Case Study Assignment: Kl Worldwide Enterprises Inc.: Putting Information Technology to Work

This article makes up Chapter 1 of the free, open access book titled, Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology, by John Gallaugher. Please ensure that you read the entire Chapter 1 of the book consisting of 3 parts (Part 1 Introduction; Part 2 Don’t Guess, Gather Data; and Part 3 Moving Forward).

Like many of its most profitable competitors, Alcan has grown quickly through insightful series of mergers, acquisitions and rapid product development and launch strategies throughout the major markets it sells into. The company has settled on a highly decentralized divisional business model that has to the point of the case study served them well. Their IT systems are showing signs of massive overduplication of expense, with a $500M level of spending on enterprise applications with SAP being the majority. There are further signs of massive waste in their highly diversified organizational structure. There are 400 systems in the company all dedicated to pricing, a massive duplication of costs, time and effort on the part of IT across the five divisions. There are also over 1,000 concurrent enterprise-class IT systems being used throughout the company at any point in time. Conservatively speaking the company is spending 20% of their total enterprise software spend on maintenance costs alone. This is forcing the CIO, Robert Ouelette, to re-evaluate both the organizational structure and IT systems supporting it. The goals of this analysis are to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the existing application or IT management structure. An analysis of the proposal by Robert Ouelette is also provided along with an assessment of it potential effectiveness in solving the challenges is facing today.

4.What new internal IT capabilities will have to be developed in order to create an IT department to support AgCredit’s future business architecture?

4. What new internal IT capabilities will have to be developed in order to create an IT department to support AgCredit’s future business architecture?

Copyright 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America This chapter was originally published as chapter 1 of The Adventures of an IT Leader, copyright 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the

A: I’d say it going to be used for strategic, enterprise top line growth. In order to leverage IT for the benefit of the whole organization enterprise architecture must be developed to oversee IT strategy. Centralizing IT strategy at the start of the new business strategies will be important to make sure IT and business are working together with common goals that deliver the most

Because the managers understood the strong culture and history of the company, they structured the project carefully to create a change in thinking before creating a change in software. The methods they used to survey purchasing people, involve representatives from all areas of the company, understand the process, work with suppliers, and select an ERP provider to grow with company and its future needs. All of these components helped to reduce the risk of the project.

Information Technology (IT) is a foundation for conducting business today. It plays a critical role in increasing productivity of firms and entire nation. It is proven that firms who invested in IT have experienced continued growth in productivity and efficiency. Many companies' survival and even existence without use of IT is unimaginable. IT has become the largest component of capital investment for companies in the United States and many other countries.

Alignment of an enterprise’s goals with its IT1 and IS1 systems has been a challenge ever since IT became a business enabler. Proposing an IT alignment requires a thorough understanding of the business goals of the enterprise and the knowledge that alignment is an iterative process which requires constant measurement and honing (Chan, 2002). Enterprises often face the problem of balance of priorities between IT and Business objectives. This report deals with one such case that faced alignment and prioritization hardships resulting in an unclear approach to achieve a corporate strategy.

This analysis will present an introduction of three different IT plans: Baldrige Criteria, Berkeley Strategic Plan, and Boulder Strategic Plan. This introduction will include a brief summary of the purposes of their creation and what each plan entails. After each plan is briefly introduced, the plans will then be analyzed against each other. This deeper analysis will present a few of both the similarities and the differences between each plan. After this comparison, a brief summary will be given and an opinionated view on each of the plans.

This paper appears in the publication, Journal of Cases on Information Technology, Volume 11, Issue 2 edited by Mehdi Khosrow-Pour © 2009, IGI Global

1. What is your assessment of the new process for managing priorities at Volkswagen of America? Are the criticisms justified? Is it an improvement over the old process?

What can be concluded from this literature is that the term ‘Enterprise IT Architecture’ has evolved to mean something quite distinct from other concepts. This is confirmed by discussions had with IT professionals, who understand it to refer to the synthesis of all the organisation’s assets, which includes (but is not

An information technology (IT) strategic plan incorporates all components in an organization relevant to the administration of technology including cost, human capital, management, hardware and software management, vendor management, risk management and all other considerations in the enterprise IT environment. This comprehensive roadmap is used by IT professionals and leaders as a directive for setting an organization’s future technology objectives. (TechTarget, 2015).

Frenzel (2004) claimed that to be successful, a firm’s IT management team must take action on the following critical areas: business management issues; strategic and competitive issues; planning and implementation concerns; and operational items. If for any reason, the organisation experiences difficulties in the above areas, the manager will need to set goals and objectives to overcome and prevent these issues.