Introduction

This assignment is intended to provide you with practical exposure to IS strategic planning work, and to a lesser extent, enterprise architecture. we are getting you to undertake this work with your own personal situation where you are the 'pseudo expert' - you manage your own applications, make decisions about which applications to buy or update and able to seek technical support when your information systems need maintenance or upgrade. The main deliverable for this assignment is an IS Strategic Plan (ISSP) covering the next 3 to 5 years for your personal situation.

Requirements

A summary of what is to be included in this plan is as follow:

1. Introduction: An introduction outlining the nature of the report.
2. Activities: Personal activities you engage with that have IS requirements.
3. Current Enterprise Architecture (EA): Based on the personal activities, outline your current information systems architecture, formulated using a recognised enterprise architecture framework (e.g., Zachaman, TOGAF, or others).
4. Future Enterprise Architecture (EA): An outline of the future desired architecture. There is no need to use a framework again but include a short list of current and anticipated future needs/desires. This should be supported by a SWOT analysis and a gap analysis that demonstrates aspects from your personal situation and the environment that may be considered as drivers of change.
5. Strategies: A statement of 2-3 strategies that you will adopt to transform the existing situation into the proposed future architecture. These strategies should be concrete enough to make investment decisions or take appropriate action and include some performance measures that would enable progress to be monitored. Ideally, the strategies are also flexible enough to allow changes as new needs (or opportunities) arise.
6. Reflection: A reflection on the process you used to evaluate both the process and the outcomes. This is an important part of the assignment and should not be neglected.

Further details to help understand these requirements are described next.

Scope

This assignment is intended to cover the full range of your personal situation with respect to information and its management - this will include any technology that relates to information processing and storage (such as home computers, laptops and home networks, and any mobile devices that you have including smart phones, tablets, smart watches, fitness devices and others) and any other storage media that you use to store relevant information. Where you store personal information online using cloud services, you should include this as well. There is no need with this review to include information about you that is stored by others (for example, the University keeps information on students, but this is not expected to be covered by this plan).

While the exercise should include facilities needed for your personal life and University study, you should avoid including work related activity in the plan created for this assignment. For example, if you are working from home, or running a business, then you can assume the broader work context will assess and plan for the future with this IT context, so it should be omitted from this exercise.

You should also avoid exposing information of a sensitive personal nature and discuss in general terms anything you are concerned about sharing without revealing sensitive personal information. Please discuss this with your unit convenor if this issue causes concern.

IS Strategic Plan (ISSP)

Typically, when an organisation develops an information systems strategic plan (ISSP), the business context and drivers are paramount, and many elements of the plan could be integrated into the corporate strategic planning processes. In a personal situation, this 'business context' is much less formal and you will need to develop your own personal ISSP taking account of this lack of formality with the general business context. However, you are likely to have some personal future plans that would be reasonable to integrate into this plan in a similar way to the planning that takes place in an organisational setting.

Once the planning process is underway, a key first step is to look at the current state of the information systems situation - this could be viewed as the current information systems architecture or as will be referred to in the assignment, enterprise architecture (EA). A future desired EA is then formulated, with inputs from the current EA, a SWOT analysis, and a gap analysis. This then enables strategy alternatives to be formulated that will transform the current state to the future state.

A good ISSP that is meaningful and useful to the readers briefly outline the current information systems state; potential uses of the technology over the life of the plan; key drivers for change; the nature of the future states (perhaps at key milestones during the plan); and the main strategies that will provide the transformation from current to future state.

Enterprise Architecture (EA)

One of the goals of this exercise is to provide you with some exposure to enterprise architecture (EA), so we want you to use a recognised EA framework to help articulate your current IS situation, albeit briefly. The key purpose here is to use the EA framework to describe your situation - while EA frameworks can include complex processes for doing much more than this, these other elements of the EA frameworks are not relevant to this assignment.

There are a range of EA frameworks available, including Zachman, TOGAF, AGA etc. With a few variations, most of these are built around the concepts of:

• understanding the business and its key business processes;
• the data and information that are needed within these business processes;
• the applications that collect, store and process the data; and
• the technology that is needed for the data and application resources.

An important element here is that these frameworks generally start with what you are actually doing or your activities (processes), then work through the information needed to support these activities, the systems that collect and generate this information, and then end up with a consideration of the technology needed to drive all of this. In other words, activities are the driver, and not the technology. Business analysis skills play an important role in understanding these activities and the information they need.

A key element with this assignment is to keep things fairly simple, so while we expect you to utilise a recognised EA framework, the resulting articulation of your architecture should not provide huge amounts of detail and should fit in one page (or a little over). However, it is important that your expression of the EA provide the reader with an assurance that you have applied a recognised EA framework.

Reflections

Concepts of 'professionalism' underpin the work in the UC IT-related courses and a key element of what professionals do is self-reflection. Your assignment should include a section covering your reflections on the process of developing this plan.

While not a comprehensive or prescriptive list, some questions that could be considered in your reflection and would be a useful starting point include:

• Did the processes adopted for this work draw on good practice (sometimes referred to as 'best practice')?
• Was there any conflict in the knowledge used? and how were these conflicts resolved?
• Was this knowledge well applied?
• Were the outcomes of this process useful and will they have a positive impact on you?
• Were all stakeholder interests adequately accounted for?