Question

Use a table to identify the software products sited in the BayState Realty Case Study that fall within the following categories of software. You need not limit yourself to only those products mentioned. Think outside the box as to other software that BayState might need.

system software

general purpose software

application specific software

System Software	General Purpose Software	Application Specific
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Use a second table to identify and explain the various elements in the total cost of software ownership and then list the steps taken by the CIO to limit the firm’s software TCO expenditures.

Elements of TCO	Explanation

Steps taken by the CIO for cost control:

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List the reasons why BayState Realty chose to go with off-the-shelf software instead of developing their own software packages in house.

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List the reasons why it makes sense to go with Linux in the data center. Be sure to include how this particular use of open source software mitigates the risks typically associated with the choice of an open source software product.

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Compare the advantages and the disadvantages associated with outsourcing the hosting of the firm’s three Web sites.

Advantages	Disadvantages
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BayState Realty is one of the largest and most successful real estate agencies in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with over 370 agents, a headquarters in the Back Bay of Boston and 12 regional offices across New England. The offices in Boston accommodate 280 employees, including both agents and all of the firm’s administrative and operational functions, like Accounting and Information Technology, on three floors of a financial district high-rise. Each HQ employee has a wired workstation running on a local area network (LAN). The LAN allows office access to common services and to share high-end printers, computer projection systems, and local data-back-up servers. Employees also use a variety of wide-area networks (WANs) to access corporate information systems as well as a rich body of documents, photographs, and property videos stored on BayState’s servers that are hosted at the off sight, BayState Realty Data Center.

As part of day-to-day operations, the firm employs a customer relationship management (CRM) system to maintain information on its high-end corporate and residential clients as well as potential clients. The firm also maintains large, multi-media files of photographs, floor plans, and video tours for all of the properties it represents for its clients. In addition, the firm operates an Internet site to market its services to the public, an Extranet site for the management of its commercial real estate business in collaboration with corporate partners and affiliations across the globe, and an Intranet site as a knowledge repository for sharing real estate selling and management best practices, and as a gateway to many other firm-wide information resources.   The culture at BayState is fast-paced but highly collaborative which means that timely access to property information and related artifacts is essential for success.

Sally Smith is the chief information officer (CIO) for BayState.   In this role, Sally must ensure that firm employees have access to all of the software required to enable BayState’s core business processes – i.e. working with customers around the buying and selling, or the leasing and renting of either commercial or residential real estate. Though this software is essential to transacting, managing, and innovating within the firm, it is also viewed as an overhead cost. Therefore, part of Sally’s job is to manage the total cost of the firm’s software ownership (TCO). To this end, Sally focuses on the procurement and deployment of a limited set of well-established, off-the-shelf products in line with the needs of the organization. She also works to leverage open source software products when it makes sense to do so.

For example, in terms of system software, BayState employees use only Dell laptop and desktop computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system. BayState (Dell) servers also run Microsoft operating systems. However, she was obliged to add Android smart phones and tablets to this list at the insistence of the sales staff. Cisco (network management) and Symantec (information security) software products are uniformly deployed to manage BayState networks and to protect the firm’s hardware platforms from unauthorized intrusion, malware, and computer viruses. For general purpose software, Sally has again settled on Microsoft Office as the firm’s suite of personal productivity tools, Internet Explorer for Web browsing, Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, and Microsoft SharePoint for Intranet and Extranet collaboration. These choices allow Sally to negotiate favorable licensing terms with Microsoft for the initial acquisition of products, to standardize and minimize implementation costs, and to limit firm investments in ongoing staff training and product documentation and support. At the same time, her technical staff is experimenting with Linux as an open source alternative to Microsoft SQL Server within the Data Center.

For the specific business functions of the firm, Sally’s information technology team has worked closely with their line-of-business colleagues to select best-in-breed application specific software. These software products include the CRM system mentioned previously as well as an Accounting System, a Human Resource Management System, a Real Estate Sales Documentation and Management System, a Rental Property Management System, and many others process-enabling application systems. In making these choices, the firm has focused first and foremost on the “fit” of each application specific product to ensure that it complements the firm’s ongoing business process. Here choices are made to ensure both proper alignment between the business and tis enabling software and effective cost control. Sally and her colleagues have resisted the temptation to customize these software products to better fit with the business. Instead, they have adapted the firm’s business processes to make the best use of the software in question and in so doing better control the TCO for that software.

More recently, the BayState IT team has taken a number of steps to expand the software standards for the firm. As employees have asked for smart phone and tablet computers, Sally’s team has worked to identify products that fit best within the overall embedded base of BayState’s existing hardware and software acquisitions, thus minimizing integration costs for these new products. The IT staff members operating the firm’s data center have begun the implementation of Linux (an open source software product) as the operating system of choice for servers running shared applications, like Accounting, HR and CRM. Finally, Sally found that it made more sense for the firm to outsource the hosting of its Web sites to a third party because the hosting firm was better equipped for 24 X 7 support of firm Web sites. The hosting company also enjoyed greater economies of scale in operating and maintaining BayState Realty’s Web site platforms.

Answer 1

A.

System Software	General Purpose software	Application software
Android	Microsoft office	Customer Relationship Management software
Microsoft's Windows operating software	Internet Explorer	Human Resource Management software
Cisco and Symantec Software	Microsoft Outlook	Real Estate sales Documentation
	Microsoft sharepoint	Rental Property management system

B.

Elements of TCO	Explanation
Acquisition costs	Acquisition costs are the elements of TCO which consist of equipment costs before taxes, after the commissions, purchase , discount, incentives .
Operating Costs	The Operating costs in TCO consist of services which are needed to put an element into the business use.
Personnel costs	Personnel costs in TCO focus on administrative staffing, support personnel , Facility Housing
Opportunity cost	The opportinity cost element focuses on the optimization of the total cost of ownership which focuses on the partner and also on competency on yours

C. The CIO of BayState Realty Sally Smith focuses on the following,

1. Procurement and deployment of a limited set of well-established , Off-the-shelf products in line with the needs of the organization.

2. And also on the leverage open source software products when it makes sense to do so.

D. BayState Realty chose off the shelf software packages because,

1. It has lower Up front cost

2. It consists of many features which are needed

3. It includes maintenance software

4. Easy to upgrade

E. Linux is sometimes used in the data center instead of Microsoft SQL because it includes the aplications like accounting, HR , CRM .

The risks of using open source in data centers are,

1. They reduce one to one communication

2. The location of data centers are far from network hubs

3. They have security related issues because of increased dependency on data center provider.

F.

Advantages	Disadvantages
Web hosting is cheaper	It does not have control on website
It does not requires hardware	It has privacy issues
It gives 24 X 7 supporting websites	It has security issues
It maintains websites very well	It does not have proper control on hiring of people who work on websites