Question

Jeffery Smith founded Smith’s technology in 1994 in Melbourne, Australia, with $10,000 and a unique
vision of how technology should be designed, manufactured and sold. More than 5 million customers later
and with an annual IT budget of approximately $500 million per year, Smith has made an indelible mark
on the computer industry—and the world. The enterprise sells more than 1,000 apps every day to
customers in 120 countries and employs 40,000 people worldwide.

Covid has had a significant impact on the organisation where they have realise that a lot of their systems
across Australia (i.e. Sydney, Perth and Melbourne) are not integrated and therefore it is very difficult for
them to reconcile their accounts and inventory stocks using their Enterprise Resource Planning system
(ERP) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) at the end of the every financial year. This year was worse
because their chief accountant could not travel to the other centres because of the Covid restrictions. As
the Chief Enterprise Architect, you have been hired to help their IT Strategy and Technology Department
to design a solution that would enable real-time updating of information across the three locations. You
would therefore have to map out future directions for the IT company, with a three-year roadmap which
involves investments in the tens of millions of dollars such as SAP ERP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Data
Warehouse Systems and Business Intelligence Reporting Systems.

Discuss the business problems faced by Smith’s technology and is it a problem associated
with the lack of good enterprise architecture practice?

Answer 1

Covid'19 pandemic had affected everyone in one way or another. Almost all business sector is diminished due to the challenge of less interaction between people. Now things are all getting digitalized and coming back. IT companies should make use of this opertunity and pave a new path to success actually. IT engineers are the ones who can tackle this challenge by providing a digital platform for everyone and make them back to business.

Here, in Smith's technology, the same had happened. The human interactions are reduced and thereby the business. The authorities are not able to reach at where they supposed to be. There by the ERP integrations are all failed to get updated.  A solution can be made in the digital platform itself. A cloud based system to control the ERP from the headquaters itself.

The company server space should be transferred to a cloud platform. A well structured and secured cloud service with backup system can adopted. This will make the company data well protected and loss-free. Now all the systems of company across all contries should be connected and work in a single cloud storage system. It will be using the same application installed in the cloud. So the ERP system is now in cloud storage and used as a shared application around all systems.

Now all the data can be monitered and analysed from the headquaters itself. Integration and updations are made much easier and faster. Upgrading of ERP system also is made easier as only one application need to take care insread of upgrading in all individual systems. This combined with a proper communication path through internet itself will solve the problem to a 100%. Also this will help the company to save a lot of resources and money. No more physical storages and infrastructures have to be maintained, no more travelling around globe for integrations and updations. All these together make the company more forward.