Mgmt320 Mod 2 Review

Assignment 2.3

MGMT320

06/13/2015

Functional Silos

Functional silos came about in order to separate major tasks into smaller more easily organized units. At first horizontal silos were common setup to work as in series processes. Then vertical silos became common with departments such as Accounting, HR and Marketing working on their areas of responsibility and submitting the results up to the next level of the organization. Before ERP functional silos were not using the same information systems as the other silos. A lot of extra work and expense went into getting data to and from different systems.

IT Architectures

Distributed Architecture shares resources and applications between clients and the server. Each is connected to a network and data center. Centralized systems have all end user Clients or PC’s routed to a mainframe data center where the applications and file storage reside. The type of system best for ERP may depend on the size, diversity and how many locations the organization has. For a small organization centralized. For a larger one distributed IT seems to be the most flexible and capable.

Levels of Systems

Horizontal levels consist of Strategic Management, Tactical Management. Executive levels are horizontal. Functional operations like HR, Accounting, Finance, Marketing, Manufacturing and MIS are vertical levels

Systems Integration

The first step in system integration is resource categorization. This step involves getting the inventory of hardware and software resources, operating system platforms and IS architecture. Basically what do we have to work with? The next step is compliance and standards. Here things such as database or other data used by the applications meet known standards for compliance. The third step is Legacy Support Systems. This step is to develop a plan of how to support and integrate older legacy applications. The fourth step is middleware tools. This is developing tools or a...