The's Mission : It Governance

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.

Key Issues At NAF, delivering value with IT is about more than delivering projects on time and on budget or having a good IT development shop. They have all this but theres still not enough value getting delivered. This case explores the questions of who is responsible for delivering value with IT and when IT value is delivered. It emphasizes that value delivery should be a business-IT partnership responsibility and will require change in the business over time. The first part of this case looks at the relationship between business strategy and IT development projects. It makes it clear that enterprise business strategies need enterprise solutions and a procedure for matching these. It also introduces the concept that investing in IT

Business Plan Alignment: aligning plans of the use of the software with the organizations business plans.

Architecture must be developed in order to oversee IT strategy to benefit the whole organizational enterprise. 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 value. The following steps are to be completed within each department:

Enterprise Rent-A-Car has started its operations in 1962 by establishing and successfully developing a new niche in the car renting industry. The business had strictly focused on replacing local citizens’ cars due to repairs. Later on Enterprise started to serve two additional segments, leisure & discretionally rentals and business rentals. Newly launched segments were successful; however the main focus of Enterprise continued to be the initial business stream – the Replacement Rentals. This business section takes up 78% of Enterprise’s resources, which enables the company to capture approximately 55% of the US replacement rentals market share. Yet, the total replacement Rent-A-Car

The original business strategy, which is still not fully implemented or thought out, is still intact and being somewhat utilized. Part of getting from where we are now to where we want to go, is to put together a comprehensive business and growth strategy plan that, brings about the most results. The original business strategy resembled that of a small business that had the most growth with the least risk. With little risk also means little or no technology. The company has changed, the competition is more intense and the economy is weakened. A new strategy that aligns with technology is essential in order to be successful. As business and technology have become increasingly intertwined, the strategic alignment of the two has emerged as a major corporate issue. With the emergence of IT from the back room to the forefront of business brings the alignment issue under the spotlight like never before. And as

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 value. The following steps are to be completed within each department:

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

* Adoption of appropriate methods and mechanics (i.e. strategic road map, target resource split, strategic buckets) for aligning these strategic goals with the project portfolio;

McKeen, James D; Smith, Heather (2012). IT strategy: Issues and practices (2nd ed.). Boston: Prentice Hall. Kindle Edition.

When the CEO launches two new strategic initiatives requiring integration across all business units, the organization – whose IT decisions have been largely delegated to its business units in proportion to their revenue generating capacity – now faces the dilemma of how to prioritize its IT projects in order to support the new strategic “enterprise” vision.

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

This portfolio focus on what I have learned during the whole IT Strategy and Control paper, a critical reflection of this paper would be provided. This reflection includes the key points, support reference and the demonstration of my own understanding about the paper itself and all of my personal understandings are based on the learning outcome of this paper. In the first part of this portfolio, I would discuss all the key IT Operations Management framework which have been introduced in the paper, the analysis of the processes based on my own understanding would be given. In the second part, analyze processes required for aligning IT infrastructure and operations with the business goals of an organization would be talked about, and I would focus a business organization which has been mentioned in the caselets as a sample. In the third part, some critical evaluate operational IT organizations and their processes against the studied models would be listed and analyzed. In the last part, the recommendations and analysis of my own would be given against those organizations (caselets) which have some problems and current issues arising from the implementation of the IT framework.

The business sector is a highly dynamic sector; new technology, mergers, acquisitions and regulatory changes are just few activities that make the business sector a constantly changing environment. The key factor to a functioning company is the deployment of an efficient information technology system, supporting; business strategies, goals, and needs of the organisation. Society for information management ranked IS – business alignment as number one concern on the annual survey on top management concerns for

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.