Terra Flora is now organized in three major divisions: Retail Services, Supply and Manufacturing, and Nursery Products. Corporate and divisional headquarters are all located in Sacramento. Each division has business operations in North American and European locations.
Figure 4.1 International locations of Terra Flora division sites
Until now, each division of Terra Flora operated as a separate company, implementing policies and procedures that the divisional managers felt were necessary to perform the various business functions. The autonomy of each division was the result of rapid growth and the fact that the procedures that were in place in each division worked well enough, in spite of some inefficiencies.
Each Terra Flora division also operates separate, heterogeneous computer environments that separately track and record various business functions, including sales, ordering, accounting, inventory, and division-specific information. Information is sent to division headquarters in Sacramento, where it is consolidated. None of the networks in any of the divisions communicate with the computers in other divisions. Consolidating information for the entire company means entering the same data several times into different computer systems.
The disadvantages of the situation are clear. It is costly, and information is redundant. Management reports are prone to error because synchronization of information is difficult. The heterogeneous networks must interoperate if the Terra Flora divisions are to merge and operate as a single business unit, relying on a centralized information database.
To meet this challenge, the company hired a new Chief Information Officer, who had managed the implementation of a similar strategic plan for another corporation before joining Terra Flora. As a first step, the CIO has asked each of the divisions to submit a list of the computer hardware and operating systems for analysis, along with descriptions of the major divisional business processes. The list would indicate the computer and manual interfaces into the processes. Each division has also been asked to supply network diagrams and brief descriptions of the databases and software applications that run on each computer. Analysis will be performed on each division in an attempt to decide which computer hardware and software from each division best fits the corporate strategy.
The immediate goal is to connect and maintain the existing systems necessary to continue business operations. In the long term, Terra Flora plans to migrate the existing systems applications to less costly and lower-maintenance client/server applications. More analysis of the custom applications must be done to determine the best features of those products and to create a plan for implementing the necessary client/server applications.