You have been hired as a software development manager for Paradigm, an organization that provides integration services to large online retail sellers. You manage a team of IT professionals who maintain the organization's IT infrastructure. The organization currently hosts their servers at a company-owned data center that houses several servers. The site is fully staffed 24 hours a day to ensure uninterrupted service to your business customers. The organization's infrastructure has expanded over the last year, and in turn, data center maintenance and expansion costs have sharply increased. As a result, the leadership team has decided to move forward with migrating to a cloud-based environment.

The executive leadership team asked the former manager to research cloud-based systems to see if migration from a company-managed data center to a cloud environment would solve the growing data center costs (e.g., salaries, updating of servers, real estate). The former manager created an ineffective presentation to communicate the findings to the whole organization. You will review the former manager's presentation, familiarize yourself with technologies that might be involved in moving to a cloud-based environment, and explain how or why the presentation is not appropriate for all the organization's employees. You will then need to determine what kind of technical communication deliverable (e.g., PowerPoint, email, social media post) would be most effective to communicate your findings to three different stakeholder audiences so each stakeholder audience understands how they may be affected. You will also be asked to reflect on your audience analysis and the deliverables you created and document how each deliverable meets the needs of its stakeholder audience.

Remember you are actually communicating with employees, and remember who you're talking to (a lot of non-IT people). An email to all employees for this purpose is really just to let them know about the coming change (they are not decision-makers) in an upbeat way (change is scary). So you will give a summary of the coming migration (not a detailed discussion), a summary of two innovative technologies that will make their lives easier, and a summary of the upcoming training (must include dates and times). That's it! You do need to put TO: FROM: and SUBJECT: in the upper left corner, and include a professional signature line at the end so it looks like the real deal.

EMPLOYEE DELIVERABLE:

For the Employees, pick a format suitable for communicating with all employees. Then:

1. Summarize the benefits of moving from a company-owned data center to a cloud environment in an upbeat way (change is scary).
2. Summarize two of the innovative technologies involved (and use that term), and how they will make their work lives easier, in a way suitable for all employees.
3. Be sure and close with a summary of specific plans for upcoming training, to reassure them (you cannot just say training will be announced; the rubric says 'summarize plans for informational or training sessions).