Mirabel Plant.  This was a big success after so many failures.  It did not take long before there was an increase in users and believers that were starting to see that the system made their lives easier.  Even with problems during the roll-out phase, it is evident that after the ERP had been implemented there have been many indicators that the ERP had increased the business’ performance. 

      The success of the system implemented at the Mirabel Plant encouraged many directors at the Saint-Laurent Plant that embraced the change.  There has to be a strong relationship between the business team and the project.  More hands were on deck for this project, as the employees were aware they would have more success if they took ownership in their vision for the BMIS project.  In the Go Live of the Saint-Laurent Plant a data accuracy of 97% was reached.  In the implement of the ERP in both the Mirabel and Saint-Laurent plant, it is evident that after dedication of their experienced employees and training the project was a big success.  
         The result of the project is highly important just as the process, dedication, and team training that went in to developing the process.  An integrated process developed by a successful team, does not only prove the company’s current success but it also forecasts a successful future for the company that always collaborates and takes ownership of their work.  I expect that the company will continue to grow and work better as a team as long as the business team has a strong relationship with their work. 

Ubuntu VS Windows

Dear Mr. Garner,

It is to my greatest pleasure to aid in your request to find out whether Ubuntu or Windows is the greater operating system.  I have cautiously researched and analyzed the benefits and threats for both Operating Systems.

Our company has administered around 200+ hedge funds in the past with over $16 billion in assets. Let’s not forget that the recent acquisition from XYZ Bank have expanded to $40 billion in assets to be administered by our fund. The acquisition from XYZ Bank has changed the way of taking MIS/IT decisions due to US Bank centralized decision policy. Our IT decision now counts for 65,000 employees in our company from our previous 175 employees. US bank IT infrastructure have currently invested $1.5 million on our 175 employees. The following table is our current breakdown of the investment. 

Our company has invested $ 775,000 in a home-software called the “workstation”. In addition, we have added a new software “Shadow Financial System”. This investment on technology and software upgrades are compatible with Windows O.S. “Shadow” notably improve our cash management, position management (all of our securities), stock record and general ledger. Our Net. Developers have designed our home-software the “workstation” to be compatible to Windows. The “workstation” allows our Hedge Funds (clients) to login on the web and download easily any report they want such as change in profit and loss reports (Month to date, Year to date), Income statements, balance sheets, Historical PnL Reports, etc. Although our clients will be able to log in from any server I am concerned in our middle office department for uploading all the reports. If they were to use Ubuntu as their main operating system, how risky would it be for the company to mishandle or input the wrong information in our system due to incompatibility issues? Our company’s goal is to administer by the end of 2014 around $40 billion in security assets. Most of our foreign investors require us to use efficient and high quality software to manage their reports. Ubuntu offers libreOffice which is a similar version of Microsoft Office. Microsoft Office in comparison to libreOffice has the market reputation for business use. Our domestic and foreign investors expect us to deliver and receive all of the documentations and reports in certain formats. I decided to use Ubuntu libreOffice and ran a derivatives analysis report in excel. When I opened the file in Ubuntu, it did give me the conversion option to see it and edit it on LibreOffice. However, a message alerted me and I asked myself several questions.  What if our investors are not able to save our files due to formatting issues? How important is it for our company to save time and peace of mind to our clients? Do we want to frustrate our clients by using another office software? (All of our clients use Microsoft office). 

                Ubuntu is really attractive is similar to Apple’s operating system. It has a lot off applications that can be accessible and downloaded. However, the usage of a free Operating System will negatively impact our image. We manage billions of dollars and our clients expect more than a free version to run recs/reports.

                The ITTwist.com site has rated Windows 4/5 compared to Ubuntu 3.5/5. I found this comparison chart from the same website that allow us to see the comparison between both operating systems.

Points Of Comparison	Windows 8	Ubuntu 12.04
Platform	Microsoft	Linux
Safety	Less	More
Internet Speeds	More	Less
Graphics	It Has Metro Desktop Environment, Which Seems More Stable Than Aero In Windows 7	More Efficiently Desktop Environments For Eg; Cinnamon Desktop, Default Unity Theme, LUBUNTU(Older System)
Cost	$200	Free
Compatibility	It has a bundles of Applications & Integrated Environment Which Seems More Catchy & Elegant	It Has No Ability to Run Windows Applications But You Can Run It By Installing WINE
Speed	Very Much Faster Speed As compare to previous versions	Faster & Much Improved OS
GUI	Great Graphical User Interface In METRO UI But have a lots Of BUGS	Great GUI Wih Unity , You can Experience the Ultimate Graphics by Installing MAC Like Dock Named CAIRO DOCK
Boot time	8s	9s
Shutting down Time	16s	8s

Source: “http://www.ittwist.com/2012/12/windows-8-vs-ubuntu-1210-complete-review.html"

The compatibility section certainly points out the risk of not being able to work efficiently with Ubuntu operating system. As a result. our company will not only lose $1.5 million in our prior investment but will negatively impact our image and reputation to our investors.

Although Ubuntu offers great features, Ubuntu does not fit into our business perspective. Why? Ubuntu can cause a lot of issues for compatibility. Ubuntu can certainly be used for other types of business such as limousine/ taxi, cosmetic, bakery and other businesses. LibreOffice will allow these small-businesses to create data bases and save certain files without buying addition a fancy software such as MS office. Small businesses will be able to complete all of their basic needs with this software. Basic needs would be such as, keeping inventory logs, creating charts, and small presentations for staff members. Small business usually don’t start with a lot of capital. This free Operating system will allowing them to save money while using great software features that enhances their businesses’ needs.

For all these reasons, I believe upgrading to Windows latest software will allow us to adding more value to our clients while easily flowing through our new software acquisitions. We will focus more on improving our technology and making technology easier for our clients rather than adventuring with a new operating system that could create a negative impact for our business.