Capt . George Zolla Ph . D . Qualifying Examination April 1996

As in most medium to large institutions, the information system configuration at the Naval Postgraduate School was not specifically architected as it is currently configured, but rather has evolved over the years to meet growing and specialized functional needs. As a result there are islands of automation throughout the School in the form of hundreds of microcomputers and tens of LAN's in addition to the central mainframe computer. The desktop devices are a mix of PC's, Macintoshes and UNIX workstations. These types of information processing platforms are found in business units, administrative offices, and most of the schools and departments throughout the School. In addition, there are stand-alone PCs and Macintoshes used for personal productivity applications. These LANs and stand-alone units are considered by the owning units to be an integral part of information services provided to end-users. Many of them support business applications that duplicate or complement some of the functionality of the central systems. Some of the data used by these local applications are duplicates of the data maintained on the mainframe with some local enhancements. This data is either entered from the same forms that are sent to the business units for entry, entered from reports generated by the central system, or downloaded from the mainframe system for use by local applications. This duplication is quite costly in terms of personnel, hardware and software. But a more critical issue is the timeliness and accuracy of the information on these local systems as compared to the central site systems, and the difficulty of integrating data from multiple systems and platforms. Since there are inconsistencies between multiple sources of data, a major effort involves reconciliation between the data on the local systems and the data on the mainframe. 1. Propose an architecture for the NPS information system that will provide a framework for making decisions about information systems and for improving the school information system in the future. Make sure your proposed architecture identifies the scope, direction, components (with particular emphasis on the networking and telecommunications infrastructure), and relationships between different components. What is the philosophy and related principles that provide the framework for the proposed architecture? 2. Given the symbiotic relationship between information technology and business process reengineering-information technology enables and empowers users to reengineer business processes, and the reengineered processes determine the need for the information technology-suggest a methodology for business process reengineering using the proposed information …