Hardware and Software Paper
Michelle Gonzalez
CIS 205
August 22, 2011
Craig Berg

Hardware and Software Paper
Many companies rely on technological advancements to keep up with the business demands; almost every business has some sort of information system. Maintaining and upgrading hardware and software is not an easy especially if the company is fairly large. This past week I had the pleasure to sit down with my company’s IT guy and take a tour of his technological brain; needless to say that was a lot of information to take in.

I currently work for Sears Holdings Corp. in the Contractor Services Group division; this division in houses several systems used as personal, workgroup, and enterprise levels. At a personal level each employee uses a PC preloaded with the necessary systems to assist our customers; our PC’s are running Windows XP and we recently upgraded to 19 inch flat panels. Our hardware is very basic and it needs a lot of improvement and/or upgrading to be up-to-date in today’s technology world
. Each system is guarded with an enterprise ID given to the employee during the hiring and training process. For example, ServiceBench is one of the systems used to locate service and repairs orders, it shows who the assigned technician is, date of service, if parts have been order or if we have to replace the appliance.
As a workgroup we have upgraded to a new a software system called Empower; this system replaced our PRIMS scheduling system. Empower allows the employee to have control of their schedule, requests, and/or changes without submitting to the RMT (Resource Management Team) group. Once the employee has chosen what they want their schedule to be the system will accept or deny the request, it all goes on business needs.
As an enterprise group we have several different systems that allow us to communicate with the entire corporation. For example, 88sears.com is the hub for human resources; in this website the employee has access to all human resource information, and is allowed to make any change that is needed. We also have a new social networking system called Pebble (our own version of Twitter). Pebble allows the employee to communicate with other associates, technicians, corporate personnel, etc. According to my IT guy this system was implemented to give the employee the access to a “social network”, and to take away urge from the associate of going on Facebook, and to keep up-to-date on new product and services; as well to communicate your knowledge with other associates.

After sitting down with my IT guy I see Sears in a different view, they have many changes to make in the technological field in order to compete with other major retailers. We are still behind and that is probably why some of our daily tasks are difficult to deal with. We have too many different systems running at the same time and most of them do the exact same thing. My IT guys are currently working on integrating some of these systems to make them more manageable by the associate and the corporation; they are also strategizing a budget to upgrade all of our hardware and servers in order to provide more accurate service and be more functional (our systems crashes at least once a month). I realize now that I want to be part of the IT group in my company and help them move forward in the technological field.