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(Royal DSM N.V.: IT Enabling Business Transformation; CS #809-078)

Due on: 29/3/2012

1. What Challenges and opportunities do senior executives at DSM N.V. face in 2000?
In 2000, DSM senior executives were provoked with a dilemma to either continue on supporting the past business services that DSM used to offer – the core petrochemicals business – or make an eventually courageous investment in the future via growing the life sciences and performance materials businesses. Subsequently, when they decided to go for the latter and alter the company’s portfolio through divestitures and acquisitions in food and pharmaceutical sectors, DSM primary objective was to make the company concentrate on growth opportunities. In addition, …show more content…

Moreover, it will provide many opportunities for value creation and aggressive financial goals. Obviously, without the standardized ICT then DSM would be left with outrageous IT cost and lousy performance at the same time.

2. What challenges and opportunities does newly-hired CIO Jo van den Hanenberg face when he assumes his position in 2000?

In 2000, DSM hired Jo van den Hanenberg as a company-wide acting Chief Information Officer (CIO), who was reporting to the chair of the Board of Directors responsible for ICT. Immediately after his appointment, Hanenberg faced two objectives: a) Standardization of the ICT within DSM. b) Skills construction for quickly integrating acquisitions and removing disinvestments from the DSM information and ICT provision.

Hanenberg used to work for Philips and witnessed acquisitions often going wrong because of the lack of governance from the parent company. So and in order to achieve his objectives, he focused on three subjects: 1- Standardizing the ICT infrastructure worldwide and supporting the business by ICT:
Hanenberg started by reducing the number of suppliers. Their number went down from 107 suppliers to just six. These six suppliers were utilized to serve e-mail and distributed ICT facilities, end user support, networks, developing and reengineering of the business processes, and operations of the computer centres. 2-

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