Key Assignment
Throughout this course, you will be working with a scenario in which some basic background information is provided about a company. This information could apply to any company that provides customer services in general. Your goal is to select a small to medium-sized company of your choice, making sure that it is in an industry with which you are familiar or perhaps want to know more about. Each assignment that you complete in this course will be based on your selected company, using the scenario company as an example or model. You may use any additional information that you discover during your exploration and problem-solving process. Be sure to refer back to the Individual Project in Unit 1 as you progress through the problem-based learning (PBL) process. You may also want to print the outline that is provided in the Unit 1 Individual Project as a guide for you to follow throughout the course.
Problem-Based Learning Scenario
Education Community Services Group (ECSG) began as a small company of 30 employees, which has its origin from originally providing educational services to adult learners. Initial projects were small like reading literacy to General Educational Development (GED) programs. Dreams expanded, new problems were solved, and the number of employees, faculty, and staff soared to over 1,000 people. ECSG has evolved into a very successful and highly respected business that is branded as a leader with education services solutions for businesses and the community. The future is extremely bright, not just because of the current market demand for education services, but also because of the information technology infrastructure investments ECSG has made in areas such as education Internet services; e-mail; enterprise resource planning (Banner); instant messaging; Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP); SharePoint repository and document management services; virtual private network; wireless services; and distance learning. The future might bring lucrative endeavors for education and certification with these technologies. For sure, the demands from the corporate and community sectors will continue to explode.
ECSG is a public company based in Dallas, TX. ECSG provides education Internet services; e-mail; enterprise resource planning (Banner); instant messaging; Voice-over Internet Protocol (VoIP); SharePoint repository and document management services; virtual private network; wireless services; and distance learning to an educational environment consisting of 60,000 students, 6,000 faculty, 18,000 network nodes, and 24 networked locations across the Dallas and Ft Worth Metroplex. Charles is the chief information officer (CIO) of ECSG, and his peers consider him a highly capable and conservative leader. The mission of ECSG is to empower the diverse communities that they serve for success. The goals of ECSG are to provide access, success, completion, pathways to success, performance excellence, and organizational communication. ECSG objectives include providing the highest quality technology-based solutions and services in the most cost-effective manner to facilitate student success and performance excellence. ECSG currently services students, faculty, staff, and administrators for five community colleges; the board of trustees, administrators, and employees for the group offices; and taxpayers, education partners, K-12 students, alumni, and corporate partners for the greater Dallas and Ft. Worth communities.
Arnold is the ECSG network manager, a highly skilled worker whose best attribute is problem solving in a resource-constrained environment. His counterpart Randy, the information technology (IT) manager, gets the work done and as a counterbalance to Arnold, can be dogmatic and rigid in providing solution recommendations. ECSG provides secure access to internal and external systems and networks; accurate and reliable data and information to support decision making, resource allocation and policy construction; training and support services to effectively use technology and information; stewardship of the ECSG technology investment; and continuous review of internal and external solutions in search of emerging technologies supporting student success. Functionally, ECSG supports applications in the areas of instructional technology; e-learning; enterprise systems; networking; applications systems development; metrics reporting; security; training and professional development; and client services.
The ECSG infrastructure hardware platform consists of 21,000 desktops, 4,230 laptops; 581 file servers; 1,455 network switches and routers; 1,821 projectors; 1,560 printers; 62 storage arrays and controllers; 672 tablets; 186 monitors; 201 document cameras; 80 smart noards; 62 network racks; 9 copying machines; and 5 fax machines.
ECSG’s strengths lie in its ability to provide educational services to a large student population and its good reputation for providing quality education. Because ECSG receives public funding, it frequently faces budget challenges in attempting to eliminate resource and capability constraints. One approach to addressing these constraints has been to add satellite locations and new campuses to increase the tax revenue from these new jurisdictions. However, with education being a key industry and competition arising from both face-to-face and online delivery environments, ECSG has determined the need to streamline operations to gain better efficiencies. ECSG is focusing on four areas where it believes improvements will yield the best results: documenting and improving network administration processes from a technical perspective and a business perspective; better utilization of an organizational network domain structure and implementation strategy using a directory structure such as Active Directory; development and usage of network security policies and procedures in use on the ECSG computer networks; and the application of IT infrastructure library (ITIL) concepts within ECSG.
ECSG has contracted with you to evaluate and recommend specific IT infrastructure processes and current best practices in ITIL focus areas such as network configuration, user management, high reliability configuration, backup management, system security, and network design. You have been asked to include recommendations for network protocols, transport, and process sections and deliver them as components of the network administration procedures and processes guide.
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
The following is a brief description of the strengths and weakness of the company:
Leaders
The leaders of the company are as follows:
Case Study: Problem 1
The Education Community Services Group (ECSG) has several problems in network availability that cause outages and poor system performance. These issues have made it difficult to provide reliable educational services during peak periods, causing it to lose students to its competitors. An information technology (IT) network administration evaluation has to be conducted and analyzed to evaluate the nature of business and the need for a reliable network administration architecture, specifically for ECSG. Without fact-finding and statistics, simply purchasing a commercially available network administration architecture will not help.
Organization and Project Selection
The first step will be to select an organization as the target for your Network Administration Processes and Procedure Guide. This organization can be real or hypothetical, and it will be used as the basis for each of the assignments throughout the course. It should conform to the following guidelines:
Select an organization that meets these requirements, and submit your proposal to your instructor before proceeding further with the assignments in the course. Approval should be sought within the first several days of the course. Your instructor will tell you how to submit this proposal and what notification will be given for project approval.
Key Assignment Overview
For the assignments in this course, you will be developing a Network Administration Procedures and Processes Guide that documents and analyzes the network administration architecture for the scenario organization of your choosing. Your first task in this process will be to create the document shell for the final project deliverable that you will be working on during each unit. As you proceed through each project phase, you will add content to each section of the final document to gradually complete the final project delivery. Appropriate research should be conducted to support the development of your document, and assumptions may be made when necessary. The overall Network Administration Procedures and Processes Guide will consist of the following deliverables:
Assignment Details: Week 1
Submit your project proposal to your instructor for approval.
The following is the project outline for the complete deliverable:
