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ZS Associates is a consulting company with offices in the United States, Europe and plans to establish an office in Canada. The manager of scheduling realizes that the company's scheduling system would not be able to keep up with the needs of the firm. The current system tracks the consultant's skills and their assignments to various projects. An MBA student working as an intern with the firm must provide a recommendation whether to develop software in-house, have new software custom built externally or purchase off-the-shelf software. He must analyse the options while considering the growth needs of the firm, features required in the software and cost.

Meyers Norris Penny is one of the leading chartered accountancy and business advisory firms in Canada. The vice-president of technology must decide whether to replace the company's practice management system or continue to upgrade the system as needs arise. The system has performed well, has stable hardware and software and staff are familiar and satisfied with using the system, however, he must consider the company's need to be innovative and proactive to maintain the firm's competitive advantage.

Tissage et Broderie is a consignment store selling handicrafts. The founders of the store have contacted a consulting firm for the development of a product and customer information system. After a preliminary interview, the consultant leading the project is ready to begin the requirements structuring process. She must create data, process and logic models.

Birch Point Lodge is a small family run resort. The managers of the lodge are trying to incorporate technology into the daily operations of the resort. With little experience, staff that are not very computer savvy and limited resources, using technology effectively have become a real challenge. They have twice tried to purchase a computerized system for handling reservations, billing and other processes. Most recently they spent $9,000 to purchase a system that was never used. They are faced with another option and must decide whether to purchase the new software or not.

Waterloo Regional Police Service, along with seven other police services, collaborated and invested resources in a computer system project that would streamline functions such as computer aided dispatching, records management, mobile workstation environments and most importantly, information sharing between these police services. The project has been in progress for several years, and a number of major issues with the computer system vendor were still unresolved. The chief of the Waterloo Regional Police Service must decide whether to continue with the installation of the computer system or move on to other options.

The Richard Ivey School of Business had recently introduced a wireless network and required all students to purchase laptops and network cards. After a year of use, the faculty decided to restrict laptop usage in class by disallowing the use of network cards. They felt the students were using the network cards for unrelated activities in class and that this was compromising the learning process. Reaction from the students was mixed, with some students quite vocal about the (un)fairness of this new policy. The section head for one of the MBA sections knew that finding a long-term solution would be a difficult process. There were valid points in the arguments to both restrict and not restrict the use of the cards. She had to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages in order to make a recommendation to the faculty at a section meeting the following day.