Sheffield Hallam University

ACES

BSc Routes

Module 12-5820-01L

Digital Enterprise

Assessment

Group Sections

Module 12-5820-01L Digital Enterprise

Assessment: Group Project (40% of module assessment)

Information about the Assessment

Aims	· To understand e-Business, its categories and their applications. · To appreciate the benefits and limitations of e-Business · To appreciate the factors that impact on success and failure of e-Business · To apprehend and to be able to implement the architecture of infrastructure for conducting e-Business · To assess the requirements for securing e-Business and ensuring privacy of users
Objectives	· To develop e-Business strategies · To justify the strategies economically, socially and ethically · To model the architecture of e-Business
Outcomes	· ScreenCast Video

Method of Working

You are to organise yourselves in groups of 4 (Definitely not 5).  One member of the group has to notify "Mo Rezai" by email, quoting:

a) The module - Digital Enterprise

b) The tutorial group belong to. (Example: Mon, 12:00 am)

c) Names of members in the group

d) This email must be copied to the other members of the group.

Those students who have not organised themselves into a group will be assigned a group at random by your tutor on Friday 30th of October. Beyond this date, composition of the groups can not be altered.

Note that it is not due to volume of work that this project is done in a group. Group working is believed to encourage peer-to-peer learning. Work on all deliverables as a group and do not subdivide the tasks.

Resources

· Learning Materials from “Digital Enterprise” module

· Additional external web-based materials identified by the teaching team and yourself

· Additional reading materials indicated throughout teaching of the module

· Access to the module instructors

Requirements outline

You are to develop a business strategy, prepare to build and prototype the proposed system.  You need to use your initiative, inline with the taught concepts to formulate a venture. Examples of projects you may want to consider are Intranets, Extranets, online shops, collaborative tools, community forums, info-mediaries, etc. Note that the intended users are to be both the employees of the online venture (in administrative role) and the public consumers.

Important Note: The following lists are to be used as mere example of issues. They may or may not apply to your venture. These lists do not attempt to cover all issues - You must decide on the issues - You must develop your business case study/business strategy. Nevertheless, example of issues you may consider are:

· Outline of business requirements.  Examples of issues you might need to consider are:

· An evaluation of services and/or products - What is it you want to do? - How would you classify what you want to do? - How would you describe your business model? - Are you selling a product? - Are you offering a service? - Are you offering value-added services to promote a product or to develop a customer base?

· Product and customer analysis in order to justify the strategy - You may bring in relevant current social and economical issues in order to justify your insertions - Why do you think products/services are valuable to the public/consumer? How do you intend to generate revenue from the venture? - Who are the customers? - What is the customer profile?

· Promotional plan - An outline of strategies that you think should be in place to drive traffic to the shop - What is the size of the market? - Who are the competitors? - How would the customers find out of your services? Why would the customers come to you? How would you develop competitive advantage over your competitors?

· Indication of suppliers of merchandise - This may be more important if your merchandise/product is information - Where is it to come from? - What are the issues with regard to making sure there is a continuous supply of merchandise/product/information? - What are the issues with developing the information, making sure it stays relevant, etc.

· An appraisal of issues with administration of the system - This is about the back-end of the system - An employee view of the system as oppose to what the customers and the general public see - What tasks are there to ensure effective continuous operation and effective maintenance ? - What expertise do you need to maintain the system? - What employee roles do you require to work with the system? -

· etc

· Technical requirements -

· An indication of a domain name for the venture - You must investigate to make sure that this domain name is available - How or from where would you obtain the domain name? - Which service provider would you use to mange the domain name and what are its associated costs?

· An appraisal of how you may develop the system - Would you use open source, commercial solutions or build from scratch? What are the advantages and disadvantages of these? - How would you justify your approach? What expertise would you required to build/configure and maintain the system? What are the associated costs? etc

· An evaluation of alternatives before opting for a choice - a number of open source shopping carts and commercial products and services to help you develop a case for opting to use a system for developing the online shop and to administer content, products, etc

· A discussion of how you may host the site - You must consider and state alternative strategies for hosting the site to help you develop the discussion - Are you taking advantage of out-sourcing? Do you have examples of service providers? What are their services and associated costs? - What about in-house development? What are the issues, advantages and disadvantages of in-house development versus out-sourcing?

· Requirement Model -

· One use case diagram, indicating all envisaged roles, functionalities, privileges, authentication and authorisation in the proposed system. In this section you must include all user levels you envisage will access the system i.e. not only the consumer but also staff with different levels of privilege to use the shop

Submission and deadline

Submission: Submission of work is on a CD at the Furnival Reception. Each group is required to make one submission and a submission will consist of two files on one CD. You must submit one CD that contains two files:

· Screencast Video: As a group you will produce a 5-10 minute video that storyboards and articulates the deliverables. All members of the group must participate in the ScreenCast. No Participation will result in Zero mark for the member. Names of members and the module should be stated on the CD.

Hand-in date: You must hand-in the CD at the Furnival reception by no later than 4:00PM on Friday, 01 April 2011. The normal regulations for the submission of late work apply available at: http://students.shu.ac.uk/rightsrules/regs.html

Point to consider: Blaise Pascal once wrote, "I am writing you a long letter, because I haven't got time to write you a short one". Emphasis must be on words and phrases such as;

· outline

· present

· annotated diagram

· use models to present

· enhanced communication with client

You must keep in mind that you are developing a business proposal that should be used as the instrument to communicate the requirements, proposals, strategies, system architectures, etc, with a potential client - Therefore you must consider and keep in mind that you are applying yourself as a professional and a practitioner so marks are rewarded for innovative and clear presentation. You are encouraged to use a variety of presentational skills including diagrams, rich pictures, hierarchical presentations, tables, screenshots, bulleted points, etc to enhance communication.  Marks will be awarded for demonstrating agility in easy to comprehend presentations.

Assessment Marking Scheme

Strategy	<35%	35-39%	40-49%	50-59%	60-69%	70-79%	80%>
Business Strategy (30%)	Inaccurate and irrelevant understanding of the objectives and the requirements in terms of problems/short-falls/position/community/etc.	Some awareness of problem and objectives, but they are not clear or not appropriate. Limited awareness of the required results. It is regurgitation/bookwork as oppose to application to a domain.  No clear objectives.	It may still be limited but it demonstrates a good understanding of the requirements. Demonstrates thinking process and understanding of business and e_Business concepts and contexts. Clear and appropriate objectives are stated. Demonstrates good understanding of what one is doing and the final product.	+ demonstrates some awareness of critical points about doing business electronically.  A few drivers and inhibitors of electronic strategies are also identified. There is good evidence of critical thinking and understanding of issues that relate to doing business online.	+ demonstrates critical understanding of requirements. Indicates consequences of potential flaws and benefits of the strategies.  Demonstrates clearly how the objectives will be achieved.	+ insertions are well justified and sensible. There is critical appraisal of the objectives and the requirements and critical evaluation of how these may be realised.	+ analyses environment and identifies the position of online merchant relative to others.  Puts in perspective the need for digital thinking in managing, communicating, informing, supporting the customers.
Promotional plan (10%)	No valid plan is outlined. None or few strategies are offered for developing the business into a revenue generating entity.	Develops an outline of few things to do in order to generate interest in the shop.	Demonstrates a good level of understanding of why marketing and promotional activities are important in success of online business.	+ develops a good number of strategies that takes advantage of online and offline marketing methods and tools for promoting the business.	+ states methods for driving traffic to the website.	+ demonstrates good comprehension of aligning promotional plans with business objectives.	+ strategies may make use of 3rd parties such as search engine marketing tools, Web-II community sites, info-mediary / price-comparison sites, etc. Demonstrates initiative in developing marketing strategies.
Technical requirements (20%)	There is very little investigation of what there is available.  Insertions are rudimentary and amounts to naming a few.	Sensible domain name for the business is suggested. Student has explored availability of domain name and has brought an outline of costs of management. Some indication of awareness and understanding of available systems and what their capabilities/functionalities are. At least two open source systems and one commercial approach are investigated.	+ extends the discussion to cover benefits and drawbacks of using open source and where the support may come from versus commercial approaches. Brings in actual costs for the commercial offerings. Appraisal of domain name may extend to exploring more than one service provider.	Discussion covers a number of system examples and group demonstrates understating through comparing and contrasting these systems. Indicates a service provider for hosting the implementation.	+ Discussion is instrumental in helping the group decide which system/approach to use for the implementation.	+ Brings in strategies for hosting the system including costs, benefits and drawbacks. Discussion is comprehensive in the way it compares and contrasts out-source and in-house hosting.	+ identifies comprehensive and appropriate criteria according to which the different strategies are to be compared and contrasted. Discussion is flawless. It is complete and helpful in identifying the way forward. In conclusion clear decisions are made and discussion well justifies these decisions.   Shows initiative and innovative approaches to realising the objectives.
Requirement model (10%)	There is no user model or it is poor. Very few valid use cases. Does not conform to UML notation.	There is an attempt with some valid use cases and roles although there are some errors and inaccuracies.	Use case diagram is not robust but it does demonstrate a good number of relevant and valid use cases and roles.	User model is good with a large number of valid use cases and roles.  Tries to be robust with a few number of uses of valid includes and extends.  All are in line with the outlined business strategy.	User model is comprehensive.  There is good evidence of cohesiveness between the user model, business strategy and the required back end functionalities.	A very robust model that promotes the use of implementation reuse.	A very complete use case diagram.   All the indicated use cases and roles are sensible and inline with the user requirements and the business strategies. User model will be instrumental in implementing the system.  It is flawless.
Presentation (clarity, conciseness, professionalism and accuracy of communication)  (30%)	Little apparent structure; unclear or inaccurate. Presentation is verbose with no aid from intuitive methods. Little preparation - Good evidence of lack of rehearsal, editing, reflection.	Difficult to understand the main features, often inaccurate. Little use of presentational techniques such as table, graphs, etc.	Understandable but lacking in clarity or accuracy, or of poor structure.  Some professional practice shown. Evidence of some consideration in preparing to present in front of camera. Takes on board some of the points raised in Media production induction session.	Understandable; well structured; mostly accurate. Some professional practice shown. Uses some of the models that have been discussed during the delivery. Induction has been instrumental in helping develop the media.	Clear; well structured; concise; accurate. Appropriate professional practice shown. Anticipates and attempts to address some of the issues client might have.	+ presentation is instrumental in effectively communicating the ideas and the details to the client. Approach and communication is business-like.	+ good use of language and style. Clear evidence of professional practice. Good evidence of work (editing and reflection) to produce the deliverable.