Case Study 1-6

Introduction This issue for case study 1-6 is brought to us by Steve Nelson and the company of the Gregg’s Appliances, Inc. The HH Gregg Company was founded on April 15, 1955 in Indianapolis by Henry Harold Gregg and his wife. The initial store was an 800 square feet appliance showroom and office. Since then the company has expanded and with that expansion the company needed more and more information technology in order to harness the power of the information they had acquired. But in 2006 the current CIO, Steve Nelson, was facing a deadline. The deadline was the HP, which was Gregg’s principal information technology vendor, has chosen to discontinue support for its line of HP 300 mainframe processors. Gregg’s relied upon those mainframes for its transaction process and inventory management applications. The last support date for those mainframes was December 31, 2006. This case study goes through the steps that Gregg’s took when Steve Nelson realized they needed a replacement for their mainframe.
Case Summary 2003 was the year when HP issued its plan to discontinue support of the 3000 systems. At the time of the announcement the previous CIO, John Baxter Burns, believed that this was just the push the company needed to get off the old IDEAS/3000 application site. Burns developed a project and from early 2004-2006 the company reviewed dozens of proposals, countless demonstrations, dismissing one after the other as solutions that would not work.
Project Approach:
1. Create an inventory of the existing IT infrastructure, including hardware and software applications. [Done by April 2004]
2. Identify needed applications for the business. All facets of the organization will be examined. 3. Recommend vendors for hardware, software, operating system, and database management system. 4. Design a migration methodology—whether porting, replacing,