INTRODUCTION AND HARDWARE OVERVIEW

In your responses to your peers, add any additional questions or considerations that you would bring from your point of view being hired by an organization as a business consultant , thinking about specific needs related to the healthcare, business, or technical industries. A business consultant is defined as a professional who provides professional or expert advice in a particular area such as security, management, accountancy, law, human resources, marketing, finance, engineering, science or any of many other specialized fields .

POST #3

To start off determining a company’s IT needs, it is important to know what the company does. If the company sells a physical product, then we can infer that maintaining an accessible server for online sales and traveling sales representatives may be important. From the job description, we can determine the level of security that may be needed and keep that in mind with every consideration and change to the system. Healthcare would have much stricter security protocols and applications than a marketing company because of the very sensitive patient data being stored. We may also need to determine whether information from mobile operations are time-sensitive. This will let us know if they can make do with just a laptop with a WIFI connection to the server, or if they will need to access and send information with urgency through mobile networks.

The most important questions to ask the company would pertain to how the company currently operates and how it would like to operate. First, we will need to go over their current network, hardware, and software setups. This would include inquiring about the number of employees within the company, where they are stationed, and what tech each employee is currently equipped with. From there we can establish what the company would like to have, such as specific hardware and peripherals, and determine what within the system can be repurposed and what needs to be upgraded or replaced. We can finally work through the current work station of each employee and determine what hardware they will need, how everything will operate together, and what software is needed and most capable of accomplishing this.

POST # 4

In order to assist this organization I would first need to know what they do for business. Is it retail? Is it medical? Is it a service that they provide such as accounting and/or tax preparation? Do they have an online presence? Next I would want to know what their goal is; what would they like to accomplish? I would like to know the difficulties they are having or have had as well as things that they feel are successful within the organization. Next I think I would want to know how many employees there are and what their duties consist of. Are there remote employees? Will there need to be various restrictions on their administrative privileges depending on the employee’s duties? What kind of security would they like? Do they want to use cloud-based storage? What kind of software do they require? Would they like to utilize project management software? And lastly, what is their budget? These are the questions that come to mind with my limited, yet growing IT knowledge.