Friggle Corp. is a leasing and property management company located in Alberta. It provides financing to organizations wishing to purchase equipment or property and manages apartments and condominium properties. The company decided that it was time to upgrade its local area network. It decided also to purchase new accounting software but wanted to retain its old unit maintenance software, which, although 10 years old, had an easy-to-use interface that allowed maintenance personnel to track the maintenance work that they did in each unit. The controller, Joe, decided that the company should purchase the software from Midland Computers, which was owned by his brother inlaw, Tom. The prices were comparable with those of other computer networks that he priced, and Midland happened to be close by. Using materials from industry magazines, Joe decided that the best property management software to buy would be from Quebec; the software had received rave reviews about being easy to use.
The implementation was scheduled for the weekend after the June month-end close so that systems could be up and running by the following Monday. To Joe’s horror, when he arrived at work on Monday, computers were still being unpacked and installed. Tom had difficulty following the installation instructions for the accounting software, which was not up and running until the end of the week. General ledger details had to be manually entered, since the software could not handle the structure of the old accounts. At the end of two weeks, Joe had the old system put back up so that Friggle could catch up on transactions and get some work out the door. It took three months of 12-hour days for all accounting staff to get the new system operational. Unfortunately, the old maintenance systems would not work with the new operating system, and a new maintenance system had to be evaluated and purchased.
REQUIRED
Assess IT governance at Friggle Corp. For weaknesses that you identify, provide recommendations for improvement.