Purpose of this Assignment
This assignment gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your ability to research, evaluate, and explain enterprise systems, and to communicate effectively at the executive level. This assignment specifically addresses the following course outcomes:

•analyze and examine how enterprise architecture and enterprise systems influence, support, and enable an organization’s ability to contribute to strategic decision making and to respond and adapt to the business environment

•analyze enterprise system solutions to make recommendations based on benefits, limitations, and best fit within the enterprise environment

•analyze and explain the elements of a successful plan for implementing enterprise solutions, addressing structure, processes, culture, and other considerations

Assignment
Your instructor has assigned each group one of several types of enterprise systems (ERP, SCM, CRM, etc.) to research and prepare a paper and an executive-level informational presentation. In Group Project 1, your team prepared a 2-3 page paper summarizing the case studies, evaluating the success of the implementations, and identifying lessons learned. For this assignment, you are to work independently and write a 1-2 page memo (not including references page) to the CIO that identifies at least seven success criteria for implementation of enterprise systems, for the category of enterprise systems assigned to your group (ERP, SCM, CRM, etc.).

Each of these success criteria should be briefly explained and then related to how they would be applied during an enterprise system implementation within an organization. Some areas to consider include the structure of the organization and its processes and culture; other aspects of a proposed implementation relate to the phases of the system development life cycle (needs analysis, design, development, implementation, maintenance). The case studies your group is using may be a good source of ideas as well. The criteria you identify must be applicable to enterprise systems (in the category assigned to your group) and should come from your research.

You are to use a Microsoft Word memo template. The use of at least three external scholarly resources (in addition to your case studies and other class materials) is required. You should use scholarly journals (rather than Wikipedia and authorless website postings). If you need assistance with determining what a scholarly journal is, the UMUC library is a very good source of information, accessed via the following link: http://www.umuc.edu/library/libhow/articles.cfm.

Remember to correctly cite and reference all sources. Since you are writing a memo, you should use in-text citations and list the references on a separate page at the end.

An example that is not related to enterprise systems but can give you an idea of what is needed follows. One criterion for successful implementation of an individual customer’s Internet connection might be that the customer’s system is fully functioning when the technician leaves the customer’s home. The explanation of how that would be applied is that the technician has completed the installation, tried it to be sure it is working, explained to the customer how to connect and use the system, and answered any questions that the customer had. As a result the reader now knows what one of the success criteria is and how it would be applied.