For Part B: you are fulfilling the role as an employee of Mafisa Minerals.

Mafisa Minerals recently acquired the St George's Chrome Mine in Steelpoort in the Limpopo province. Two months after the acquisition, you receive the following e-mail forwarded by the

Financial Manager of Mafisa Minerals.

To: Finance Manager Mafisa Minerals From: Senior IT Manager Re: Integration of systems at St Georges Mine

Dear Colleague

My team has just concluded an in-depth analysis of the systems used at St Georges and has found that they are incompatible with the software that we use across the rest of the Mafisa Group. When we conducted our initial evaluation of the system prior to the acquisition of the mine, the third-party service provider to which St Georges had outsourced the IT function assured us that it was simply a matter of integrating their existing systems into our system.

We have discovered that integration is not a viable option and it has become cumbersome to make proper use of the information outputs from their system.

Currently, we have been maintaining the mines financial and safety records using the existing system and then compiling management reports by manually consolidating the results, but this is not a viable long-term solution.

My proposal is that we upgrade St Georges systems by installing licensed copies of the financial and safety software that Mafisa uses across the group and then converting St Georges financial and safety files so that they are compatible with that software.

St Georges reports would then be consistent with the rest of the Mafisa Group.

Kind regards IT Manager

PART B

REQUIRED: (Students must refer to the above scenario in their answers.) For Part B: you are fulfilling the role as an employee of Mafisa Minerals.

(a) Discuss the difference between the centralisation and decentralisation of an organisation's information technology (IT) system, including client-server architecture.

(b) Discuss the various IT changeover methods and recommend the best IT changeover method to get St George's onto the Mafisa Minerals IT system.

(c) Post implementation, the board requires that both Mafisa and St George's have similar data management at an organisational level. Discuss the features of modern organisational structure and their approach to data that can assist the board with the post-implementation review.