Chesapeake IT Consultants is a fictitious company created for .docx

Chesapeake IT Consultants is a fictitious company created for
the IFSM 300 Case Study.
CIC Case Study 6/14/2018 rev. 5 1
Chesapeake IT Consultants
Chesapeake IT Consultants (CIC) is a successful Information
Technology consulting services firm
that utilizes proven IT and management methodologies to
achieve measurable results for its
customers. Its customer base includes small to mid-tier
businesses, non-profit organizations
and governmental agencies at the local, state and federal levels.
CIC feels strongly that its
success is dependent on the combination of the talent of its IT
consultants, the best practices
CIC employs, and a dedication to delivering truly beneficial IT
solutions to their clients.
Corporate Profile
Corporate Name: Chesapeake IT Consultants, Inc.
Founded: May 2004
Headquarters: Baltimore, Maryland
Satellite Locations: Herndon, Virginia; Bethesda, Maryland
Number of Employees: 400

Total Annual Gross Revenue: $80,000,000
President and
Chief Executive Officer (CEO): Alvin Morrison
Business Areas
CIC provides consulting services in the following areas:
- Business process redesign,
process improvement
- IT strategy, analysis, planning, system
development, implementation,
and network support
– Requirements analysis; vendor
evaluation, due diligence,
selection and performance management; Service Level
Agreements
Business Strategy
CIC's business strategy is to provide extraordinary consulting
services and recommendations to
its customers by employing highly skilled consultants and
staying abreast of new business
concepts and technology and/or developing new business
concepts and best practices of its
own.

Excerpt from the CIC Strategic Business Plan
While the complete strategic plan touches on many areas, below
is an excerpt from CIC’s latest
Strategic Business Plan that identifies a few of CIC's Goals.
Goal 1: Increase CIC Business Development by winning new
contracts in the areas of IT
consulting.
Goal 2: Build a cadre of consultants internationally to provide
remote research and analysis
support to CIC’s onsite teams in the U. S.
Goal 3: Continue to increase CIC’s ability to quickly provide
high quality consultants to awarded
contracts to best serve the clients’ needs.
Goal 4: Increase CIC’s competitive advantage in the IT
consulting marketplace by increasing its
reputation for having IT consultants who are highly skilled in
leading edge technologies and
innovative solutions for its clients.
Current Business Environment
CIC provides consultants on-site to work with its clients,
delivering a wide variety of IT-related

services. CIC obtains most of its business through
competitively bidding on Requests for
Proposals issued by business, government and non-profit
organizations. A small but growing
portion of its business is through referrals and follow-on
contracts from satisfied clients. CIC
anticipates it will win two large contracts in the near future and
is preparing proposals for
several other large projects.
CIC, as a consulting company, relies on the quality and
expertise of its employees to provide the
services needed by the clients. When it is awarded a contract,
the customer expects CIC to
quickly provide the consultants and begin work on the project.
CIC, like other consulting
companies, cannot afford to carry a large number of employees
that are not assigned to
contracts. Therefore, they need to determine the likelihood of
winning a new contract and
ensure the appropriately skilled consultants are ready to go to
work when needed. CIC relies
on its HR Department to find and hire the personnel that the
line managers need for upcoming
contracts. It is very much a "just in time" hiring situation.
The Headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland, houses
approximately 300 employees. Satellite
offices have been opened in the last two years in both Herndon,
Virginia and Bethesda,
Maryland to provide close proximity to existing clients. It is
anticipated that new pending
contracts would add staff to all locations. The management
team believes there is capacity at
all locations, as much of the consultants' work is done on-site at
the customers' locations.

Strategic Direction
As a small to mid-size business (SMB), CIC recognizes that it
needs to carefully plan its future
strategy. Considering the competitive environment that
contains many very large IT consulting
firms, such as Hewlett-Packard (HP), Booz Allen Hamilton
(BAH), and Science Applications
International Corporation (SAIC), as well as numerous smaller
companies with various skill sets,
market niches, and established customer bases, CIC will be
evaluating how best to position
itself for the future and recognizes that its ability to identify its
core competencies, move with
agility and flexibility, and deliver consistent high quality
service to its clients is critical for
continued success.
One area that is critical to a consulting company is the ability to
have employees who possess
the necessary knowledge and skills to fulfill current and future
contracts. Given the intense
competition in the IT consulting sector, CIC is planning to
incorporate a few consultants in other
countries to provide remote research and analysis support to the
on-site U. S. teams. Since CIC

has no experience in the global marketplace, the Director of HR
has begun examining
international labor laws to determine where CIC should recruit
and hire employees.
Challenges
The two contracts that CIC expects to win very soon will
require the hiring of an additional 75
consultants very quickly. The Director of Human Resources
(HR) is concerned that the current
manual process of recruiting and hiring employees will not
allow his department to be
responsive to these needs as well as the demands of future
growth and increased hiring
requirements. He is looking for a near-term solution that will
automate many of the manual
hiring process steps and reduce the time it takes to hire new
staff. He is also looking for a
solution that will allow CIC to hire employees located in other
countries around the world.
Management Direction
The management team has been discussing how to ramp up to
fill the requirements of the two
new contracts and prepare the company to continue growing as
additional contracts are
awarded in the future. The company has been steadily growing
and thus far hiring of new
employees has been handled through a process that is largely
manual. The HR Director
reported that his staff will be unable to accommodate the hiring
of the 75 new employees in
the timeframe required. The Chief Information Officer (CIO)
then recommended that the

company look for a commercial off-the-shelf software product
that can dramatically improve
the hiring process and shorten the time it takes to hire new
employees. The Chief Financial
Officer (CFO) wants to ensure that all investments are in line
with the corporate mission and
will achieve the desired return on investment. She will be
looking for clear information that
proposals have been well researched, provide a needed
capability for the organization, and can
be cost-effectively implemented in a relatively short period of
time to reap the benefits. The
CEO has asked the CIO to work with HR to recommend a
solution.
Your Task
As a business analyst in the CIO's department, you have been
assigned to conduct an analysis,
develop a set of system requirements, and propose an IT
solution (applicant tracking system or
recruiting system) to improve the hiring process. The CIO has
set up a series of interviews for
you to collect information about the current hiring process and
the requirements for a system.
He has asked you to produce a Business Analysis and System
Recommendation Report (BA&SR)

as your final deliverable.
Interviews
In the interviews you conduct with the organizational leaders,
you hear the comments recorded
below.
CEO: Alvin Morrison
“While I trust my HR staff to address the nuts and bolts of the
staffing processes, what is
critically important to me is that the right people can be in place
to fulfill our current contracts
and additional talented staff can be quickly hired to address
needs of future contracts we win. I
can’t be out in the market soliciting new business if we can’t
deliver on what we’re selling. Our
reputation is largely dependent on having knowledgeable and
capable staff to deliver the
services our clients are paying for and expect from CIC.”
CFO: Marianne Cho
“So glad we’re talking about this initiative. As CFO, obviously
I’m focused on the bottom line. I
also recognize it’s necessary to invest in certain areas to ensure
our viability moving
forward. Having cost effective technology solutions that
improve current processes and enable
future functionality is very important to CIC’s success. We
must consider the total cost of
ownership of any technology we adopt. CIC is run as a lean-
and-mean organization and support
processes must be effective but not overbuilt. We do want to

think towards the future as well
and don’t want to invest in technology with a short shelf-life.
Along those lines, we currently
have a timekeeping and payroll system; and to help support our
bottom line financially, any new
solution should effectively integrate with, but not replace, those
systems.
CIO: Fadil Abadi
“As a member of the IT Department, you have a good
understanding of our overall architecture
and strategy; however, let me emphasize a few things I want to
be sure we keep in mind for this
project. Any solution needs to be compatible with our existing
architecture and systems as
appropriate. Obviously, we have chosen not to maintain a large
software development staff so
building a solution from the ground up does not fit our IT
strategic plan. Our current strategy
has been to adopt Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions that
can be deployed relatively quickly
and leverage industry best practices. In addition, our
distributed workforce means we are very
dependent on mobile computing – this brings some challenges
in term of portability,
maintenance, and solutions that present well on mobile devices.
We’ve been expanding at a
rapid rate and are seeking to expand internationally so any
solution will need to be viable
globally. And last, but certainly not least, CIC’s success is
largely dependent on our ability to
satisfy the requirements of our clients and maintain a reputation
of high credibility, reliability
and security. Any security breach of our clients’ data would
have a devastating effect to our

ability to compete for new business as well as maintain current
clients.”
Director of HR: William Bradley
“Thanks for talking with me today. I see this effort as very
important to the success of CIC. The
rapid growth to date and future plans for expansion have pushed
our recruiting staff, and we
recognize we can no longer meet the hiring and staffing
demands with manual processes. I’m
also interested in solutions that are easy-to-use and can
interface with our existing systems and
enhance processes. I’m willing to consider a basic system that
can grow as CIC grows and
provide more capabilities in the future. I’m sure Suzanne, our
Manager of Recruiting, can
provide more specifics.”
Manager of Recruiting: Suzanne Rodriguez
“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to begin the
process of finding a technology
solution to support our recruiting processes. In addition to
myself, there are 2-3 full-time
recruiters who have been very busy keeping up with the
increased hiring at CIC. It goes without
saying that a consulting company is dependent on having well-

qualified employees to deliver to
our customers. We’re in a competitive market for IT talent and
want to be able to recruit
efficiently, process applicants quickly, and move to making a
job offer to the best candidate
before the competition snaps him/her up. When I talk with my
colleagues in other companies,
they mention applicant tracking systems that have enabled them
to reduce their hiring time by
15-20%. I’m so envious of them and look forward to having our
new solution in place before the
next set of contracts are won and we need to hire 75 (to as many
as 150) staff in a 3-month
period. I do not think my team can handle such an increase in
an efficient and effective
manner. It really seems like there would be a rapid return on
investment in a technology
solution to support and improve the hiring process.”
Recruiters: Paul O’Brien (along with Mac Thompson and Juliet
Jackson)
“This project should have happened 2 years ago but glad it’s
finally getting some attention. As
a recruiter, I’m sort of the middleperson in this process. On one
hand, we have the job applicant
who is anxious to know the status of his/her application and fit
for the advertised position. It’s
important that the recruiters represent CIC well, as we want the
best applicants to want to
come to work for us. Then we have the actual hiring manager in
one of our business areas who
has issued the job requisition and wants to get the best applicant
hired as quickly as
possible. Obviously recruiting is not the hiring manager’s full-
time job, so we’re always

competing for time with other job responsibilities, so we can
keep things moving as quickly as
possible. They look to us to screen resumes and only forward
the best qualified applicants to
them so they can quickly identify their top candidates. Working
with Ted, our administrative
assistant, we need interviews to be scheduled to accommodate
everyone’s calendars. After the
hiring managers make their final selections of who they would
like to hire, it is our task to get
the job offers presented to the candidates - hopefully for their
acceptance. Everything is very
time sensitive, and the current process is not nearly as efficient
as it could be. Applications and
resumes can get lost in interoffice mail or buried in email; and,
when a hiring manager calls us,
we often cannot immediately provide the status of where an
applicant is in the process. This
can be very frustrating all around. Speaking for myself and the
other recruiters, I have high
expectations for this solution. We need to really be able to
deliver world-class service to CIC in
the recruiting and hiring areas to meet the business goals.”
Administrative Assistant: Ted Anderson
“I support the recruiters in the hiring process. After the

recruiters screen the resumes and select
the best candidates for a position, my job is to route those
applications and resumes via
interoffice mail to the respective functional/hiring manager,
receive their feedback on who they
would like to interview and who should be involved in the
interviews, schedule the interviews
based on availability of applicants and the interview team
members, collect the feedback from
the interview team and inform the assigned recruiter of the
status of each candidate who was
interviewed. Then, after a job offer has been made, I coordinate
the paperwork for the new hire
with HR and Payroll to ensure everything is ready to go on the
first day. As you can imagine
when hiring volume is up, I’m buried in paperwork and trying to
keep all the applicants and their
resumes straight, track their status in the process, and ensure
everyone has what they need is
very challenging. Any tool that would help the workflow and
enable many steps in the process
to be done electronically would be wonderful.”
Hiring Manager (in functional area; this person would be the
supervisor of the new employee
and would likely issue the job requisition to fill a need in
his/her department/team):
“While it’s a good problem to have – new business means new
hires -- the current method for
screening applications, scheduling interviews, identifying the
best qualified applicants, and
getting a job offer to them is not working. My team is evaluated
on the level of service we
provide our clients, and it is very important that we have well-
qualified staff members to fulfill

our contracts. Turnover is common in the IT world and that
along with new business
development, makes the need for hiring new staff critical and
time-sensitive. I confess that
sometimes I’m not as responsive to HR as I should be, but this
is only one of several areas I’m
responsible for. I look to the recruiters to stay on top of this for
me. In the ideal world, I’d like
an electronic dashboard from which I can see the status of any
job openings in my area,
information on all qualified candidates who have applied and
where they are in the
pipeline. Electronic scheduling on my calendar of interviews
would be a real time saver. It’s
important that we impress candidates with our technology and
efficiency – after all we are an IT
consulting company—and using manual processes makes us
look bad. And, this system must be
easy to use – I don’t have time for training or reading a 100-
page user’s manual. Just need to
get my job done.
Running Head: LIMITED ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE
LIMITED ACCESS TO HEALTHCARE 2

Limited Access to Healthcare
Student name
University
November 8th, 2018
Introduction
As the world keeps on developing, there are some areas that
have a challenge to access healthcare services. There is a
number of factors that limit these areas access to healthcare. In
other places there are no barriers to access the healthcare
facilities however there is no access to appropriate quality of
care. In this assignment I am going to analyze some of the
barriers that limit healthcare and discuss the potential
intervention and approaches that can be implemented to solve
this problem.
Limited access to healthcare is greatly contributing to the
spread of certain diseases. According to Heather in his book
from rural village to a global village he explains that the rural
areas are the most affected by limited access to healthcare.
According to the research some of the health care services to
treat and prevent chronic diseases are missing in rural areas.
Some of these services are: mental health, substance use and
abuse, preventive care, pediatric and many more. There are
several factors that cause the limitation of healthcare services,
these factors include health illiteracy, geographical barriers,
transportation and mobility.

There are multiple geographical location barriers in
these rural areas where they have no access to healthcare
facilities around them, they are scarcely populated and located
in remote areas. This puts them at risk of limited access to
healthcare.
Lack of means of transportation is also another factor
limiting the access to health services, healthcare facilities are
located far from certain rural areas hence they need to travel to
receive medical assistance. Lack of mobility means is a key
factor to access healthcare, affecting patients who cannot afford
these means.
In many healthcare centers the availability of medical
providers is of one or two professional doctors and sometimes
they are shared by other healthcare facilities. This leads to
limited access to quality healthcare and sometimes the
consumers or the patients might have to wait for long hours for
their specialists to arrive.
Lack of healthcare practitioners is one of the main
challenges the rural areas are experiencing in many parts of the
world. The government is initiating projects to curb these
problems. Although I am not holding a position that can help me
capitalize these approaches which are beneficial to the
community, I will explain these potential approaches that I
conducted research on.
To access the information sources in the university library I
used the PubMed database that helped me access documents that
relate to limited access to health care. I used key words such as
health information search, chronic disease, health care access
and health seeking behavior. I also filtered the number of years
for the articles published to a limited gap of 5 years that gave
me the most current updated articles regarding limited access to
healthcare. From the sources I used I went through them to see
if they have the content that I needed on limited access to
healthcare and if the information was reliable.
In the journal of community health published in October 2013
there is information on how transportation barrier affects the

community (Syed, 2013). This article elaborates the challenges
that are faced by patients in seeking the healthcare services. The
author emphasizes on the disadvantages brought by this barrier
and the negative outcomes that come in hand with the
transportation barrier. In general, the article briefs on the
negativity that is common by patients who have limited access
to healthcare and medical access.
According to an article published on the American journal of
medicine by Ronald and his counterparts they explained the use
of telemedicine (Weinstein, 2014). Telemedicine is simply the
use of technology where a patient receives healthcare services
without physically reaching the health care center. From the
author they came to a conclusion that telemedicine has a lot of
benefits and it can curb the problem of limited access to
healthcare. The author list some of the benefits gained from
telemedicine as follow: is an affordable service to patients who
would have spent much to reach the healthcare, uses on prison
where inmates are not allowed to leave the premises of the
prison and in turn they have limited access to healthcare, is
potentially beneficial for patients with special needs who have
difficulties moving around, among others. This article is helpful
because it enlightens how people who have limited access to
health care can utilize and acknowledge technology to receive
healthcare in the comfort of their homes.
In an article published in 2013 in the journal of medicine
research (Moorhead, 2013), it covered the use of health
information online. The author of this article summarized that
information is being shared online on the social media from
patients, health professionals and the public to curb the limited
access to healthcare. The Article discusses the benefits of health
information online that remark the health issues and improve
the health outcomes. Even though there are many benefits that
come with health information online, the information needs to
be monitored not to violate the privacy and confidentiality of
patients and also to improve its reliability and quality.
Consumer health information has raised concern as many

patients are going online to seek remedies. The use of electronic
devices and communication gadgets has gone up in engaging in
healthy information sharing. This is explained by the author of
the article “the impact of consumer health information on
demand for health services” by Debra SabatiniDwyer and
HongLiu (Dwyer, 2014).
According to the article titled “The home health care routing
and scheduling problem with interdependent services” published
in the health care management science, it addresses the in-home
health care services that are conducted in private homes by
either home care attendants or medical practitioners
(Mankowska, 2014). In this article they were successful in
explaining the advantages of the in-home health care to curb the
problem of limited access to health care for the aged or patients
who couldn’t make to the centers. The author dictates the
application of this approach and the successful outcomes based
on its principles.
Learning from the research
From the scholarly opinions that I learned on limited access to
healthcare, I gathered vital facts on this problem. These articles
had knowledge that enlightened me further on the challenges
and threats that are posed by limited access to healthcare. For
example, I learned that missed appointments with a healthcare
practitioner may lead to a chronic disease worsening due to a
missed follow up to assess the progression of the disease and
recovery. The peer-reviewed journals gave me an opportunity to
gain knowledge about the potential intervention approaches that
can be used to solve the problem of limited access to healthcare.
For example when I read the journals on online health care
information seeking I learned of the advantages that it brings
when patients seek health care on the internet, which is helpful
but also the article highlighted on the disadvantages that can be
brought by the online health seeking information (Emmerton,
2014).

References
A New Dimension of Health Care: Systematic Review of the
Uses, Benefits, and Limitations of Social Media for Health
Communication [Journal] / auth. Moorhead Anne // The journal
of medicine internet research . - 2013.
Dr Google and the Consumer: A Qualitative Study Exploring
the Navigational Needs and Online Health Information-Seeking
Behaviors of Consumers With Chronic Health Conditions
[Journal] / auth. Emmerton Lynne // Journal of medical
internet reserach. - 2014. From Rural Village to Global
Village [Book] / auth. Hudson Heather E.. - Newyork :
Routledge, 2013.
Telemedicine, Telehealth, and Mobile Health Applications That
Work: Opportunities and Barriers [Journal] / auth. Ronald S.
Weinstein Ana Maria Lopez, Elizabeth A. Krupinski // The
American Journal of Medicine. - 2014. - pp. 183-187.
The home health care routing and scheduling problem with
interdependent services [Journal] / auth. Dorota Slawa
Mankowska Frank MeiselChristian Bierwirth // Health Care
Management Science. - 2014. - pp. 15-30.
The impact of consumer health information on the demand for
health services [Journal] / auth. Debra sabatini dwyer
Hongliu // The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance. -
2014. - pp. 1-11.
Traveling Towards Disease: Transportation Barriers to Health
Care Access [Journal] / auth. Samina T. Syed Ben S.
GerberLisa K. Sharp // Journal of Community Health. - 2013. -
pp. 973-993.

Chesapeake IT Consultants is a fictitious company created for .docx

Chesapeake IT Consultants is a fictitious company created for .docx

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