Enterprise It at Cisco (2004)

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the need for any organization to have its IT strategy and business strategy properly aligned. While many organizations view IT and business alignment as an event – it is actually an on-going process, or continuous journey. Therefore, the main problem is that many organizations of today still hold these two principles (business mission & IT strategy) as two separate entities. However, in the Information Age – collaboration is key to capturing and retaining market penetration. To not have alignment with the IT and business strategy together is not a matter of want it is a matter of survival. This report will expand upon the need for business and IT strategic alignment as well as examine what happens in lack of a comprehensive plan. This will be done by examining the Vermont Teddy Bear company prior to and after the arrival of Bob Stetzel, the Vice President of Information Technology. This document will view it findings and make recommendations on the immediate and future operations of the company.

This lyric is related to the Abraham and Isaac story. In the beginning of the story, after Isaac was born, this made Abraham happy and laugh a lot. They all lived together, worked together, and aged together. Abraham must love his son. From this lyric, it just describes what a father did to his lovely son. This description is represented the great relationship between father and son. Everything he did always has a meaning inside, which will be understood by the son after he gets older and his father may die also.

1) How did information systems and the organization design changes implemented by Knudstorp align with the changes in business strategy?

In this company, the CEO, Harold Redd, was driven to implement some change because the organization consisted of workers who only had basic skills in computer assembling and troubleshooting. Given that the company had very few

1. Compare and contrast the use of IT in an “information Age” company versus that in an “industrial Age” company? Is Cisco an Information Age company? Why?

The major elements are cost efficiency, eliminating wastes, and researching future IT investments. In the IT Doesn’t Matter article, three main points were outlined, and they were spend less, follow, don’t lead, and focus on vulnerabilities, not opportunities. Overspending has always been a major issue in regards to applying new technology, and it is important to execute an IT budget for any organization. Office Depot adopted new technology to improve all of their operations, especially in the supply chain. They were able to increase efficiency, while modernizing their budget. Information technology can benefit any organization if they are researched thoroughly and will improve the business needs of the organization. If it will not improve the business needs, there is no need to invest in expensive technology. The most important phase in the system development life cycle is the systems analysis phase. The goal of this phase is to identify what problems need to be fixed and breaking down how the system will benefit all users. Therefore, the business needs need to be identified and outlined before new technology is adopted into an organization’s business model. Once new technology is applied, organizations must continue to research information technology. If organizations follow these elements of

As a result, the IS people weren’t a particularly happy lot...no one really had a great deal of respect for them.” (Brown & Vessey, 2001) This shows that business users were disconnected with their IT development counterparts and most often blamed IT for not doing enough to fix problems with the applications. They failed to realize that the problems they were seeing with their systems was due to the business users requesting a lot of adhoc changes to be made to the system without engaging proper change management

This case study goes through the evolution of IT governance at Cisco and the related project management. This case is a classic example of the result of a decentralized governance of business units. What happened to CISCO due to the decentralized governance, how the business processes were modified to overcome the chaos created by the decentralized governance and how the employees and management reacted to this change in CISCO’s business governance? This case clearly illustrates the effect of a totally decentralized governance and how changing to a centralized governance leads to unrest and resistance. It also illustrates how the cultural/managerial change effects the business decisions needed to be made

Ubisoft has different production, marketing, administrative and Internet teams in different countries. As each department uses different IT systems, managers have an initial problem of whether the IT centres should be centralised or decentralised. Centralisation has its advantages as it offers a rapid system response, it can save money through avoidance of duplicated activities and offers better security. Its disadvantages include if the central unit fails then the entire system will collapse and they might lose touch with the goals of major IT departments.

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.

* Centralization of the core processes and standardizing of the IT infrastructure would leverage technology expertise across the organization and the affiliates. It would also enable cost effective contracts from the software suppliers and would facilitate global business processes.

Q.1: How did the information systems and the organization design changes implemented by knudstorp align with the changes in business strategy?

1. How did the information systems and the organization design changes implemented by Knudstorp align with the changes in business strategy?

Ed Parrish, CIO, identified three initiatives intended to enable easy sharing of information across companies(Source?): (1) standardizing data definitions and formats for key data elements on a world-wide basis, (2) defining and establishing the information technology infrastructure needed to share data and information electronically, and (3) developing and applying IT expertise as a corporate rather than a company function. (Ross, 1995) Remember the use of transitions (e.g. however, accordingly, first, second, etc…), they are helpful to the reader Steve Piron, Vice President of Information Architecture began the task of standardization. Piron 's teams would be putting a process in place that as described by Ross (1995) , "…defined standard data definitions in critical areas like customer, product, competitor, supplier, and then determine which would be shared on a w This is all just restating the case and others authors—where is your writing?orld-wide basis, which was regional data item and which was a country data item."

1. How did the information systems and the organization design changes implemented by Knudstorp align with the changes in business strategy?