Information Infrastructure Evaluation
U.S. Sports Fanatics utilizes a formal enterprise content management system. Therefore, during its evaluation, the consultation team will be required to evaluate several areas of the organization for it to understand how the organization manages its content. During the assessment of U.S. Sports Fanatics’ information infrastructure, the consultation team will address the five core components of the company’s ECM system architecture. These components, which will be evaluated to determine how the U.S. Sports Fanatics manages its content, include content capture, content management, content storage, content preservation, and content delivery.
Evaluation of Content Capture
Content capture is the process of obtaining data from different sources and transforming it into usable formats that can be stored in the company’s ECM system (Nickolov, 2017). There are many sources of obtaining content, and some that U.S. Sports Fanatics uses to obtain its data includes past files, paper documents as well as external sources. During the evaluation, the consultant team will first list all the sources of U.S. Sports Fanatics‘ content, including its source, format, how the data will be methods, and the methods and techniques that were used to capture the content. The team will only list the useful content and the one that supports the business operations of U.S. Sports Fanatics. The team will also provide notes on the appropriateness of the content capture in assisting the company in achieving its goals and objectives. The following table shows U.S. Sports Fanatics’ content list and how it is captured.
| Content Item | Source | Format | Use | Method of capture |
| Employee data | Employees’ records | SQL Database | ü Assigning of duties ü Preparation of payrolls ü Determining performance | The employees’ data is captured during recruitment. During induction, employees have to provide all the details like their official names, age, religious beliefs as well as their bank details for payment. The employee is provided with data forms to provide the information, and then later, the data provided is entered into the system. |
| Financial and accounting data | Annual Financial Reports | SQL Database | ü Used in making major decisions on the performance of the company ü Used to look for financiers and investors. | Prepared using quick-books and then entered into the organization’s database |
| Client Data | Sales reports | SQL database | ü Used in accounting. ü Sales team ü Used during marketing ü Used to look for support, especially when clients comments on the company’s website. | Data collected during initial contracts using sales forms, and later the data was fed into the company’s database. |
| Support Data | Company’s website and blogs | SQL database | ü Advertising ü Sales ü Improving the popularity of the company. | Data collected from comments of clients from the company’s blogs and website and fed directly into the database. |
Evaluation of Content Management
Content management of an organization deals with how content and information flow within the organization (Hanseth and Monteiro, 2018). To ensure that the evaluation of U.S. Sports Fanatics content management is done effectively, the consultant team will start by understanding the U.S. Sports Fanatics’ business processes. After identifying all the business processes which should be mapped with the content of the company, the team will prepare a flowchart of all the processes. The business process flowchart will include the process, content, and comments from the consultant team about what is used by the current process and how it’s used.
| Business Process | Content | Comments |
| Employee recruitment process | Employee data | U.S. Sports Fanatics’ current process of acquiring information from recruits uses paper forms and therefore requires data to enter into the database by HR data entry personnel. The company can prepare electronic forms and put them on the company’s website for the recruits to fill them and send them back to the HR department. The information can then fed directly into the company’s database. |
| Financial reports preparation | Annual reports database | U.S. Sports Fanatics accounting department currently uses Quick books to prepare its financial statements, and later the data is uploaded into the company’s database. The company can use NetSuite ERP, which will provide end-to-end functionality of vendor and customer contact information, analysis of the company’s market as well as instant generation of financial reports directly into the company’s database. |
| Sales Process | Client database | Paper forms are used during initial contract contacts between the client and the company’s salespeople. Then later, the sales data entry personnel enters the clients’ data into the company’s database. However, this would have been easier if the salespeople were equipped with Applications that can allow them to share sales forms with new customers for them to fill electronically, then send back. This will allow the salespeople to enter the clients’ data directly into the company’s database. |
| Customer engagement | U.S. Sports Fanatics website and blogs | Currently, the company uses websites and blogs to determine the support that its employees provide to its customers. According to reviews, employees are not providing satisfactory support to the clients using the websites. To improve the employees’ support, emails, and personalized messages can be sent to customers to enquire if they were satisfied with the products provided. The information obtained will be more accurate and reliable compared to the comments the customers make on the company’s website and blogs without being engaged by the support team. |
Evaluation of Content storage
Content storage is the company hardware infrastructure where the organization’s content is physically stored for future use as well. During the storage of the data in the company’s hardware infrastructure, the data can be organized to meet other demands within the company (Dvilyanskiy & Rytov, 2019). Before starting to evaluate the U.S. Sports Fanatics’ content storage, the consultant team will have to identify and document the company’s existing systems. The best way to identify them and document a company’s content storage is by using network diagrams. Through network diagrams, physical storage can be identified, and later content can be easily mapped to the storage. During the evaluation of the company’s content storage, the content data identified will be used to identify different servers in the company’s database that are used to store the data collected.
The team identified several database servers, which included employee database server, customer database server, financial database server, and support database server. All the four servers were operating independently within the U.S. Sports Fanatics’ main database, and it was secured, and only authorized persons had access to the content stored in different servers.
In the current employee database server, the information of the U.S. Sports Fanatics’ employees was stored there. The data included personal background, educational background, as well as a compensation package of every employee. Also contained in the employee database was the formal structure of the U.S. Sports Fanatics as well as how human Resource Management carried out its process such as hiring, training, assigning of tasks, and firing of employees.
The current client-server database involved three logical components. It had salespersons who engaged the customers, it had the server where the salespersons send requests on behalf of clients, and it had customers who were given feedback by the salespersons. The new server should engage customers directly by allowing clients to send and access information.
The financial database server was currently used in the company. It only involved the accounting department officials, shareholders, and the company’s top management.
The current support database server of U.S. Sports Fanatics mainly involved clients and the support team.
Evaluation of Content Preservation
The company’s content is essential and the most important asset, and therefore it should be preserved. The content is applied in different business processes, and sometimes it is replaced after becoming outdated (Dvilyanskiy & Rytov, 2019). However, some content data has high value and therefore has to be protected for a long time. The preservation of the content should be in such a way that it can be easily retrieved without using special hardware or software devices. The consultant team identified the content preserved in U.S. Sports Fanatics’ ECM systems using the information that was collected in the company’s content capture. The identified the content, identified the preservation method, and commented on the preservation method currently used.
| Content | Preservation Method | Comments |
| Employee Database | Colocation | Keeps the data safe, but frequent maintenance of powering and cooling the equipment was costly for the U.S. Sports Fanatics. |
| Financial Database | On-Premises | Financial reports were stored in the company’s Ob-Premises servers that were well maintained. Necessary back systems were installed to recover any data that may be lost due to natural disasters destroying the servers’ hardware. |
| Client Database | Backup to on-site storage | The company had a critical backup system to recover the data in case of a dangerous disaster that would destroy the secondary data. |
| Support Database | Private Cloud | It was effectively used but was not coupled with encryption protocols, which made the data to be a bit insecure. |
Evaluation of Content Delivery
The first step that the consultant team took was to identify how the company’s content was delivered to different stakeholders. This was shown by the in the content capture and content storage phases using different databases and different flowcharts to indicate how information was transferred from the server to the authorized persons. For instance, the U.S. Sports Fanatics’ customer database system delivered reports on demand using the company intranet. That meant that the company’s data could not be accessed remotely by people as it was not configurable to smartphones. The same was for financial, support, and employee database systems.
Evaluation of ECM Relationships
Here, the consultants examined how the U.S. Sports Fanatics’ different components related to each other and whether they were able to work together. This enabled the team to trace any issues that were related to the next component due to an issue identified in the previous components.
References
Dvilyanskiy, A. A., & Rytov, M. Y. (2019, May). Evaluation of damage to objects of critical information infrastructure under the influence of destructive electromagnetic radiation based on a hierarchical rank approach. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science and Engineering (Vol. 537, No. 5, p. 052015). IOP Publishing.
Hanseth, O., and Monteiro, E. (2018). Understanding Information Infrastructure. http://heim.ifi.uio.no/~oleha/Publications/bok.pdf
Nickolov, E. (2017). Critical Information Infrastructure Protection: Analysis, Evaluation, and Expectations. http://www.comw.org/tct/fulltext/05nickolov.pdf