Case Study: Under Milkwood Gaming Pty Ltd|IT Operations Management

Abstract

The purpose of the study is to present the project proposal for adopting cloud based services in Under Milk wood firm company. The proposal is suggested based on the BTOPP framework model. The organization under Milk wood firm is developing Game for all age group customers. The services are transmitted to the customer as online service. Adopting new cloud based technology into the organization environment reduces the cost and management over resources. It increases the productivity of the company. The research work investigates the adoption of cloud based services into the company as well as the feasibility for implementing the cloud based services into the environment.

Introduction

Dynamic business process and huge amount of information are main characteristics for the today’s business. It requires IT which is integral part in IT environment for managing every aspects of organization.  One of the modern information technologies that organization can use and get will more benefit is cloud based services. The movement of current business operations into cloud based service which reduces the operational cost as well as achieve greater benefit.

Gaming is most important entertainment during the technological advancement in hardware and software for all age groups. The improvements in hardware such as processor, sound card, and graphics are the attracted factors for increasing consumers in Gaming industry.  The company under Milkwood Pty Ltd is large game manufacturing company which releases 10 games in the market or being maintained. It gives supports for online games that maintain servers at Sydney, London and Los Angeles. It develops games directly and also outsourced. It runs with employees of 400. The CEO of the company is Dylan Thomas. It releases games for PC’s, MS’s Xbox and Nintendo GameCube. It releases various levels of games. Games sold to customers through distributers over online. It also offers updates, patches through their company web site. The success of the company is the close of customer. It includes the following departments such as administration, marketing, sales, IT, HR, Hardware R&D, software R&D, game development.  The company operates with the following resources such as OS, desktops, servers, networks, online gaming customers,, staff and financial.

Gaming industry includes more operations on software and hardware to deliver quality services to their customers (Murphy 2001).  Gaming industry is undergoing for dramatic changes. The industry is converted from traditional family and friends based activity to online activity.  More number of participants are increasing to make use of the benefit. While increasing the number of users, it increases the connectivity with the server. Online gaming industries are continuously working with latest technologies to engage more number of users over online. The revolution of internet is giving open door for various industries in new dimensions especially for gaming industries.  Internet increases the global market for the gaming industry. People can access their favourite game on any devices, at any time as well as anywhere. The success of gaming industry is mainly based on skill and changes. The developers should have skill for developing games those attract end users. The industry should adopt technological changes.

Scope

The project proposal analyses the arguments of the company and proposing alternate strategies for improving the performance of the organization based on B-Business, T-Technology, O-Operations, P-Processes and P-People -BTOPP implementation. As part of proposal competency matrix for staff will be proposed for better utilization of staff. The proposal will be proposed as feasibility study for further approving as well as implementation. It analyses of extending competency matrix for all software and hardware staff.

Objectives

The research study includes the following objectives such as

• Proposal will be proposed to find the alternate strategies for improving the business operations

• An efficient strategy for improving the business performance of Under Milkwood Gaming Pty Ltd is cloud based services

• Conducts feasibility study to check the feasible factor implementing the technology into Milkwood Gaming

Proposal

            The research study analyses the strategies used for manufacturing game product as well as distributing to the customer. The study makes use of on B-Business, T-Technology, O-Operations, P-Processes and P-People –BTOPP framework for describing tools, peoples, process and organization during the development of game.

            Business case application to the organizational structure and methods should be understood for all the stakeholders of business are the key factors for success. Business case is right choice for organization that should be applied as well as developed towards specific circumstance of organization to operate unique position among diverse companies (Nelson 2010). Any planned method and application must be aligned with business strategy for improving the business as well as strategic values. The model BTOPP B-business, T-technology, O-organization, P-process and P-people proposed by Morton offers method to visualize organization’s business system to establish business case for improving the business performance.

 

BTOPP (Morton 1991)

IT operations

In IT environment, projects are having definite beginning as well as ending, in which processes are in continuous nature. Project lifecycle management has beginning and ending. The operational activities are not visible in the project life cycle. Operational framework I standard based on service level agreements that should be monitored periodically as well as its life cycle can be managed and identified. 

To begin the research, it is important to know the business understanding and IT environment as well as the way of interaction among entities.

The elements of BTOPP are as follows (Morton 1991):

(B)Business

Information technology that should be aligned with market needs as well as opportunities. Business needs information about the market and customer to strengthen the value chain as deliver the quality customer required end product or services. The planned application of IT should be tightly linked with business strategies.

(T)Technology

In IT environment both hardware and software are functioning together to perform specific operation. Network is established with planned functionalities as well as securities. The system configured with other business system for providing right information or service to right people.

(O)rganization

Organization should be restructured and unstructured based on IT. Due to the IT environment, location of offices, department, and service for customers are all get affected. Technology adjustments consume more months or years with in organization.

(P)rocess

The main focus of business process is to offer quality end –end service delivery, adopting and integrating new features of Information technology. After the process adopts with the IT features later it can be reengineered based on the changes of IT environment. Various management work processes and practices should be changed and adjusted with major engineered business processes like product as well as order processing.

(p)eople

Various stakeholders of the business such as customers, business partners and employees should learn how to use organization information system. They should know various aspects of the information system. They should know how the information utilized in the information system, source of information. The people should know more about the technologies and their working principle. They should understand how the technologies make changes in their jobs.   

Cloud computing

In the on premise data centre, users can purchase software, hardware, virtualization, setting application, firewall, operating system, storage are possible. After setting everything, users of on premise data centre are responsible for managing the setup and its life cycle.

In cloud computing, cloud vendor offer various services to the user as well as they are taking responsibilities for managing the offered services. They offer service either free or pay per use. Cloud computing environment provides flexible environment for easy to access applications, compute, storage, networking services and so on.

While adopting cloud services into Under Milk wood Pty Ltd the required resources such as software, hardware, servers can be acquired from the cloud. The company has to purchase new software based on current trend to implement games, selling games to customers over internet, maintenance of website, uploading game software, maintenance of game site, server establishment and maintenance, game production. The above said consumes more resources and increases operational cost for the company. The cloud based services provides flexibility to get all those required services with reduced cost and maintenance (Zhang, 2010).

Types of cloud

There are three types of cloud services such as

• Public

Cloud providers own and operate cloud resources. They have control over the resources. They offer the following services such as software, servers, storage over the internet

• Private

Single business or organization own and operate cloud resources. They have full control over the resources. The cloud may present at companies on site data centre or hosted by the third party cloud providers.

• Hybrid

It has both private and public cloud, technology that bounds both clouds together for business application share among them. It offers more flexibility.

Types of services

• IaaS- (I)nfrastructure (a)s a (S)ervice

Cloud provides offer infrastructure like servers, virtual machines, network, storage, OS for rent. The users do not take care about the hardware as well as virtualization software. Consumer of IaaS has to take care about maintenance. It offers more flexibility.

• PaaS-(P)latform (a)s a (S)ervice

The service offers demand environment to develop, test, deliver and manage software applications. the users of PaaS are responsible for the application. The service provides platform for developing as well as testing application. The environment is managed by the cloud providers (Vaquero 2008).

• SaaS-(S)oftware (a)s a (S)ervice

It offers managed software services to end users. It provides software for end users over the internet when needed. Examples for SaaS are MS one drive, dropbox, Amazon Kindle, wordpress, it reduces operational cost.

Adopting cloud environment into Under Milkwood’s using BTOOP framework

B-Business

The technology will be applied into business environment is based on the current market trend as well as opportunities. Cloud based technology for Under Milkwood offers more flexibility to perform their business operations in an efficient manner. Need of development software is ever changing in the gaming industry. The numbers of consumers are ever increasing thereby which increases the accessibility of servers. To adopt huge number of customers cloud technology is the better option. It offers storage, network, and server and so on.

 T-Technology

Cloud environment offers various services for the gaming company. It provides production software for developing gaming software.  It gives storage facilities for storage their more number of gaming software on cloud. It gives flexibility for users to access the software from anywhere. Online website can be hosted on cloud web server.

Organization

The departments of the gaming company should be aligned with the new cloud based technology. The current company scenario utilizes more resources such as desktop, servers, networks, human resources. It consumes more operational cost. The organization infrastructure can be restructured for cloud based services. The organization can get IaaS for server, storage, PaaS for platform for gaming production, OS, SaaS for software applications. The infrastructure setup will be reduced through the virtualized environment.  

P-Process

The main focus of the business process is for developing gaming software that attracts customers.  The gaming platform needs to develop based on current trends and technologies. The current technologies use touch sensors for interacting with game application. In future, technology may get change. According to that, industry should be updated to deliver end products.

P-people

The major stakeholders of the gaming company are customers, employees. The employees or designers should get familiarity for accessing the cloud and get services. The customers are getting the services from the cloud seamlessly. They get services 24/7 basis without disruption.

Competency Matrix

Skills are categorised with rating highly required (Mandatory) and Minimum required

S.No	Skills	Hardware Engineers	Software Engineers
1	Hardware skills	Highly required	Minimum
2	Software  Programming	Minimum	Highly required
3	Gaming Knowledge	Minimum	Highly required
4	Hardware Accelerator	Highly required	Minimum
5	Diagnostics	Highly required	Highly required
6	Critical thinking	Highly required	Highly required
7	Team player	Highly required	Highly required
8	Hardware components	Highly required	Minimum
9	Software design pattern	Highly required	Highly required
10	System knowledge	Highly required	Highly required

 

Proposed Milestone

Below are the tentative timing plan is created for this gaming project

Proposed Budget

Below items are considered for creating a cost for hardware and software components and from planning, development and deployment.

 

Benefits of proposed system

• Cost

Cloud based services reduce huge capital cost involved in the business operations

• Speed

It increases productivity through offering required resources anywhere and anytime with few minutes as well as few clicks

• Scalability

Based on the business requirements, accessing resources over cloud can be increases as well as decreased.

• Productivity

It needs less operational and maintenance effort. The organizations do not need to spend time and cost for maintaining software, hardware and patches. The organization’s IT department can concentrate more on production rather than installation and maintenance

• Reliability

Recovery and back up are most important features for cloud computing.  For under Milk wood, backup and recovery is more important to offers services to client in an un-disturbed manner. It gives more accessibility on resources for customers.

• Security

Cloud vendor offers security methods, policies and protocols to strengthen the security of resources in the cloud.

Risk analysis         

The following risk may arise while adopting cloud based technologies for the gaming company such as

• Mitigation of cloud

Moving on premise data such as from organization to cloud provides complexities.

• Incompatibility

Incompatibility issues may arise between on premise cloud infrastructure as well as infrastructure adopted in the organization

• Security of data

Security is major challenge for cloud environment. Applications, software can have vulnerabilities through which attacker can perform attack.

• Cost of bandwidth

While getting everything from cloud, it consumes more bandwidth, major operational cost involved in bandwidth cost

• lack of expertise

The employees need proper training in an organization to utilize the benefits of cloud

• down time

The operations are fully dependent on internet. Issues in internet access may affect the production activities and other operations.

Recommendation and conclusion

Cloud service is the better option for the gaming industry. It requires more resources based on latest trend. Purchasing software, hardware, server and maintenance increase the cost and effort for maintenance. Cloud offers more benefits like to improve the production and motivate the employees to adopt latest technologies in the developmental process. Cloud based environment is the proposed solution for the Under Milk wood Pty Ltd.

References

• Morton, M.S. (1991). The Corporation of the 1990s: Information Technology and Organizational Transformation. New York: Oxford University Press.

• Murphy, K. E., Simon, S. J. (2001). Using cost benefit analysis for enterprise resource planning project evaluation: a case study for including intangibles. 34th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 1-11. Miami: IEEE.

• Nelson, M., Peterson, J., Rariden, R., Sen, R. (2010). Transitioning to a business rule management service model: Case studies from the property and casualty insurance industry. Information & management, Vol. 47, Iss. 1, pp. 30–41.

• Zhang, Q., Cheng, L., & Boutaba, R. (2010). Cloud computing: state-of-the-art and research challenges. Journal of internet services and applications, 1(1), 7-18.

• Vaquero, L. M., Rodero-Merino, L., Caceres, J., & Lindner, M. (2008). A break in the clouds: towards a cloud definition. ACM SIGCOMM Computer Communication Review, 39(1), 50-55.