Club IT III
Brad Rainier
XBIS/219
8/11/2013
Kimberly Wheeler

Club IT is a downtown night club owned by Ruben Keys and Lisa Tejada. The night club offers music, food, and beverages to its customers. The owners have just completed a total renovation of the inside of the club. After completing the renovation they are now working to improve their information technology. Making improvements to their information technology will positively impact their business efficiencies. This will ensure that they are utilizing all of the resources that are available to remain the number one night club in the area, increase profit margins, and also position them to possibly open a second club in the future. After interviewing Ruben and the employees of the club, I have identified three areas of concern. These areas of opportunity include communication, online presence, and supply chain management. I have completed a technology plan that will assist with addressing the areas of opportunity at Club IT. The plan includes 7 major criteria that describe how these improvements will positively impact the business and also how they can be implemented at the club. Organization Description and Demographic Information
The first criterion of the technology plan provides a description of the organization and its demographics. Club IT is a downtown music venue. The nightclub offers live music on weekends, and has live DJ’s that play different genres of music such as hip-hop, techno, and live 40’s, throughout the week. Club IT is made up of the two owners, Ruben and Lisa, and 19 other employees who work hard to keep the night club functioning. The employees include an assistant manager, four bar tenders, six servers, two stewards, two short order cooks, and four security guards. Club IT’s main customer base includes mostly Net Generation and Millennials. Goals and Strategy
Criteria two involves identifying a clear set of goals for the club. It also includes the strategy for implementing the new information systems and how they will benefit the business. The club’s current goals include improving its communication technology, creating an online presence, and improving their supply-chain management. The owners also want to implement a management information system capable of providing them timely feedback on Club IT’s operational efficiencies. Club IT’s long term goal is to open up a second venue in a different location to expand its brand. The new information systems will play a major role in achieving these goals. Improving the communication technology of the club will not only provide faster internet speeds, but it will also enable the owners and employees to manage their orders for their supplies, as well as allowing customers to connect wirelessly to the internet while they are at the club. This improvement will positively impact the business functionality as well as offering customers an access point to the web. Creating an online presence is vital to the clubs future success. If the owners want to expand and open a second location, they will need to take advantage of the benefits that the web has to offer. By creating an intuitive website for the club, not only are you taking advantage of marketing the company towards your main customer base, but you can also sell tickets over the website, collect payments, and allow the tickets to be printed through a printer at customer’s homes. This saves the company overhead costs of having to have staff available to sell tickets, and also is more of a convenience for its customers. Club IT’s supply chain management is another area where the club can improve on. Currently the club is using over five different vendors to supply them with their food, beverages, and other supplies. Streamlining the process of ordering electronically will improve the clubs efficiency and ability to manage their supplies. Professional Development
Providing a professional development strategy to ensure that all employees are properly trained to the new systems is very important. When the new systems are installed, the employees will go through onsite training at the club. Training will be offered on the two Sunday’s directly after the equipment is installed. The employees training will be provided by the owners. Training will include topics such as how employees can access their orders, manage supplies, and also assist customers with connecting their wireless devices to the company WI-FI connection. Ruben and Lisa will also have to go through training to learn the management information system and how to retrieve the data they are looking for to manage the company. This training will be provided to Ruben and Lisa only by the support team of the manufacture of the equipment.
Assessment of Needs Assessing the needs of the club involves looking at the hardware, software, telecommunication services, and any other services, that are required to improve the club’s information technology. Currently, communication is a serious problem for Club IT. At the club, Ruben and Lisa have been utilizing a dial-up internet speed to conduct their business. Even though a dial-up connection may be less expensive than a DSL or cable service, the Club is suffering severely because of the restraints the dial-up connection is putting on the business. The dial-up modem that is currently being utilized, is taking up the phone line used at the club when someone is connected to the internet. Club IT will be purchasing a high speed internet connection with wireless capabilities. The new internet connection and wireless router will be able to be installed in one day and can be installed prior to the clubs operational hours. Club IT will also be establishing an entirely new website. Establishing a strong online presence is imperative in today’s market especially with the club’s main customers are Net Generation and Millennials. The new website will allow the club to sell tickets over the website, collect payments, and allow the tickets to be printed through a printer at customer’s homes. The club will also take advantage of creating profile pages on the major social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. This enables the ability to communicate the featured music as well as the club’s music calendar and specials to its customers. To completely overhaul the current website and redesign a new user-friendly and intuitive Club IT will hire a graphic designer. The new website will be created over a months’ time and will integrate all of the current website features including the employee portal however will include all new rich graphics, and photos of the club’s new interior design. The club’s existing website will stay available until the graphic designer replaces it with the new page. The final updates to Club IT include integrating a transaction processing system and a management information system. These systems will enable the company to manage information and retrieve it in real-time. They also enable the company to improve other areas such as its supply-chain management. The two systems will take a week to get running however the club will not have to be closed while the transition is taking place. Budget The budget is the next criteria of my technology plan for Club IT. The improvements that are going to be made at the club are not cheap. Ruben and Lisa currently understand that if they spend the money now, the efficiencies that will be gained at the club will assist with recouping their investment quickly. The total upgrades will cost Ruben and Lisa $15,000.00 to install. This is a large sum of money considering their 2004 year end net income was just over $24,000.00. The new high-speed internet connection with WI-FI installed is $1500.00 to install. The monthly rate is $75.00 per month, however with the new abilities of integrating ticket sales and merchandise sales online, this expense will be covered. To hire a graphic designer and completely overhaul the website will cost $5000.00. The benefit with the website is this is a flat fee that is charged and the site is maintained by the software that the graphic designer uses. There is no added monthly fee for the actual website itself. We will be integrating the ability to accept payments through the new site. There are several services that I have researched that charge 1% of each sale to wire the money securely into the club’s bank account which is well worth the money. The big ticket items that Club IT is investing in include the transaction processing system and the management information system. These two systems total $8000.00 which is 53% of the entire budget. The remaining $500.00 will be for paying the employees for training on the two Sundays after the systems are installed. Evaluation Evaluating the progress of the new upgrades is extremely important. Ruben and Lisa want to ensure that their $15,000.00 investment was worth the money. The owners will conduct an evaluation for their renovations. They will conduct a quarterly review to see what progress has been made. The high speed internet connection is something that is understood and is essentially paying for itself. The owners will ensure that the connection is reliable and as long as they do not have any connection issues it is well worth the monthly fee. They will measure the efficiency of the new website, by comparing the cost of having to pay staff to sell tickets at the club, compared to having the tickets available inline 24 hours a day at the cost of 1% per sale. They will also be able to measure their online presence by comparing overall sales. With the integration of the free advertising through social networking, they can measure how much more traffic is coming in and out of the club each month. The new information systems will be measured based on the efficiencies of the company. Ruben and Lisa will be able to monitor cost savings because of the abilities to pull real time data from the club operations. They will also be able to streamline their supply chain management and monitor the cost savings of using one major vendor. Inventory
Currently Club IT is using a dial-up internet connection that is very inefficient. Though the cost is very minimal, however it is hindering the company’s success and costing more money that it is making. Club IT currently has a website that offers limited information about the club. It is not user friendly and lacks the rich graphics that should be highlighting the clubs new interior renovation. Currently the club does not have any kind of transaction processing system and a management information system. All of the financial records, orders, and vendor information, are completed through Lisa’s laptop and entered in on a spread sheet. The technology plan that was completed for Club IT’s owners, Rueben and Lisa, identifies upgrades to the companies information technology. These upgrades will be made to improve the company’s efficiencies as well as ensure the company is successful in the future. The seven criteria in the technology plan break explain each improvement as well as its cost and how it will be implemented.

References
Rainer, R. K., Jr., & Turban, E. (2009). Introduction to information systems: Supporting and transforming business (2nd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
http://bcs.wiley.com/he-bcs/Books?action=index&bcsId=4176&itemId=0470169001