Eastern Digitals

Introduction

Company Overview

Eastern Digitals is a company located in California, United States. The company manufactures hard drives for digital storage of data. The company was founded in 2000 by an American family from California. It is one of the biggest companies manufacturing hard drives. It serves large organizations, wholesalers and consumers. Its customers are from the United States and other countries worldwide. Companys like Microsoft and HP buy their hard drives from Eastern Digitals.

According to the 2018 report, Eastern tech had over 200,000 workers. The total assets for the company as per the year 2018 totalled to $1.456 trillion. The company’s revenue for the year was 75 billion dollars, while the net income was $18.25 billions. It serves a little over 50 million customers worldwide. It also has several branches all over the world, including in Atlanta, London, and Australia. In the digital transformation, hard drives are nowadays in high demand as they are used to store a large amount of data for governments, private companies and individuals too. Data such as photos, records and databases are stored in hard drives. This leads to increased market demand for the products of the Eastern digitals products. Satellites that are orbiting in space take data about the earth and the atmosphere and send it to the receiving stations where it is analyzed and stored where it is later distributed to other departments such as military, weather forecasting companies, among others. All this requires the storage of data in hard drives. Wrong storage of data has led to collapsing of a very big organization in time.

Administration

The administration is a department in the organization that is responsible for a lot of tasks, the main one being overseeing all activities of the whole organization. Business administrators act as the overall supervisors for the organization. They make the immediate executive decision concerning the organization for the place of the board of directors. They also head the board of directors meetings that are held after a period of time set according to the company’s policies. Decisions such as modern Business processing models, the overall selection of information systems, administration of all the stakeholders in the organization, risk analysis, the overall issue concerning security management, among others.

This report will look at every task on its own, its problems and the solutions that can be implemented to control the problem. Administrator’s duties depend on the type of organization that the administrator works on. The administration department is responsible for ensuring there is efficiency in the organization. Administrators are in between management and employees in an organization. They act as the link between the two parties. They connect them for an efficient flow of processes in an organization. They also motivate all the workers in a business organization, making them know what the long term and short term goals of an organization are. The administration is the key to the good performance and success of every company. They ensure increased productivity in a company. Good administration faculty is very important when running a business organization as it is the key determiner for good performance. Without a good faculty, this company is likely to fail in its goals. The administration department is also responsible for making the regulations that govern a company as well as the company policies that ensure good relationship among all parties involved. Their roles are sometimes neglected or underestimated, but an organization cannot run smoothly without an administrator. All departments in an organization are related to the administration as it connects all the shareholders together.

Findings

An effective administrator should have the following abilities;

1. They should be able to know very well the general roles and concepts of an administration and the organization in general.
2. Know the necessary and proper way to file documents and records concerning the organization.
3. They should have good management strategies for the offices.
4. They should be able to manage the assets appropriately.
5. They should be able to think well so as to develop administration procedures.

The functions of an administrator

Planning

Planning involves determining who in the organization will do which task, where the task to be done, and how. The administrator has a process to determine the best person to perform a task out of alternatives that are available to make sure the policies, objectives and programs are done. Planning also involves organizing special training programs for the employees to increase their efficiency and relationship between the shareholders. A good administrator knows how to plan, depending on the ability of every department and worker in an organization.

Organization

Administrators act as organizers in an organization. They organize seminars, training programs, meetings and events in a company. They decide the best time for these events depending on the calendar of the company.

Control

Administration controls everything that happens in an organization. They are the supervisors of all the other departments in an organization. Administrators are the heads of a working organization.

Disasters that the administration department faces

1. Finding the needed right staff.

Every business administrator finds himself or herself in this challenge of trying to find the right staff with the right skills and convincing them into buying into the goals and visions of the organization. Right staffs are hard to come by as an administrator is always looking to find staff with experience and those who can contribute something necessary for the growth of an organization. According to some of the most successful administrators, there are no magic answers when it comes to staff-finding. Finding the right staff is always a risk as one bet on people they do not know, without knowing how they will adapt to the new company and how they will contribute. A good administrator should always be specific to the requirements that they need when hiring new staff. Small businesses are usually like families, meaning they can trust each other and work well with each other leading to success, or they can be dis-functional. When dis-functional, the whole company is likely to succeed.

Skills and personalities are the crucial factors that determine the working relationship between employees, while in big companies, politics is usually the major factor. In small business environments, every own member’s personalities determine the peace in the company and also the productivity of that company. A good administrator must learn how to deal with people of different personalities and also what works on each member of the organization and figure out a way to make it work for the benefit of the company. There is a high unemployment rate, but a lot of companies still lack employees with the skills they need for their organization. Some of the hired staff still require years of training to be able to produce what the company wants, and this is a risk for an organization. The ever-changing technology also makes it hard to find the right staff as even those with long experiences in the fields are unable to use the new machines brought by the ever-changing technology.

2. Problem solving and management of risks.

Identification, assessment and mitigation of risks is a significant disaster that every administration faces. Some of the problems are emergency and not planned for, and so the administrators have to think very fast to make sure they do not lose in their businesses. The risks may be both financial or human. Administrators that lack problem-solving competency leads to the collapsing of the business organizations they are in charge of. This is a major problem in the world of business today. This is the reason why most co-operate managers are jumping from danger to danger. These dangers are mostly brought by the changing business environment and technology. Competitions among businesses also are causes of these disasters as business administrators have to figure out ways to remain ahead in the world of competition.

An administrator should be able to think clearly and fast as a simple blunder can lead to the collapse of a company or can make a company incur big losses that will take time to recover. To perform well in the future, companies should come up with good problem-solving solutions in all the levels of the business organization. Administrators should always be ready to solve the arising problems, and they should also be updated with the changing business environment.

3.Regulations.

New regulations are being implemented every day in the houses of representatives. An administrator has to keep up with the changing rules and regulations. The rules that are mostly changing involve those concerning the environment, financial policies and taxes. Demand from shareholders or customers for the company products to become environmentally friendly or to have no side effects at all is a disaster for the management. Most big companies have people suing them most of the time due to failure to adhere to certain major or minor regulations.

The only way to solve these problems is to understand all rules and regulations concerning a company, the implications of those regulations as well as coming up with ways to deal with new legal issues as they come. This requires the administrators to be more attentive and sharp to solve these problems as they arise. The major areas of regulation issues nowadays are health and tax issues. It is difficult for business administrators to make permanent decisions concerning the organizations due to the regulation changes that are unpredictable.

Preparing for disasters

1. Business model process selection.

This is a workflow representation of all the process that goes around in an organization in a graphical model. These models are, for example, work flowcharts that show how the different departments work in an organization. Representation diagrams can also be used to show the processes of an organization. Organizations use business models to compare the way the business is now and how it will be in the future if certain changes are implemented. Business process mapping is also used together with business model processes to show how the business is performing. Both of the flow charts are used to detect and identify any weaknesses that the organization has. After identification of weaknesses, the processes are used to come up with new solutions to curb the problems so that the business can perform well in all its goals, both short term and long term. The process mapping can get into more details in the high-level mapping or into fewer details in low-level mapping. In selecting the type of processing models for an organization, one has to identify the problems associated with the type of modelling. The most commonly used type is the modern business processing model.

Management of the process model selected is also a factor to consider when choosing a business model. The business administrator has to research the types of models to come up with the one that suits the needs of the company and one that the company can handle managing without troubles. The research can be done by reading articles, business journals, reading books, questioning managers of big successful companies, among other methods. The factors for the selection of business models are such as limitations, challenges, government issues, and security issues. Solutions to the challenges are also important to make sure the model selected works well to achieve the organization’s short term and long term goals. The internet also can be used as a source for the research for a business processing model as it contains testimonies from successful business organizations’ representatives.

Business Process Modeling Techniques

Process modelling use scripts, flowcharts, hypertexts and programs for information representation. Business Process Modeling Notation is one of the techniques that organizations use to run their businesses (Sue Greenberg, 2015)P. The process is simple to create and simple to use as it uses arrows, geometric shapes and lines to show the flow of processes in the organization. Universal Process Notation is also another processing model in business. In this type of model, there are boxes given where every task is to be done in (Polyvyanyy, 2015).

All the tasks assigned by the supervisors are each given a box. Inside the box, you do your assigned work, and the person does his or her work, making it easier for an organization to perform a lot of tasks at the same time in an orderly manner to ensure no task is left undone. This will also help the administration identify the tasks that have not been done and immediately determine the people responsible for the tasks. It increases efficiency, and it is simple to use. The box also tells what every task to be done involves and the time at which the task is supposed to be done. It is mostly used for information tech processes.

The other technique is the flowchart technique. This technique is good as it explains the complex tasks in an organization and makes them seem very simple. These techniques use the order of sequence by which they start from inputs, goes to all the processes up to the out as final process in a processing organization.

Problems faced in modern business processes

There are some challenges associated with business process models. One of the challenges found by this research was the difficulty of determining the goals of the business process modelling from those of Information Technology (Hammer, 2015). Business processes most of the times are difficult to be understood by IT analysts. A new process model that will differentiate the roles of IT from those of the business process model should be created to ensure no conflicts in the processes carried out by IT analysts and other business organization departments and employees.

Another challenge is security issues in business process models. The models that are available do not provide security for all the processes in the model but instead, provide only one type for all the stages together. We should make sure we build a process model that will include all the processes in a model. This ensures efficiency and helps the company moves towards its goals, both short term and long term.

Processes such as Business Process Model Notation express how components in an organization interact with each other; however, it doesn’t give an opportunity to check whether some of the properties work efficiently. It has a visual analysis that works on some scenarios but doesn’t work on others, for example, when there are a lot of models. Informal analysis cannot be used due to the dangerous aftereffects associated with the models that violate them (Prause, 2017). This challenge can be overcome by the use of graphical queries, which usually check against a process model to ensure its efficiency.

Advantages of business process models

The main advantage of a business process model is to do analysis and determine how an organization is doing and predict how it will be doing in the future. It is useful in determining changes that should be done in an organization to ensure productivity and efficiency, therefore, making sure the goals of an organization are met. Each business organization’s goal is to provide quality goods and services within the shortest time possible to make their customers happy. Happy customers lead to a lot of profits and also make the organization gain more customers from the competition. Business models also give consistency to the processes making an organization more stable and easy to predict its future. The business process model also encourages changes to the redundancies, thereby increasing efficiency. The process modelling also makes it easy for a group of related organizations to produce very similar quality products and offer similar services.

Contingency planning.

A contingency is a plan developed in a business affecting some situations that might happen and might affect the business organization. A contingency is not made for only the negative situation that might arise. It is also created for any positive circumstances that might happen in a business organization, such as a very large unexpected order from the customers. Smart managers use contingency plans to make sure the organization runs smoothly or a project is completed successfully as, without a contingency plan, the odds of successfully completing a project drops even when a project was perfectly designed by computer software with all the right calculations. This is because the events are unpredictable. People used the vernacular “Plan B” as a substitute for a contingency plan.

Importance of contingency planning

Every organization can be affected by an unplanned situation, and that is why a contingency plan is always necessary. If the business organization responds poorly to an unexpected situation, it might affect its future performance and also the goals of the organization leading to loss of customers, sudden loss of money, loss of data, or even the company might collapse.

Some of the specific situations that might occur in an organization and need a contingency plan are such as;

1. Death of personnel, such as the manager of the organization.
2. Union strike of the employees of an organization that was unexpected.
3. Natural disasters, such as sabotage and other criminal actions, might lead to loss of data.
4. Disruptions that are accidental, such as fire leading to loss of property.
5. Issues concerning products and services, such as large unexpected orders.

6.A disaster like an earthquake or a hurricane.

7. Accidents on work sites.

Contingency planning process

Five steps are used when developing a contingency plan;

1. Risk Analyzing

Before making a contingency plan, you should make a list of all possible events that might happen. Make a sensible list of events in the order of their likeliness to happen and also the amount of destruction they might cause on the business organization. The list we mentioned above can be used when developing a contingency plan, as those are the common events that occur unexpectedly. A team may be used when making a list to help brainstorm ideas as some of them are easily forgotten yet causes big losses to the company when they happen.

2. Determine how likely the risks are to happen.

When brainstorming to make a list for the possible situations, one might come up with some that are very unlikely to happen that there is no need to develop a contingency plan for them. In this step, one should focus on some of the most critical ones that might cause huge losses. The following procedure may be used to determine the likelihood of the occurrence of these situations:

– Write down all the possible situations that might occur.

– Give each event a number according to the impacts it would cause to the operations of the organization; for example, an earthquake might be a ten while the fire on one of the production machinery might be a 4. This is because the failure of a machine is more likely to happen than an earthquake. Giving them numbers helps you calculate the odds of the events happening, and you will find that some are likely to happen once every month, while others are likely to happen once every 50 years.

– Calculate the odds by multiplying the number of the rank you have given the event by the impact, and this will help determine the likelihood of occurrence.

– Use those odds to develop all the contingencies starting with the one with the highest odds up to the one with the lowest odds. This helps a lot when you do not have enough money or time to make sure you plan for the most likely events before you are out of time or funds. One might also develop one general contingency plan for all the low-odds events to take care of them in case they happen.

3. Developing a process for each item listed.

Start with developing a plan for the most important and most likely events to happen to the least in that order. If time and funds are available, one can create a plan for all the events on the list just to be safe. In all the plans, they should be aimed at returning the situation to normal. After the application of the plan, things should go back to the way they were before the unexpected event.

4. Sharing of the plan.

After drafting a good contingency plan that is approved to be applicable, one should share a copy of the plan to each person working on that organization for them to be prepared. A contingency is only working when everybody has read and mastered it for the case of the event happening. It should be properly communicated to all the shareholders in an organization.

5. Revision of the plan.

A contingency plan needs to be maintained, revisited and revised as the organization changes to make sure they are still effective. Failure to revise or maintain the plan might lead to the plan failing when it is needed.

What is a Business Impact Analysis?

A business Impact Analysis (BIA) is an analysis in a business organization that calculates and give a rough idea of the effects of an unexpected event that interrupts the processes and function of an organization and comes up with all the information needed for the development of the recovery strategies after the disruption. The disruption might be major such as a terrorist attack or a minor one such as a false fire alarm.

Components of a Business Impact Analysis

1. Executive Sponsorship.

Support from the executive offices of an organization is needed in order to conduct a BIA. The plan will fail without support from the management of the company. The support helps you get cooperation among all the other departments for easy analysis as they will co-operate if the executive offices are involved. Communication is key while performing the analysis, starting with those in the executive offices downwards. One can communicate through means such as memos, emails, or calling emergency meetings after an unexpected event has disrupted the activities of an organization. BIA helps an organization recover as quickly as possible so that it does not incur more losses, and also it can recover the lost products quickly.

2. Understanding of the organization.

In order to perform a BIA, one needs to know about all the functions and activities performed by the company to analyze the possible recovery methods. You should check the company’s divisions and structuring and make sure you understand all of them before performing the analysis. You can also find an expert in all the departments to help you understand how some of the divisions in the organization works to know how the divisions will be affected by disruption and ways to recover after the disruption. Organization functions and processes should be well understood as their failure might lead to losses that are hard to recover from.

3.Business Impact Analysis Tool.

BIA tools are the most important key for good and efficient analysis. The tools will be developed after understanding all the business functions performed by every division and department in the organization. The tools used to acquire information in a Business Impact Analysis are such as questionnaires, interviews, flow diagrams, organizational charts and BIA soft wares design to collect information for the analysis.

4. Business Impact Analysis Process.

Using the tools mentioned in the component above, list all the processes and functions of the organization. Write each process, whether it is non-critical or it is critical. Also, make a list of all the people who must be available for these processes to take place in an organization. In all the critical functions, write a detailed document of who performs the operation, how the operation is performed and the impact it has on the company as well as the impact it will cause after a disruption on the first day of the disruption.

Continue with the process determining the impact for a whole week, a whole month, two months, and so on. For each duration, say a week, determine a recovery target each function, each division of the organization as well as all business systems. Finally, create or identify a safe storage place for all the data concerning the Business Analysis Impact to be stored so that it can be accessed in t the future in case of an interruption in the normal functioning of the business.

5. Business Impact Analysis Findings

Confirmation and presentation of the findings of the analysis is the last component in a BIA. Confirmation is done with the heads of the departments to ensure the analysis is realistic and accurate. The findings are then submitted to the company’s management for approval to use those findings in developing recovery strategies for the company.

Business Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

BCDR reduces the effects of outages and the number or disrupting cases in the operations of a business organization. It helps a business organization recover after an incident; it helps reduce the reputational harm and also loss of data. Good BCDR needs good preparations and planning. It also helps manage resources.

Business resumption

Many processes are involved in a business organization. All the processes must work together to achieve quality products and services. During a crisis, all the processes need to be taken care of to ensure the business doesn’t incur losses. They all should be attended. some of the components in a business that might be affected by a crisis include the following:

1. Operational

The normal operations of a business are likely to be affected during a crisis. The plan should give ways to return things to normal as soon as possible and efficiently.

2. Client support.

Clients will always need to be taken care of whether there is a disaster or not. Some will need to know whether the ongoing situations will affect the services or products they get from the company. The plan should ensure the clients are offered the services they need as soon as possible, even during a crisis.

3. Phones/ Internet.

Phones and the internet act as the link connecting the clients to the business organization. The plan should ensure the internet and phones run even in the time of crisis.

4. Financial.

The plan should be developed; thus, the minimum possible amount of money is lost. Some money should also be saved during the budget to manage a crisis in an organization.

5. Hardware and software.

Extra hardware and copies of software should be set aside to be used during a crisis

Security Incident Response

A lot of consultants on the security are saying that now is the time to fight the cyberattacks as they are on the rise every year. To make sure that the response plan works, four elements should be included in the plan:

1. It should be consistently tested.

Many companies have incident response plans that are not tested at all. One cannot know whether the plan works without testing it. You might trust the plan only to disappoint you at the time you need it most. Teams should be created to test the plan and see whether it is applicable and whether it works or not. Routine testing makes the members of an organization ready and experienced to execute it when it is needed. It also helps in the identification of the weak points that the plan has so that changes can be done to make it stronger. Once you get used to the plan, execution will be simple and fast.

2. It should detail and flexible.

The incident response plan should include all the details of the plan, but it should also be flexible so that it can be applied in different situations where there is a need. It should provide space for lateral movement for all the incidents that can happen in a business organization. It should also be flexible in a way that makes it easy to update regularly. This helps in dealing with the ever-evolving cyber attacks.

3. It is clear about communication plans.

For every successful incident response, there should be clear communications between the parties involved. An investigation should be carried out to identify which information has been compromised. Most of the plans are usually informal.

4. Inclusive to all the stakeholders.

All stakeholders must be involved in the response where each one is given a task that he or she can handle. This is after every stakeholder understanding the environment of the business and the processes performed by the organization so that they can know what they are protecting. Practicing helps the shareholders grasp the content and the way to move forward during an incident. The plan should also involve your legal division early in the process. The legal members will give advice on whether to include the police officers or not. Incident response is a major problem facing companies in the whole world due to the rise in the number of cybercrimes.

1. The process involved in incident detection

The response team should first work on identifying why the breach has occurred. They should then go on and contain the incident to ensure no more loss or damage is done in the organization. Some of the indicators that will inform security that a breach has occurred will include;

– System administrators, security staff, network administrators and other users start reporting problems in the network.

– Security soft wares installed in the computers will start generating alerts after analyzing data.

– Anti-malware programs will detect incidents.

– Problems in network devices, applications, cloud services, external storage, users etc.

REFERENCES

Hammer, M., 2015. What is business process management?. In Handbook on business process management 1 (pp. 3-16). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Polyvyanyy, A., Smirnov, S. and Weske, M., 2015. Business process model abstraction. In Handbook on Business Process Management 1 (pp. 147-165). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Prause, G., 2017. Sustainable business models and structures for Industry 4.0. Journal of Security & Sustainability Issues, 5(2),pp.62-85

Sue Greenberg, P., Greenberg, R.H. and Lederer ,J 2015. The role of trust in the governance of business process outsourcing relationships: a transaction cost economics approach. Business Process Management Journal, 14(5), pp.593-603