Question

Assumption: Your Company was able to purchase major holdings in FaceTalk. As a result of the stellar work of your committee, all of you were given big bonuses at the end of the 4th quarter.

Assignment Scenario: You return to work in the new year, after taking your family on a trip to an exotic island, and the CEO calls an urgent brown bag (bring your lunch), titled, “The CPFR Assignment” meeting to discuss the next step in the company’s network strategy.

Since it is brown bag meeting, you are prepared for a long winded speech by the CEO. Thank goodness that vacation was so wonderful!
CEO: We have now become the “Strategic Center Firm” (SCF) in which all shareholding companies build cooperative relationships. We have become widely recognized in the Global capital markets and must now take our pre-eminent role in the development of a centralize strategy for the industry. This is a good thing but because of our central position, we must be the foundation for all the network’s structures. This requires we build a decision support structure that satisfies the following areas:
1.    Formal reporting relationships and procedures
2.    Managing complex, cooperative interactions among network partners
3.    Aligning incentives among networked partners to have a reason to stay connected
4.    Managing the strategic network and controlling its operations
To ensure we accomplish the above tasks, we need, specifically:
1.    Strategic outsourcing: we provide more outsourcing and partnering opportunities that the other firms. However, we need a centralized group decision support where network partners are more than contractors. Members should also see opportunities to create value for the network through cooperation.
2.    Technology: We are functioning in the securities and cash equity markets supporting normal trading terminals spread across the country that are used by brokers. The brokers will send their orders from their offices to our central network which you will access through our DSS dashboards at our workstations. This DSS must be connected directly to the back-end server and act as a communication server as well as a front end to the system. The best bid and the best offer (BBO) will be provided to all the partners. The buy and sell orders placed by the brokers are aligned with the best available price in the market. Then, the confirmations are sent to the brokers. The structured requirements, in which partners submit formal reports detailing the outcomes through use of the decision support technology, are essential in our efforts as a strategic center firm. Their efforts facilitate the success of this activity.
3.    Process Related:
4.    Review of: integrated project plans including development plans, risk plans, communications plans, test plans and project documentation
5.    Balanced Scorecard Audits: system should allow partners to review both strategic and financial controls; customers, internal business processes, learning and growth within the trading environment
6.    Goal seeking analysis: this is done in order to value the network to suit continuously changing trading conditions in a volatile external environment. Our strength is in remaining agile; our suppliers and partners must become more interdependent and less independent
7.    Defining acceptance criteria and success factors when using collaborative computing tools and software
8.    Classification test set (data mining)
9.    Expert repair system must be able to perform diagnosis; producing defect reports and summary reports
10.    Market Surveillance Systems (NASD) and (SONAR)
11.    Knowledge transfer process: expert systems are required to ensure knowledge management is both vertical and horizontal. We have several partners in different stages of the value chain and must integrate different, yet complementary skills. Improving our information systems and communication capabilities will secure our success in these areas.
a.    Resource and asset management backpropagation: I must emphasize now that we are a strategic center firm, competitive advantage is between value chains and between networks of value chains. Our network value is only as strong as its weakest link. Implementing a centralized decision making authority and responsibility, we are responsible for encouraging partners to continue efforts toward forming network-specific competitive advantages. Similar to the Object Management Group (OMG) we want friendly rivalry among partners through building capabilities that create more value for the network.
b.    Finally, we must research and determine the best fit real-time DSS products to ensure our success as the strategic center firm. I would like a solid recommendation with justification of two products currently on the market. Understanding the specific needs and requirements involves a partner-wide definition of:
1.    Setting up a Data Warehouse
2.    How Data, Text and Web Mining are conducted
3.    BPM and BI
4.    Expert systems
5.    Group Decision Support Systems (two recommendations stated above)
6.    Artificial neural networks and intelligent systems (models)
Welcome back to work!

Deliverables:

1. Plan and create a detailed proposal with executive summary.
2. Declare written assumptions from your outline to meet the criteria of a Fortune 500 Central Strategic firm.
3. Thoroughly integrate and address all Assignment factors presented by the CEO, under technology, into a constructive Strategic Center solution covering all points from the technology portion of the CEO mandate.
4. Research analyze and choose the appropriate and contemporary DSS solution(s) based on reviewed, tested, and implementation research on other Fortune 500 Corporations. Provide at least one comparison with a real world Fortune 500 company.
5. Construct a minimum of one attributed ANN or intelligent systems model with detail explanation in proposal.

Summary

This is a scenario which belongs to Computer Science and it is about a company which obtained major stock in the company Face Talk. The CEO has called in a meeting to discuss the implementation of a Decision Support System so that it can be helpful for decision makers for the communications, know-how, statistics and information/models to identify and solve issues.

Total Word Count 1254
 

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