Background:
Overview:
PWC was founded in 1990 as an employment agency for
temporary employees. The company supports media companies needs for freelance
writers, reporters, and graphic artists.
In 1998, PWC expanded its scope to include a broader range
of information workers (IWs) and to support a broader range of companies. PWC
new mission was twofold. This mission is to become a leader in supporting the
individual needs of highly qualified freelance IWs and to provide the best
service to corporate customers seeking temporary employees.
Information Worker Service:
PWC recruits consultants, freelance workers, and independent
contractors worldwide. The company refers to these individuals as information
workers (IWs). The company provides the IWs with personal and groupware tools
such as e-mail, discussion groups, and scheduling resources to help make them more
productive. Next the company evaluates and markets their skills. Then finally
the company helps them work with the employers they serve by making it easy to
share information with these employers. If an IW is assigned to a position with
an employer who has network connectivity to PWC, special access to shared
resources is granted. This special access allows IWs to conveniently share work
with employees of the companies that employ them.
Corporate Customer Service:
PWC works with a group of leading technology and services
companies that need temporary employees. PWC makes it easy for companies to
browse trough it’s online list of workers and find the right worker for the
job. In addition, PWC makes it easy for its corporate customers to initiate
contract processes and for employees of the corporate customers to conveniently
share information with temporary employees.
Organization:
Currently, PWC has approximately 300 full-time employees.
They are evenly distributed among its four offices in New York, Chicago,
Atlanta, and Los Angeles. The Chicago office is the company headquarters.
PWC has the following departments:
- Business administration
- Human resources
- Information technology (IT)
- Marketing
- Consulting
The consulting department provides project management and
communication services to the corporate customers. In the consulting
department, experts are assigned to support each information worker (IW)
occupational role. These experts hire the IWs, evaluate their skills, manage
their security certification clearances, and monitor their assignments with
corporate customers. Corporate customers occasionally hire these consultants
for temporary assignments.
PWC organizes its information into the following groups:
employee, recruiting, IW, accounting, corporate customers, and projects.
The company provides services to more than 20.000 IWs.
Approximately 20 percent of these workers are currently employed in temporary
positions acquired by PWC.
PWC wants to increase the number of its full-time employees
to 450 during the next two years. During the next two years, the company also
wants to double the number of IWs and increase the percentage of IWs that are
actively employed.
Existing IT Environment:
The internal WAN consists of 1.544-Mbps lines that connect New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles to the headquarters in Chicago. The connection to New York operates at 30 percent utilization, the connection to Atlanta operates at 20 percent utilization, and the connection to Los Angeles operates at 50 percent utilization. The connection to the Internet is in Chicago. The company’s external Web site is hosted by a third party.
The network consists of one master domain and one separate
resource domain at each of the company’s four locations. The master domain
contains all employee user accounts and is named PW_MASTER. PW_MASTER has its
PDC and a BDC in Chicago and BDC’s located in New York, Los Angeles, and
Atlanta. Each location has a resource domain. The PDC’s and BDC’s for these
resource domains are located at the associated offices. Each location also has
a second BDC located at the Chicago office. The resource domains are named
CH_RES, NY_RES, LA_RES, and AT_RES. The PW_MASTER and LA_RES PDC’s also run
WINS. Currently there are no DNS or DHCP service running.
Currently, the information workers (IWs) do not access the
internal WAN. The IWs only access resources on the Windows NT and UNIX Web
servers that are hosted by the ISP. E-mail service for IWs is hosted by a UNIX
POP3 server.
Proposed Corporate-Customer Connectivity:
Currently, 50 percent of PWC information workers (IWs) are
working at approximately 20 large companies. PWC has at least one full-time
employee permanently located at ten of these companies to manage IW services.
Two corporate customers are willing to configure trust relationships between
their own WANs and the PWC WAN. Therefore, approved IWs will be able to place
files on the PWC servers, and employees of these two corporate customers will
be able to access the files conveniently.
Project Goals:
Information Worker Management:
PWC wants corporate customers to be able to directly acquire
and manage information workers (IWs). The IT system will need to feature highly
flexible tools for searching, scheduling, estimating costs, and deploying
resources. (AD)
Establishing Trust:
Many of the services that information workers (IWs) will
provide to PWC corporate customers will be performed remotely. Because little
or no personal contact will occur, establishing trust will be difficult. In an
attempt to solve this problem, PWC will use video conferencing whenever
possible. The company will provide membership access to national video
conference centers. When bandwidth allows, the company will also provide
support for video conferencing from IW home offices. To further increase trust,
IWs enrolled in the Virtual Office service will be granted a higher level of
security clearance.
Information Worker (IW) Virtual Office:
PWC currently provides Web-based administrative tools such
as time sheet reporting, invoicing, and payroll services. It also offers the
following standard and deluxe services to its information workers (IWs):
- Standard
- This service level is free and provides e-mail, 5 MB of
file storage, and access to the job database.
- Deluxe
- IWs pay a monthly fee for this service level. This level
includes all standard services and provides group-rate insurance plans and
stock options.
As part of this project, PWC will offer a premium service
level named IW Virtual Office. IWs will pay an additional charge for this
service level. This level will provide 50 MB of file storage, project team
rooms, personal scheduling tools, contact management, access to discussion
groups, and advertisement space on the PWC Web site, with links to personal
portfolios. PWC intends to use Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Microsoft
Outlook 2000, and Microsoft Exchange 2000 to support this functionality.
Each IW is classified as one of the following occupational
roles:
- Business
- Information technology (IT)
- Management
- Media creation
- Sales
-Training
To support the corporate customers need for confidentiality,
IWs will be classified into one of several levels of security clearance.
Depending on work history and credentials, they can attain higher security
levels.
Project Requirements:
PWC intends to upgrade the client computers of all permanent
employees to Windows 2000. The company will hire external workers to perform
the upgrade. The company also wants to consolidate and upgrade the existing
Windows NT domains, implement Active Directory, and upgrade Microsoft Exchange
5.5 to Exchange 2000.
Each PWC office currently operates as a small independent
business. However, most information sharing is contained within each
department, regardless of location. The administration of user accounts and
resources should be restructured to support this organizational system.
For security management, the company wants the root of its
internal forest namespace to be a sub-domain of its public domain. This domain
is named proseware.com. For fault tolerance, at least two servers should host
domain controllers in each domain.
In addition to the internal network, PWC intends to use
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Active Directory, and Exchange 2000 to
implement the information worker (IW) Virtual Office service. Permission
changes made to IW resources should not need to be replicated to the other PWC
offices, although all employees need to be able to search the complete global catalog containing employees
and IWs.
Initially, all 20.000 IWs will be imported into Active
Directory as contacts. When IWs subscribe to the Virtual Office service, they
will be supplied with Microsoft Outlook 2000, migrated to Exchange 2000, and
entered into Active Directory as users. IW users will access PWC internal
network through the Chicago Internet connection by means of VPN. To support the
anticipated high security levels, IWs subscribing to the Virtual Office service
will require stronger password policies than PWC employees. These policies
include longer passwords and PKI certificates. The design must support smart
cards and consistent logon procedures regardless of domain. All users will use
username@proseware.com for authentication.
PWC also wants to create extranet connections and trusts.
Initially, PWC will configure extranet connections and trusts with two of its
corporate customers. IWs with appropriate credentials will be able to store
documents on servers at PWC. Corporate customer employees will be able to
access these documents easily. The two corporate customers who are configuring
trust relationships with the PWC WAN have already installed Active Directory
domains. Users at these companies will want to be able to view appropriate PWC
file shares in their own global catalogs. These two corporate customers do not want
IW user accounts to appear on any of the access control lists in their forests.
Chief Information Officer (CIO) Interview:
There are lots of creative individuals in the IT field. They
will install services just to see how the services work. Because of this
tendency, we often have many more services running than we need. I want to
regain top-level administrative control. I also want to be able to delegate
administrative tasks. Because I want to keep our initial design as simple as
possible, I want to use only services that are absolutely necessary. Because we
will use video conferencing, I want to be able to control the quality of
service provided to specific users. I also want to be able to control domain
replication. In addition, because we might lose a WAN link to our remote
locations, employee logon processes should not require the WAN connection.
I will control all schema changes, site policies, and
additions of new domains. I also want to assign selected individuals to
administer employee and information worker (IW) accounts and resources and to
have full domain rights to these objects.
The IT support staff at each location is responsible for all of the normal daily work, including the daily administration of users, resources, and permissions. I have better things to do with the resources I have I want the new design to be structured so that this work is delegated to individuals in each department.