1. At the start of the case, Cisco’s information systems are failing, yet no one steps forward to lead the effort to replace them. Why is this? Why were no managers eager to take on this project?
Why is this?
When Peter Solvik joined Cisco in January 1993 as the company's CIO, Cisco was a $500 million company running a UNIX-based software package to support its core transaction processing, including financial, manufacturing, and order entry systems. At that time, Cisco was experiencing significant growth. However, the application didn't provide the degree of redundancy, reliability, and maintainability that Cisco needed to meet the business requirements anymore. The current systems may be good for $300 million companies, but they were
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Besides, the team members were placed onto one of five "tracks". Each tracks had a Cisco information systems leader, a Cisco business leader, business and IT consultants from either KPMG or Oracle, and additional personnel from the business as team members.
5.Cisco had very efficient training program for the team--The first CRP(CRP0) began with training the implementation team. First training was focus on getting the team trained on the Oracle applications in two 16-hours days. Second training was to participate the entire application suite. At end of training, a small "tiger team" was engaged.
6.Cisco had very effective Implementation Methodology--Team employed a development technique referred to as "rapid iterative prototyping" and broke the implementation into a series of phases called "Conference Room Pilots"(CRP)
1) CRP 0: Training and Configuration of Oracle package.
2) CRP 1: Detail documentation and analysis of each functional area. The team determined to need another package to support after-sales.
3)CRP 2 & 3: Centralized data warehouse was developed. Final Testing with full load of users was done.
Although all of above factors played very important role in the success of ERP implementation, the most important one should be the clear understanding of its strategic goal. Cisco did correctly to define themselves and realize the current problem and make plan
The reason 2013 intangible assets make up more of the total assets compared to 2013 intangible assets is due to the NDS acquisition that occurred in 2013
The product of the company is not having a broad scope to compete in the market. With companies like CISCO having broader products, its very difficult to compete in the market. So the company needs to create a more viable business model and upgrade the products.The technical solution of the
Cisco is clearly the one of Information Age companies. Cisco gives the priority on the Information Technology. In the case study, Cisco adopted strategy of systematic acquisitions and strategic partners, which proof that Cisco focuses on cooperated information. Cisco also concerned about standardization, flexibility, extensibility, and scalability. The decisions that Solvik and his team made during this case trends to emphasize how more Cisco becomes closer to the definition of Information Age company. They applied internet and intranet which is not so popular at that year for employee self-service, communication and distance learning, customer
With limited budget to spend for upgrade, BAL had to consider a more rational way to improve current system. In addition, regarding the company size, there wouldn’t be economy of scale at
1a. How did Cisco find itself in trouble with regard to its intended IT prior to Brad Boston's arrival?
Kumar, P. (2010). Successful implementation of ERP in a large organization International journal of engineering science and technology. Vol. 2(7), 3218-3224. Retrieved from http://www.ijest.info/docs/IJEST10-02-07-151.pdf
1. Study the networked supply chain concept as implemented by Cisco. What are its strengths and weaknesses?
1) How have Cisco’s channels evolved in the last 10-15 years? Why have they evolved that way?
1. Cisco suffered from inertia when an attempt was made to engage business management in selecting software for their individual areas, and/or agreeing to participate in the ERP implementation project. List and explain reasons why management would hesitate to become engaged in the IT process/project.
National Computer Operations (NCO) was an internal, monopolizing computer support entity that was faced with a challenge which was presented by the new banks chainman. The change, which was to take effect in 2 years, was that NCO could now market externally and all the internal departments could buy computer services from outside firms (Spector, 2013, p. 73). How was the company leader, Gar Finnvold, going to overcome these changes? The following essay will discuss a step by step diagnosis for the organization, as well as, who and what tools will be utilized. Additionally, the essay will describe who and what tools will be utilized.
The issues that Alcan was facing were numerous to say the least. The fact that the leadership in the IT side had been vacant for more than a year was very problematic. Another large chunk of the infrastructure issue revolved around how decentralized the business groups that made up Alcan were. “Every business group was completely independent, with its own strategic IT plan, infrastructure choices based on its specific needs, and IT applications and services. Each group had its own IT organization that pursued its objectives based on the group’s needs and orientation. Groups’ needs, like their activities, were highly diversified. Over the years, this culture of autonomy had been reinforced by mergers and acquisitions” (Bernier & Dube & Roy, 2009). Another issue that was identified was that Alcan had more than one thousand information systems, and many of these systems managed information that was financial. It completely makes it difficult to comprehend how you would even attempt to be able to work with over 1,000 systems within Alcan. Another identified issue was that there was a problem with accessible skills which were insufficient, and crudely positioned to meet requirements of the information technology infrastructure. This also resulted in these needs not being evaluated, identified, or even compensated in a similar way as other various business groups. Instead the outsourced providers instead minimized the deficiencies
The business division also felt that IT lacked credibility, and could not be trusted to complete business projects successfully. These feelings were further reinforced by the fact that it took IT a long time to install new, business related technology. To make matters worse, these new applications and systems often did not work as expected right away and the IT staff seemed uninterested in fixing them quickly. Hefty Hardware also had a high CIO turnover due to the many failed projects.
Peter Solvik joined the Cisco team in January 1993 as their new CIO. He saw that there were two challenges that needed to be addressed in the company. First, Cisco’s Information Technology department was too traditional in the sense that it was viewed as a cost center that reported through the Finance department, and it was too internally oriented. There were three ways that he approached this: The IT-reporting relationship was changed from Accounting to Customer Advocacy, the IT budget pertaining to the functions were returned to the functions leaving just a small portion left in General and Administrative expense, and the central IT steering committee was disbanded and replaced with a structure where IT investment decisions on application projects were pushed out to the
Chapter 11 Enterprise Resource Planning Systems 1. Closed database architecture is a. a control technique intended to prevent unauthorized access from trading partners. b. a limitation inherent in traditional information systems that prevents data sharing. c. a data warehouse control that prevents unclean data from entering the warehouse. d. a technique used to restrict access to data marts. e. a database structure that many of the leading ERPs use to support OLTP applications. 2. Each of the following is a necessary element for the successful warehousing of data EXCEPT a. cleansing extracted data. b. transforming data. c. modeling data. d. loading data. e. all of the above are necessary. 3. Which of the following is typically NOT part of
ERP implementation is unlikely experience that any company will have. It has to be planned prepared and stimulated from the entire stakeholder otherwise it will sunk the millions of dollar and it drain the companies market. In case of Nestle USA, it confronted a lot of difficulties due to improper implementation plan yet be able to recover as a successful project. Many organisations have gone through the similar situation that there are plenty of lesson to be learned. We can conclude that ERP implementation needs big consideration on business requirement, business process reengineering, stakeholder’s involvement, hardware and software and other units.