Strategic IT Plan

  

Strategic IT Planning: Your 3-Step Process

Introduction

Strategic IT Planning is required to ensure your resources and assets continue providing the results and the support your organization needs.

What is a Strategic Plan?

It is a roadmap to achieving a goal. It may cover your entire department or responsibility or it may focus on a specific issue or element of your role. It can be long and involved or a simply one-page document that provides guidance and steps you need to implement to achieve a goal.

Making it Happen

There are a few things that are important to your success. While it may seem that developing the Strategic Plan is the hardest part, most plans fail because of the implementation. The key is to keep it small and be successful, then build on that success for the next initiative. Don’t bite off too much or try to be too ambitious.

• Take your time and keep it manageable

• Link your plan to your company’s strategy

• Justify your initiative and get buy-in and support

• Don’t re-invent, rebuild

• Go slow, manage change

• Set aside time from your operational responsibilities to make it happen

Without a Strategic Plan, you and your team won’t be effective and you won’t be able to get results, get attention and get ahead.

Why you need an IT Strategy:

Redirect from tasks to opportunities and result

• Switch from fighting fires to preventing fires

• Reduce risk with planning and a longer view

Most Strategic Plans never get written or they fail because they are too involved and complex. Keep them simple and use these three basic steps as your core approach. Ask yourself these questions:

1. Why do you need to do it? What is your goal?

2. What are the things you need to get done to achieve your goal?

3.  How can you make those things happen?

By following the 3 steps above and writing them down, you will have the outline of your Strategic IT Plan. Then, you establish the tactical things that will help you implement your plan.

Implementation Plan

Once you have established your strategic plan using the 3-step process, you need to develop your implementation plan. This includes getting approval and resources as well as the steps you need to take to achieve your strategic objective.

1. Set the objective for each step

2. Analyze internal/external factors

3. Develop solutions

4. Identify and eliminate barriers

5. Allocate resources (people, time, money)

6. Develop detailed tasks

7. Implement your plan!

Step Implementation

What Are The Roadblocks?

How Can You Overcome The Roadblocks?

What Resources Do You Need?

What Are The Timelines?

What Are The Main Steps To Implement Your Plan?

research questions and hypotheses

 Primary Task Response: Within the Discussion Board area, write 300–500 words that respond to the following questions with your thoughts, ideas, and comments. This will be the foundation for future discussions by your classmates. Be substantive and clear, and use examples to reinforce your ideas.

Quantitative research questions use the scientific method to answer and, therefore, each research question has two associated hypotheses.

  • What are the differences between research questions and hypotheses?
  • What key information needs to be included in quantitative research questions and hypotheses?
  • Provide an example of one quantitative research question and its two associated hypotheses.

Data analytics

  

1 Financial Condition of Banks. The file Banks.csv includes data on a sample of 20 banks. The “Financial Condition” column records the judgment of an expert on the financial condition of each bank. This outcome variable takes one of two possible values—weak or strong—according to the financial condition of the bank. The predictors are two ratios used in the financial analysis of banks: TotLns&Lses/Assets is the ratio of total loans and leases to total assets and TotExp/Assets is the ratio of total expenses to total assets. The target is to use the two ratios for classifying the financial condition of a new bank. Run a logistic regression model (on the entire dataset) that models the status of a bank as a function of the two financial measures provided. Specify the success class as weak (this is similar to creating a dummy that is 1 for financially weak banks and 0 otherwise), and use the default cutoff value of 0.5. 

a. Consider a new bank whose total loans and leases/assets ratio = 0.6 and total expenses/assets ratio = 0.11. From your logistic regression model, estimate the following four quantities for this bank (use R to do all the intermediate calculations; show your final answers to four decimal places): the logit, the odds, the probability of being financially weak, and the classification of the bank (use cutoff = 0.5). 

b. The cutoff value of 0.5 is used in conjunction with the probability of being financially weak. Compute the threshold that should be used if we want to make a classification based on the odds of being financially weak, and the threshold for the corresponding logit. 

c. When a bank that is in poor financial condition is misclassified as financially strong, the misclassification cost is much higher than when a financially strong bank is misclassified as weak. To minimize the expected cost of misclassification, should the cutoff value for classification (which is currently at 0.5) be increased or decreased?

2. Competitive Auctions on eBay.com. The file eBayAuctions.csv contains information on 1972 auctions transacted on eBay.com during May–June 2004. The goal is to use these data to build a model that will distinguish competitive auctions from noncompetitive ones. A competitive auction is defined as an auction with at least two bids placed on the item being auctioned. The data include variables that describe the item (auction category), the seller (his or her eBay rating), and the auction terms that the seller selected (auction duration, opening price, currency, day of week of auction close). In addition, we have the price at which the auction closed. The goal is to predict whether or not an auction of interest will be competitive. Data preprocessing. Create dummy variables for the categorical predictors. These include Category (18 categories), Currency (USD, GBP, Euro), EndDay (Monday–Sunday), and Duration (1, 3, 5, 7, or 10 days). 

a. Create pivot tables for the mean of the binary outcome (Competitive?) as a function of the various categorical variables (use the original variables, not the dummies). Use the information in the tables to reduce the number of dummies that will be used in the model. For example, categories that appear most similar with respect to the distribution of competitive auctions could be combined.

b. Split the data into training (60%) and validation (40%) datasets. Run a logistic model with all predictors with a cutoff of 0.5. c. If we want to predict at the start of an auction whether it will be competitive, we cannot use the information on the closing price. Run a logistic model with all predictors as above, excluding price. How does this model compare to the full model with respect to predictive accuracy? 

d. Interpret the meaning of the coefficient for closing price. Does closing price have a practical significance? Is it statistically significant for predicting competitiveness of auctions? (Use a 10% significance level.) 

e. Use stepwise selection (use function step() in the stats package or function stepAIC() in the MASS package) and an exhaustive search (use function glmulti() in package glmulti) to find the model with the best fit to the training data. Which predictors are used? 

f. Use stepwise selection and an exhaustive search to find the model with the lowest predictive error rate (use the validation data). Which predictors are used?

Graph Algorithm Assignment

Graphs (Help! Really challenging assignment. Would appreciate any bit of help!)

Family tree’s and genealogy software has become more and more prevalent in recent years. From the name you might expect that a family tree would be easily represented by a tree structure, but that is not the case! A more appropriate data structure to represent a family tree would be a type of graph. Using the description of the family that accompanies this assignment, you must represent this family using a graph structure. The graph needs to be a weighted graph. The weights will constitute the types of relationships, I recommend using some kind mapping between numbers and strings to represent the relationships. When adding family members to the graph, this can be done programmatically for the provided family members within the description file. Additionally, I also want there to be an interface in which a user can create a new family member and add them to the tree. This can be a simple CLI where the user provides a name, gender, and age to create a person. Then another simple CLI where they select which member of the family they want the original relationship to be with and what kind of relationship it should be. Finally, they can edit the family member using another CLI and selecting the family member they wish to edit, the operation they wish to perform (edit name, edit age, edit relationship), and then add new relationship between family members which can call a function that you create in order to add the original relationship. Remember the DRY philosophy, where code can be modularized or made into a function, it should be if you plan on using the logic again.

Finally, I want you to make data assertions within the FamilyTree class that enforce certain “rules” that exist in a typical human family. An example would be a person should not have any kind of relationship to itself (a person can not marry themselves, a person can not be their own brother, sister, father, mother, etc.). There should be at least 3 data assertions. These should exists as part of the family tree, not as part of the graph.

As a hint, for a successful design: I would recommend using layers of abstraction. Your graph class is the backing structure to the family tree class. Your family tree should implement methods that interface with the graph class, i.e. add_family_member() should call the constructor to create a node and then call a function within the graph class to add a node to the graph. Then using the relationships function parameter, you can add edges to the graph between the new nodes and the existing nodes. The family tree should be what enforces what relationships can exist through the data assertions, the graph does not care about what relationships are made between family members. Your functions that the user would interface with would be greatly reduced compared to the total number of methods within the classes themselves. The user should be able to add, remove, and modify family members and that’s about it. Therefore those should be your function calls.

Submission Goals

(120 pts.) Create a FamilyTree class that will represent a family tree for a given family.
The class should contain several types of relationships that commonly happen within a family (siblings, marriage, offspring, etc.)

(40 pts.) Programmatically add the family members to the graph as described by the accompanying family description file.
(40 pts.) Give data assertions to the FamilyTree class to enforce restrictions for basic family structure (at least 3); i.e A person can not marry themselves.

(40 pts.) Provide a simple CLI the enables users to add, remove, and edit family members.

graph.py

graph = dict()

graph[‘A’] = [‘B’, ‘C’]

graph[‘B’] = [‘E’,’C’, ‘A’]

graph[‘C’] = [‘A’, ‘B’, ‘E’,’F’]

graph[‘E’] = [‘B’, ‘C’]

graph[‘F’] = [‘C’]

matrix_elements = sorted(graph.keys())

cols = rows = len(matrix_elements)  

adjacency_matrix = [[0 for x in range(rows)] for y in range(cols)]

edges_list = []

for key in matrix_elements:

    for neighbor in graph[key]:

       edges_list.append((key,neighbor))

print(edges_list)

for edge in edges_list:

        index_of_first_vertex = matrix_elements.index(edge[0])

        index_of_second_vertex = matrix_elements.index(edge[1])

        adjacency_matrix[index_of_first_vertex][index_of_second_vertex] = 1

println(adjacency_matrix)

WutherHeightsFamilyTree.docx

The Extended Families of Wuther Heights (Modified):

Family 1

Patrick Earnshaw (M) {id: 001}

Hannah Earnshaw (F) {id: 002}

Relationship: Married

Children:

Catherine Earnshaw (F) {id: 003}

Hindley Earnshaw (M) {id: 004}

Family 2

Andrew Linton (M) {id: 005}

Dolores Linton (F) {id: 006}

Relationship: Divorced

Children:

Isabella Linton (F) {id: 007}

Edgar Linton (M) {id: 008}

            Heathcliff Linton (M) [Adopted] {id: 009}

Family 3

            Hindley Earnshaw (M) {id: 004}

            Frances Byler (M) {id: 010}

            Relationship: Married

            Children:

                        Hareton Earnshaw (M) [Adopted] {id: 011}

Family 4

            Catherine Earnshaw (F) {id: 003}

            Edgar Linton (M) {id: 008}

            Relationship: Married

            Children:

                        Cathy Linton (F) {id: 012}

Family 5

            Isabella Linton (F) {id: 007}

            Children:

                        Linton Heathcliff (M) {id: 013}

Family 6

            Heathcliff Linton (M) {id: 009}

            Children:

                        Linton Heathcliff (M) {id: 013}

Family 7

            Hareton Earnshaw (M) {id: 011}

            Cathy Linton (F) {id: 012}

            Relationship: Married

Family 8

            Cathy Linton (F) {id: 012}

            Linton Heathcliff (M) {id: 013}

            Relationship: Divorced

case study

Answer the four questions noted below.  Please use at least one reference and ensure it’s in APA format (as well as the in-text citation).  Also, ensure to NOT COPY DIRECTLY from any source (student or online source), rather rephrase the author’s work and use in-text citations were necessary.

Describe the CIA triad and the defense in depth principle? Why are those concepts important when designing your network security strategy?

What are the steps for an incident response plan? How does network security play into an incident response plan? 

What are some major differences between open source and commercialclosed source software and solutions? Should you consider one over the other? 

What are firewalls? What are VPNs? What are some alternatives to a traditional firewall? What are some alternatives to traditional VPNs? How does the alternatives improve the traditional version of both?

Note: The essay should include an APA cover page and at least two reference (academic or professional literature) in APA v7 format.

FTK IMAGER LITE

Prepare an investigative report of the forensics data capture conducted using the tool FTK imager lite. 

The paper should provide the following information: 

· Executive Summary of your investigation, including a description of the device or systems and the tool used for the forensics analysis

· Step-by-step description you used to gather data for analysis

· Report on the information that was obtainable from the device

· Graphics evidence that you conducted the forensics data gathering and analysis

The paper should be in a form that would be used for reporting to a court or a law enforcement agency. Be sure to provide graphics evidence of your forensics investigation effort (Screenshots, reports, etc.). References should be in APA format.

   No Plagiarism 

· APA Format required

· 5 pages without References.

Cloud Computing and Digital Forensics

1.) Discuss in 500 words or more the top 5 details that should be included in your cloud SLA.

Use at least Four sources. Use the  Research Databases available from the Danforth Library  as your first choice. 

Include at least 4 quotes from your sources enclosed in quotation marks and cited in-line by reference to your reference list.  

Example: “words you copied” (citation) These quotes should be one full sentence not altered or paraphrased. Cite your sources using APA format. 

Use the quotes in your paragraphs.  Stand alone quotes will not count toward the 3 required quotes.

Write in essay format not in bulleted, numbered or other list format. 

2.) It is sometimes said that information extracted from a router or switch does not necessarily provide specific evidence of a particular crime. What is meant by that?.

If true, what then is the most useful information collected from these devices in an investigation?

 Explain in minimum 250 words 

Week 3 Discussion

 

  1. Identify your field of study (Psychology), the career you chose, and explain why you chose it ( To work with children in my local school system of Fayette County, GA).
  2. Find two sources from the web and two sources from the South  University Online library about your field. List your four sources in  APA format at the bottom of your post.
  3. Share examples of APA in-text citations which will go in the body of your post for two of your references.

When responding to others, comment on search tips that worked for  you, or on why you think academic and professional writing requires such  rigorous documentation in the form of references and in-text citations.

Note that from this week on throughout your college career, the  grading criterion that mentions information literacy includes the  requirement of providing references in APA format to support your ideas.