The Business Environment At Canadian Shield Insurance

The company is served by an IT infrastructure comprising of an amalgamation of off the shelf software and components and locally developed applications and middleware. The hardware infrastructure is by and large robust and capable of withstanding any current operational peaks. The infrastructure employs a high level of redundancy and good recovery and password management systems, so there is little risk of high business impact in the case of IT issues. No architecture document exists and minimal change control is executed.

Target Corporation allocated large budget to upgrade information system as part of a roadmap to transform business (Target Roadmap, 2015). Once the upgrade is completed, it will provide a large amount of intelligent data for internal resources to support customers faster. It further tracks performance and controls accurately the timely information about daily operations in real time. The automated online and on-demand ad-hoc reports generate reports for each store any time as well retains records of products and services.

The case study reviews the company Providian Trust as the organization attempts to implement a major software system aimed at updating its internal business processes and outdated information system to be more cost efficient and provide more timely services to its customers. Providian Trust Company is responsible for providing financial and fiduciary services to include residential and commercial mortgages and corporate loans which were the company’s primary source of revenue. However, despite the company’s ability to manage $49.4 billion in trust assets, the organization was only the tenth largest provider and were losing money. This was largely attributed to the fact that they were lagging behind in regards to technology

Up until this point, Third Star Financial Services has operated via a succession of mergers and acquisitions where systems were inherited but never integrated into the network. Its data management has been virtually non-existent and entirely ineffective. Evidence of this can be found in the absence of an enterprise-wide data management solution and the presence of several disparate systems operating independently with no measurable benefit to the company. Due to a lack of actionable data, management makes decisions based on instinct rather than through analysis. A direct consequence of this is a steadily declining market share and loss of high-level employees to competing companies. Fortunately, this discrepancy has been identified and Third Star executives have established the new goal of modernizing and streamlining operations. Using concepts outlined by the Data Management Association (DAMA), this proposed enterprise architecture will allow Third Star to transform their data from a liability to an asset.

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.

The major goal is to integrate Information Systems/Information Technology with the corporate strategy to use information for better governance and management. This has improved with the connectivity and networking and also the shrinking cost- performance ratios in technology. IT governance thus is a result of the complete merger of computer and communications technologies, like data processing and high advancement in networks, and integrated systems. (Bloomfield; et al, 2000) To this extent the software of the stand alone systems have to be converted to a single functional system for all requirements and the system involves the creation of a network with the following functionality:

The following paper will discuss the research that I completed regarding the internal and external environments of both Allstate Insurance and the Target stores as a corporation. What will be provided is information on the competitive advantages of each company and the types of strategies that they each use. What will also be discussed is how each of these organizations create value and how they maintain a competitive advantage through their business strategy. I will also cover what types of measurement guidelines both Allstate Insurance and Target is using and how effective these measurement guidelines are for their organization.

As the new CIO of Volkswagen of America (VWoA), Dr. Uwe Matulovic brings an impressive resume that includes ample experience in aligning business process management (BPM), business process re-engineering (BPR) and the insights necessary to create the Business Process Technology Organization (BPTO). As the IT projects within VWoA have lacked governance and are facing a severe budget shortfall of $150M, Dr. Matulovic has a formidable challenge. He must first align all existing IT projects to strategic initiatives, which is the essence of effective IT governance (Huang, Zmud, Price, 2010) and then he must define processes to stabilize these strategies yet ensure integration still occurs at the process and system level (Korac-Kakabadse, Kakabadse, 2001). All of these factors need to be taken into account as VWoA is evaluating up to 22 new models with will have an exponential, nearly chaotic impact on their existing IT systems and their ability to respond. Further, the VWoA business has continued to suffer from a lack of unified focus of IT spending to overall strategic initiatives. This lack of governance has created a process of defining IT priorities more defined by the persuasive ability of managers, their ability to build compelling Return on Investment (ROI) arguments, and

Secondly, because change management is occurring on the regional level instead of the corporate level, there is differing technologies, processes, and management styles which leads to a growing sense of frustration. Due to lack of IT Governance framework the company was not able to:

Due to the “centralized management of systems development” from the San Antonio office, the data systems support the “single USAA customer image,” and information is treated confidentially as the chief source of the organization[4]. USAA has decided to develop its IT infrastructure to better answer the demands of its members. By the 1980’s the company’s many divisions had started developing their own systems. McDermott saw the need to create an Information Services Division to integrate all the company’s systems and member information. His new vision of USAA is that the company is so integrated that members lose something of value when they go to a competitor”[5].

The new process that was instituted to prioritize IT projects at Volkswagen of America is very well organized. It takes an IT project and looks at it from multiple aspects, from business to IT. It also allows for several departmental entities to play a more active role in tying in business objectives with stated benefits of the IT project. As stated in Applegate, “IT governance is the effort to devise an overarching and integrated approach, addressing broad themes such as operating performance, strategic control, risk management, and values alignment.” (Applegate, 403) In

This case study sheds light on the value of information as Integrating Siting Systems INC (ISSI) has to make a decision on whether to conduct a test or go with a regular decisionmaking process in deciding whether to produce a standard or robust system. Our aim is to decide whether we should install the standard system, the robust system or to carry out a test that would help us make a better decision.

For example, FFC relies on bar code scanners and credit/debit card readers. To maintain its competitive edge in its market area, FFC recently implemented a fingerprint bio-coding payment system in all of its stores. This new systems implementation required that FFC change several of its general-ledger application programs; in particular, those related to its cash receipts processing. FFC does not use any outside service organizations to provide its IT services. Sophie Ewing, the audit senior who heads up your team, decided that because of FFC’s complex and sophisticated IT processing, an IT General Control (ITGC) review is mandatory to meet SAS 109’s risk assessment procedures and SOX Section 404 Management Assessment of Internal Controls requirements. You know that an ITGC review is very important because ITGCs provide the foundation for reliance on any financial information FCC’s systems produce. Your evaluation will affect the financial auditor in assessing the risk of material misstatement in FFC’s financials, and consequently, the audit plan. At your first team meeting, Sophie announced that your firm’s network security specialists would review the technical issues related to FFC’s internal controls. They will evaluate FFC’s operating systems, its telecommunications software, and its network configuration and firewalls. In preparation for the meeting, Sophie encouraged you to review the key provisions included in SAS 109, SOX Section 404,

All these factors are creating new challenges and new opportunities for businesses of all kinds and for the public sector. Adapting to the volatility and change is crucially dependent on, and in many cases driven by, IT. But to successfully meet these challenges and grasp these opportunities, you must focus on what you do best, not on becoming systems experts. Yet at the same time you must be 100 per cent certain that your IT support is efficient, cost effective and totally tuned to your needs.

Business must endlessly update their systems to keep up with the changes that occurs with their business process. Business processes are continually trying to find many ways to accomplish new and shifting goals for the business. New or shifting goals, such as changing the responsible for a current business process, or combining more than one responsible into one can be difficult and needs a clear understanding of multi-tiered systems and the business processes itself. The absence of connection among requirement and employment can lead to problems in recognizing the suitable program which must be changed to further increase the worthiness of a system in response to the new goals. Unfortunately, these changes can lead to errors and can make take longer than expected.