Riordan
CIS/207
10/01/13-11/04/13
Mel Lee
University of Pheonix

Dear Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board, I am coming to you today with an idea. An idea I feel will bring about some changes, and not just minute changes, but changes that will affect the way we do business today and for many years to come. I am here to propose to you a new system, one that encompasses all of the buisness' training courses to the local intranet with in house shopping. We call this new system Aim High; which is what we did, and we feel it will satisfy all of your needs and even wants in an information system. Now you may be wondering what exactly Aim High does, well let me tell you somethings about it. It starts off by being a local intranet for Riordan, letting you access the internet from anywhere on the premises. Aim high also comes fully equiped with Wi-Fi functionality so you aren't strictly confined to your office all day. Now for the executives we have included an optional package within the Aim High system which lets you turn your company laptop or tablet into a mobile hotspot so you can do business from anywhere around the globe. Now the internet will be a fully functional world wide web, with the option to restrict access of websites to certain levels of authority within the company. Aim High also allows to setup online classes for any training courses Riordan may offer. Part of this system includes setting up an employee profile which in turn allows you to sign up your employees for any courses they need to take, and courses they have previously taken. You may be thinking why take the classes online. Well there are a couple of benefits to online learning; just think about all the money Riordan will be saving by not having to send its employees to an off-site training facility to take these classes. Online learning also lets your employees get the information they need faster and they can keep the information on their computer for reference later on instead of having to rely on note taking and memory recognition. This Riordan Portal will be similar to one that is already in use today by the United States Air Force, The Air Force Portal. In order to see what the Air Force Portal is exactly let us see what the FAQ’s for the Portal tell us. According to Air Force Portal Faq's (2012), What is the Air Force Portal?
You can think of it as the Air Force’s worldwide Intranet. It is available to all users anytime and anywhere an Internet connection is available from .com or .mil connections. The AF Portal and allows you to quickly find authoritative, relevant data and information, applications and collaboration tools to help you do your job and live your life in the USAF.
This portal system will allow your company to install video and power point slides on your Intranet site to conduct training with your employees at any time necessary. This new portal system will incorporate all of the items that you already have in place. The only foreseeable problems will be, needing to upgrade your master servers to handle the increased work load on them as well upgrading your internet to possibly a T3 service. The overall benefit that this will provide to your company is the fact that you will no longer need to send your employees stateside and pay for them to attend classes. The "Distance Learning Solutions" (2012) material states that the company is spending over $100K a year on training, which is eating a large portion of your companies resources as you are well aware. There will also be an added savings in being able to store the training material and re-play it as the need arises. This will cut out having to staff someone to constantly be relaying the same information over again. After reviewing the requirements that you are looking for in the distance learning material, we believe this will surpass all requirements necessary for training. Bottom line numbers and costs are a big factor to any company and your training costs are hurting that number. Using this portal system will drastically reduce those numbers and start to raise your bottom line numbers. Based off current flight costs, your organization is spending around $2.5K in travel cost just for your planned overseas portion (Orbitz.com, 2012). Using this new portal system will slash those costs and enable your company to put that money into research and development.
One thing that we are looking at when designing this new portal system is to have a three tier training system. The first tier will be your managerial training for your organizations. This will be for your regional managers, company managers for each site, your department managers, and anyone you deem necessary to accomplish this training. The second tier training will be accomplished by your front line supervisors and shift leaders. The third tier will be accomplished by your front line workers, those of you who need the in depth training on the systems. All of this training will be accomplished by a means of computer based training with a recordable test at the end of the course. When looking at the second and third tier training, we want to have it set up so that it will be either teleconference training or via a power point slide and videos, either way a power point presentation will be presented for each tier of training, all of which will accomplished over your existing intranet service. The addition of testing at the end of the training course will ensure that the employee has understood the material and is ready to implement it. It would be a rather foolish move to implement such a strategy and not have those who view it retained the information. This will also allow the company to re-organize or completely change the lessons in a way that is more easily understood by those who need it. Now you may be asking yourself, what about security concerns with the new system. That is why the portal system will be behind your existing firewall and intranet. The only way to access this service is by logging into your company’s intranet service. This is the most secure way without establishing new procedures; there is no reason to reinvent the wheel on this new system. The main goal is ensure that everyone is receiving the training they need and to also increase your bottom line. Once your employees are on the main intranet page, they will be required to log in using a username and password that will be set to expire every 90 days. This will prevent any log-in information from being intercepted by prying eyes. This will also be an added fail-safe in the unlikely event that the network is compromised and not detected. The information will only be available for a limited time before access is denied by the 90 day change.

The concept of employee training through a network is exciting to many companies. There are many benefits to having employees access training materials locally instead of having to travel great distances. One great advantage is that today site can be the elimination of travel expenses for the company instructors tasked with teaching in overseas locations.
The addition of a dedicated line will improve business communication as a whole throughout the organization. There will be an easier platform for communication after everything is set up. Applications such as Skype, Ovoo or even something like Facetime (apple.com) and VOIP programs will make communication more affordable as well as more convenient. One may actually consider their desktop computer as a communication device to offices overseas after everything is set up and implemented.
I think this will be a blessing for where corporate training is concerned. Here we have the ability for employees to be able to log in and access training files through remote access. It has been proven that learning is facilitated well and more information is retained if a video is to be watched and notes taken, rather than material you can simply watch the instructor speak. The reading of technical information in general seems to make the student or employee “turn off” the logical part of the brain after a short time. With the option to have high speed streaming video the employee need simply log in and view a presentation which will hopefully better train the individual. This will be done without buffering times and skips, as well as lower loading waits.
Also receive a boost in speed when working with files on their website and other distant servers thanks to the higher throughput this will create. While some see the upload times of files as a minor annoyance there are certainly some benefits to the increase in speed. One certain improvement to the increased bandwidth will be the ability to access files and change them in real time. Considering the fact that serves as a manufacturing company this may be important if flaws in material or finished product are noticed and the production of plastic goods can be shut down while the problem is solved.
These improvements may initially sound as simply as changes to minor events that exist to simply annoy users of the network but when you have the ability to be in two places at one time thanks to the new high bandwidth network service one can see how big of an improvement this will be over traditional travel methods, time, and costs. I think employers today are willing to take these approaches because of the price and how fast and easier they can communicate with their employees (ooVoo, 2013)(coleman,2013). We have also taken into consideration your need for an updated Point of Sale system for your retail and commerce section of Riordan. For this we have implemented a system that not only keeps track of your customers but also your inventory and sales. We start off by imputting the system onto your companies RF gun units which your stores use to scan in any shipment you send them or any transfers the store does to other stores. Now you might be thinking why is this important, well let me tell you why you need this feature in you company. Once you scan in or scan out an item it sends a message to that stores mainframe and stores it in that stores database keeping track of every item the store has in its inventory. This allows your employees to be able to use the cash register to check and see if you have an item in the store that isn't represented on the stores sales floor. When the customer gets ready purchase their items Aim Highs Point of Sale system is setup to ask for the customers last name and zip code. This is important for a couple of reasons it makes a profile for the customer which allows you to enter their whole name, address, phone number, and email. The zip code is used for seeing exactly where your clientel are coming from in reference to your general area. These allow your marketing department to send out emails to the customer letting them know about upcoming sales or just send out the company coupons. It also allows you to see in which areas you need to focus more extreme measures of marketing to try and get even more customers to come to your store. The customer profile is also important in other ways, as it lets your employees get on a first name basis with the customer giving them a more comfortable one on one experience. As well with making the profile, whenever the customer makes a purchase it records the items of the purchase into their profile, which allows you to go back and see what sizes and colors of items they have already purchased. It also keeps track of what register the customer was helped on and keeps a record of the transaction number in case the customer loses their reciept and has to make a return later on. Aim High also comes included with an online catalog; which your employees can use to order items for the customer that you may not have in stock in the store. When this is done the system sends a message over to the catalog department so they can send the order out to some of your other stores which should have the item in their inventory to ship to the customer. For this we have also built in support for any shipping service Riordan wishes to use, its default setting is UPS. We attached a button to the Pos system that allows you to log onto the UPS portal and print out shipping labels to make shipping all of your companies packages quickly and efficiently. By now I can see that I have your attention and can tell that you are liking these features we offer with Aim High, but I can see you wondering about the security of the system. This is a valid question in this day and age of highly technological advances so let me go on about some of the things Aim High has to offer Riordan in the security area. For personel information we have tailored the system to only let people in the Human Resrouces department and above to have access to this information. When an employee that meets this requirment is hired, He/She will be issued an employee number based on the department and then they will be asked to input a password only they will know for the system login. This information will include but is not limited to pay rate and compensation, background checks, drug test results, personal identification and social security numbers, NDA's (nondisclosure agreements), as well as any direct deposit information that the payroll department may have on file. Aim High has one of the top online security systems to date it offers web filtering, network security, and cloud protection. Web filtering allows your company to setup website block and allow lists, your personal laptop and mobile device can be setup with different web restrictions based on whether you are accessing the companies network or your personal network. The network security keeps your company from being infected with malware by blocking known and predicted malicious domains and Ips from resolving at the DNS layer and stops botnets from communicating to their command and control hosts. Unlike pure proxy solutions, DNS-based security platform is able to proactively stop infections and attacks over any Web or non-Web port, protocol or app. As you can tell, we here at Aim High have taken many steps to try and keep all of your data safe and protected from outside sources. We also take pride in knowing that we provide a system that has the potential to be maintained very easily with the proper care. We have designed the system where you should have one technician online at all times, the job of this technician is to monitor the system and do maintiance as needed. He will be responsible for collector status', logfile processing, data processing, checking the error logs, and status notifications. Through all of this he will be able to create a restore point for the network and in the event that something happens he will be able to restore the system back to a point where the system was working properly (Oracle, 2008). I'm sure one of your main concerns is on trying to maintain the POS aspect of our system, well we have a few solutions to help alleviate all of your concerns. We have made sure that we have met all compliances with The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). Thus we will have a program installed on every POS system you possess which will scan your entire POS system including any websites that you may be using to check for any vulnerabilities. Now you can change the settings on this to where it stays on and does live scans or you can change it to where you it only does it once an hour to once a day up to once a month. Now this program will also check all of your firewall files to make sure they are the most recent which provides even more functionality. Along with setting up all your employees with identification numbers and passwords, we also run an encryption program in the background so every transaction you do that involves a credit or debit card will be encrypted as the information is being processed. This also helps keep down any attempts of having one of your customers identity stolen thus also making your company look bad if it happens, then people would not know if they would be able to trust your system to send secure information so it could deter them from coming in and shopping with you (latham, 2002-2013).

Reference and Citation Page

Oracle. (2008). Monitoring and Maintaining the System. Retrieved from http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14269_01/doc.451/e14266/maintenance.htm

latham, m. (2002-2013). Maintaining Security and PCI Compliance on your POS. Retrieved from http://www.switchcommerce.com/maintaining-security-and-pci-compliance-on-your-pos/

ooVoo. (2013). ooVoo Video Chat. Retrieved from http://www.oovoo.com/home.aspx

coleman, d. (2013). 2013 Collaboration Predictions: Video Conferencing, Big Data Collaboration, Workplace Changes. Retrieved from http://www.cmswire.com/cms/social-business/2013-collaboration-predictions-video-conferencing-big-data-collaboration-workplace-changes-019090.php