Case Study for Assignment 1 and 2

CS International Consultants Pte Ltd

CS International Consultants Pte Ltd is a global AEC consultancy company with its Headquarter located in Singapore. It has several regional offices located in Ho Chi Minh City (Vietnam), Chengdu (China), Abu Dhabi (Middle East) and Hyderabad (India). CS was formed in 2004 from the corporatization of the technical branch of the government agency Public Housing Development Authority. One of the bold visions of the company is to become one of the Top Ten AEC consultancy company in Asia within 10 years of its formation. The organisation consists of four (4) major divisions:

Corporate Division
The division consists of four (4) departments which provide service support to the organization. Finance & Legal Department The division is responsible for the financial and legal planning, accounting and reporting for the organisation. This will also include the budgeting and costing of the corporate services including IT. The IT Department will work with the Financial Accounting Unit of this Division to apportion and distribute the IT cost to the various divisions and departments. From the corporatization of the company until now, the IT department has been designated as a cost centre where the IT cost are apportioned and distributed based on the headcount in each department using the systems and services. Note: Recently, during its annual Management meeting, CEO had decided that the IT department shall become a profit centre within the next two years. All IT systems and services costs are to be based on the charge-back model. Currently, the IT department expend a huge amount of time and resources in justifying the cost to the various departments. However, the efforts are usually met with distrust and scepticism by the departments. There have been also several feedbacks that the supporting costs are getting heavier every year. Human Resource Department The HR department is responsible for the management of the employee within the
organisation. Its responsibilities include staff recruitment, remuneration and welfare including compensation.

Corporate Services Department

The CS department is responsible for the provision of corporate administration and secretariat services in the company. It is also responsible for physical security in the company.

Information Technology Department The department supports the IT services in HQ and also in the four (4) regional branch offices. Only the HQ has a data centre which houses the servers, storage, network devices and other IT equipment. It is fully equipped with its own airconditioning and power supply system and has smoke, flood and fire alert system. Each of the branch offices has its network system with at least one file/print server. IT Admin and Security Unit This unit is responsible for the management and administration of the IT budget, IT assets (hardware and software) and IT security in the organisation. It consists of two teams IT Admin and IT Security & Risk Management Team. The Admin Team works with the Finance & Legal department on the charge back and apportionment of IT costs to the various departments. The various IT Units will coordinate with the Admin Team for the purchase of IT hardware, software and maintenance. It is also responsible for managing the inventory of all IT assets and external services (e.g. internet & leased line) purchased and maintained. The IT Security & Risk Management Team is responsible for the administration and management of the IT security and Risks in the organisation. It is also responsible for the drafting, dissemination, training and management of the IT security policies and procedures in the organisation. Note: Physical infrastructure and environment security such as security doors and security access passes are under the purview of the Corporate Services department except for the Data Center which is under the IT department. SAP ERP Unit This Unit takes care of the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in the organisation. This enterprise system consists of the Financial, Human Resource as well as the Project Resource Planning and Management in the organisation. Other than the administration and management of the system, this Unit is also responsible for the updating and changes requested for the system. This system has been in place since 2005, (3 years ago). Note: As this is a critical system running the Financial, HR and Project applications in the department, changes in the applications and master data will require approval from the SAP Application Change Committee (SACC) consisting of the Chief Finance Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief HR Officer and the Division Heads. Policies and procedures for SAP application and master data changes have also been implemented to ensure changes are properly executed and documented. 3

Application Development Unit The Unit is responsible for the building, testing, deployment and supporting of the Microsoft Exchange email system and IT applications used in the organisation. The application developers do not use any particular Software Development Lifecycle methodology in their application development. Documentation and user testing are also minimal. The applications are usually release into production after completion. They do not keep any inventory of existing or obsolete applications. Changes to the application are usually communicated by the users directly to the Unit and the development commenced without any written requirements or approval. Infrastructure Unit This is the biggest Unit in IT Department consisting of three teams Data Center, Desktop Support and Network & Communication. Data Center Team This Team is responsible for the management and administration of the Data Center where all the servers, storage and network communication equipment are located. The Application Development Unit relies on the Data Center Team to accept the deployment of the new and changed applications to the production environment. Owing to a lack of effective planning, the Team are often flooded with many applications deployment which creates resource problems in meeting their release to production dates. The Data Center staffs only carry out ad-hoc monitoring of the servers and its components when there are feedback or complaint of server problems. Server monitoring are not planned or consistently carried out. No reporting of server problems and its resolution (if any) are documented. Addition of capacity or fixing of availability issues is usually reactive. There is no formal planning done based on any new business requirements. In the Data Center, the Intel-based servers are deployed with the basic configuration that complies with the required security baseline. Over the years, some of these server configurations were changed based on the application requirements. However, these changed configurations were not recorded and documented. Note: Since two years ago, the IT Department has been conducting annual Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity exercises to test its recovery capability. This exercise covers only the recovery of the main critical applications in Singapore HQ and does not include the overseas regional offices. There have been plans to include the exercise for the branch offices from next year.

For any system or server/network equipment failures or problems, the IT analysts and technicians will just record them into a database application but the workarounds and causes of the problems are usually not documented. Newly employed staffs are provided default access to the network, common noncritical systems and services which are pre-approved by the relevant System and Service Owners. Critical system access will need to be requested by the users and approved by their head of department and the System Owners.

Desktop Support Team This Team is responsible for the design, configuration, deployment and maintenance of the organisations desktops, laptops and other IT equipment such as printers, scanners, plotters, etc. They will also assist to resolve any incidence reported by the user through the IT Helpdesk telephone or on-line application. This Team is also responsible for the desktops and printers used by the staffs stationed at the construction sites. However, the deployment and maintenance of these desktops and printers are carried out by an external service supplier on-site. The management and service level of this external supplier are not documented, monitored or measured. Note: The IT Helpdesk is manned on a daily rotation by the technicians in the Infrastructure Unit. The Helpdesk operator will refer the incidence case to the relevant unit or team depending on the type of incidence. The incidence is handled on a first come first serve basis. There is no priority based model used for the resolution of incidence. Also the incidences and their final resolution are usually not documented. All IT assets and external services are awarded and purchased through quotations or tenders. There are currently no procedures available or documented in the IT Department in the management of these suppliers. These suppliers will just deliver the goods and if required, will configure the equipment. There is no rating of the services or equipment provided by these suppliers. Network & Communication Team This Team is responsible for the design, build, deployment and maintenance of the Local Area and Wide Area Network systems as well as Internet Communication and Virtual Private Network (VPN). The Team does conduct some monitoring of network traffic but this is more ad-hoc and the information is usually not shared with the other Units. The average monthly network availability measurements are reported to be about 99.5% and there is no trending or analysis of the availability. IT Services Management Unit This newly formed Unit is responsible for the planning, strategizing, designing and management of IT Services. Although they are responsible for any new or changed IT services, they do not follow or have any procedures for the release and deployment of these new or changed services. The services are implemented as and when they are completed or available after approval by the CIO. Note:

The users request for services using the Service Request application in the organisations Intranet. After approval by the relevant System Owner or CIO, these requests will be routed to the relevant Unit for their action. During the recent staff satisfaction survey on IT services, there were some feedbacks from users that they do not know what are the IT services offered by the IT Department. The information are not published or available anywhere in the organisation for reference.

Overseas Consultancy Division

The company has several overseas building construction projects in Ho Chi Minh City/Hanoi (Vietnam), Chengdu/Xian/Suzhou (China), Hyderabad/Chennai (India) and Abu Dhabi/Bahrain/Qatar (Middle East). This division is responsible for the management and administration of these small project offices (which do not have servers) and the regional offices (which have at least one server and storage system each). The overseas staff working on their respective projects will back up or store their works into the servers in these regional offices. These staff will use the corporate email system residing the Corporate HQ in Singapore. The staffs in these overseas offices are mostly technical professionals involved in the various projects. Note: The servers and storage systems in the regional offices have small tape backup systems which provide daily backup of the server data. There is currently no disaster recovery and business continuity plans for these overseas offices. These overseas servers and other equipment are maintained by external IT service vendors.

Local Consultancy Division

This Division is involved in the design and construction of public housing and commercial projects in Singapore. This division has four technical departmentsArchitectural, Civil & Structural Engineering, Mechanical & Electrical Engineering and Quantity Surveying.

Investment Division
This division has only been recently formed and is responsible for researching, developing and deploying new investments in land resource and properties. As a new division, they do not require any applications as yet.