The Big Fix At Toyota Motor Sales

The challenges facing Mr. Bob Stetzel upon his arrival at VTB were many. However there are some which weigh heavier on the success of the organization than others. It is those challenges that will be highlighted in this report. One such problem is the constant influx of uneven demand for products and services – which suggests a lack of IT strategy connected to the business goals.

In the “Mini Case Study: IT Planning at ModMeters”, it is clear that the communication skills between the business managers and the IT managers were in need of improvement. IT planning is a method used to form clear objectives for IT organizations that connect directly back to the enterprise’s strategic business goals (“IT planning”, 2014). IT strategic planning assists in directing the business strategy, based on IT capabilities and opportunities and determines IT’s role in delivering the business strategy. There is a clear lack of communication and individual opinions on taking ModMeters global. Although CEO John Johnson and other high leveled corporate employees believed the idea was promising and seemed to look good on paper, Brian Smith, CIO of ModMeters had different thoughts on the expansion. Brian Smith knew that although the new initiatives were theoretically doable; however with such tight resources including people, time, and money, he knew that finding the means to support two new strategic initiatives was nearly impossible (McKeen, J.D., & Smith, H.A., 2012, p. 69). There seemed to be a major lack of communication when planning the new initiatives and the miscalculation of funds to do it successfully.

offer a fully integrated solution of strategy, operations, and information technology was key to its

Vermont Teddy Bear is positioned in the “strategic mode.” CEO John Gilbert stressed the importance of reliability regarding the company’s ecommerce platform. It is also noted that some company’s may be forced into this “strategic mode”. This seems to be the case for Vermont Teddy Bear regarding their need for new information technology. They are so fragmented and had been inefficiently managed for so long that major improvements to their IT architecture are unavoidable, especially if they hope to remain competitive. All of the questions in “A” list from “IT & the Board of Directors” need to be considered for Vermont Teddy Bear. Based on these questions, they are not doing too well, but finding the right answers will help them get closer to their goals. Stetzel is definitely facing big challenges in going forward. A system overhaul or ERP implementation are difficult tasks even with a sufficient budget. With the limited resources available to him, Stetzel must find a way to make whatever decision he goes with work and to gain the support of the board, managers and employees. Without full cooperation, the any plan is likely to

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

Similar to Cisco and Tektronix, the previous legacy CRM systems in Cigna were independent of each other and outdated. The CIO was keen to improve the efficiency of the business operation through IT and to consolidate the system plans through developing them internally. Cigna needed to move IT into the turnaround mode in order to meet customer and legal demands. As such, there was a need for an IT governance structure to ensure broad based, multi-level participation by all stakeholders in IT Governance (Rau, 2004), the selected roles and responsibilities within and external to IT & the relationship amongst these components. No such governance council was established in Cigna which would seem to have resulted in all IT related decisions falling onto the shoulders of the CIO without having additional support of other senior managers. In addition, without the IT council being in place, it did not seem to be asked as to whether or not the CIO had the experience to handle such a project. Based on the fact that she was an internal recruit, it is unlikely that she had previous experience as IT lead on such a project. There were unrealistic expectations placed on the IT department by senior management

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

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

The IT folks couldn’t communicate properly with the business about their ideas and strategy that confused the business and made them reject the ideas that were actually worth trying.

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 role played by the IT in the company to the rest of the organization is reactive to business conditions rather than a proactive approach. IT has been busy establishing several IT processes, policies, and projects in order to catch up with current demand from customers, and has been relying on the “diving catch” approach of finishing things at the very last minute.

In accordance with Chan’s (2002) views, there was no structural alignment in the process as the responsibility of managing IT was shared resulting in a tiny business growth. After forming the BPTO and undergoing strategy change, the company came up with roles for IS as a strategic alignment (Chan, 2002) by categorizing them and relating them to business goals. This comparison articulated the priorities of a

Additionally, the information regarding CIOS changing with some measure of ordinariness exhibits that a feasible CIO has not been put set up, it has all the earmarks of being as they are all things considered exorbitantly particular and not able to see the timberland through the tress the degree that taking apart with the business. Though the structure themself is a limitation of IT, the way that persons who are both IT and commercial cunning have not remained put into executive positions is a decreasing level of the business adjacent of association. CITATION Luc13 \l 1033 (Lucasdebartolo, 2013)Recommended plan for Savvy Store program

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.

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.