Abm 750 Harvard Case Summary

The mini-case starts with “IT is a pain in the neck,” which is a wrong notion that most of the business managers have in an organization. The history of IT-business relationships in most of the organizations shows that there is a huge gap between both sides which is getting better over a period of time. Today, managers know the fact that it is the people, technology and information that realizes the value of a company and everytime IT cannot be blamed for everything. The days have gone when IT was looked at as the sole responsibility for a company’s growth or downfall. IT processes along with the

Information Technology (IT) is a foundation for conducting business today. It plays a critical role in increasing productivity of firms and entire nation. It is proven that firms who invested in IT have experienced continued growth in productivity and efficiency. Many companies' survival and even existence without use of IT is unimaginable. IT has become the largest component of capital investment for companies in the United States and many other countries.

The information system transaction processing infrastructure was good for a company of their size along with password management and recovery mechanisms. Plus, the company hosts their ecommerce application outside of Vermont which provides more advantage positon on the national internet. Although these are all positive aspects of the system, the system also has numerous flaws. For starters the IT architecture document exists but was incomplete. Secondly, some of the application were connected to the middleware to the core enterprise application, whereas, others run independently. Thirdly, the system was too complex and aging. As a member of the Board of Directors the IT architecture would be a great concern especially the part where all the necessary information resides in one person’s head. The major concern; however, would be with the system stalling during peak experiences.

“A garbage can model of IT value portrays the factors most organizations confront when making investment in technology” [Henry C. Lucas Jr]. According to Henry C. Lucas’ Garbage Can model the value of a project depends on the level with which the variable affecting a project such as management buy-in, technology, cost, and IT staff converge to produce a useful output. The level of this convergence determines the value derived from the project. If an application is ideal for an organization and is configured and implemented correctly but is not embraced by the users it will not produce the anticipated value. In cases where technology becomes intertwined with the strategy of the organization, as was the case in the R.L Polk case study, it becomes even harder to determine the true value of the solution. In these scenarios the direct benefits might be easier to calculate, but assigning the value of the indirect benefits to the technology becomes difficult. For this reason, I agree with the approach adopted by Vasconi in this article. Creating a separate company for developing the new solution not only increases the probability of success, but it also makes it easier to measure the direct and indirect benefits created by the solution. Vasconi effectively used the garbage can

The fact that opportunities for strategic advantage from information technology is rapidly disappearing, it is important that companies look critically at how they invest in IT and how they manage their systems by avoiding wasteful spending, waiting to purchase an IT commodity until you are sure of its authenticity and also focus on vulnerabilities not opportunities.

As it has been evident in the 21st century, almost all companies at the global level are utilizing Information technology in their attempt to achieve the desired productivity. It is however worth noting that manufacturing, processing, assembly as well as service industries and companies have sought to utilize IT without emphasis on the specific achievements. In this context, it has come to the notice of many critics that entrepreneurs are utilizing IT just for purpose of achieving high profits and without paying key attention to the strategic importance of the same. As Carr argues, the power and the ubiquity of IT has increased prominently but this system is no longer offering the desired strategic advantage.

Information Technology (IT) is a foundation for conducting business today. It plays a critical role in increasing productivity of firms and entire nation. It is proven that firms who invested in IT have experienced continued growth in productivity and efficiency. Many companies' survival and even existence without use of IT is unimaginable. IT has become the largest component of capital investment for companies in the United States and many other countries.

Included with this full-text Harvard Business Review article: 1 Article Summary The Idea in Brief—the core idea The Idea in Practice—putting the idea to work 2 Investing in the IT That Makes a Competitive Difference 11 Further Reading A list of related materials, with annotations to guide further exploration of the article’s ideas and applications

IT Executive, with a success track of development and delivery of technology portfolios under complex matrix organizations, aimed at shaping and realizing disruptive business strategies. Success record as a business-technology strategy leader includes the use of business acumen, influencing and negotiation skills combined with enterprise architecture principles, application portfolio development/management, scaled agile portfolio management skills, and deep technical knowledge to increase firms’ competitiveness.

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.

How it can go wrong - key lessons to learn from IS/IT Strategy implementation Table of Contents

Author suggests that business corporations should spend less on the IT infrastructure by arguing that IT is no more a strategic advantage and is similar to other commodity which is assessable to each and every one at market place. Author advices organizations to spend less on the IT capital, to wait and learn from the mistake of competitors and also evaluate the risks associated with the implementation of IT infrastructure. Author has provided the details of it spending and financial outcome of the industry. Here we need to understand that financial out come from an IT investment cannot be expected immediately or in the same financial year. First of all capital goods are very different from the information good. Business benefitted from the Information technology not only based on the how much they spent on the IT rater than how their IT operations are aligned with their

“In the earliest phases of its build out; however, an infrastructural technology can take the form of a proprietary technology. As long as access to the technology is restricted—through physical limitations, intellectual property rights, high costs, or a lack of standards—a company can use it to gain advantages over rivals.” As Laura Acevedo notates in her article Business Benefits of Information Technology, “Companies using a first-movers strategy can use information technology to create new products, distance their products from the existing market or enhance their customer services. Companies that follow a low-cost product strategy can look to information technology solutions to reduce their costs through increased productivity and reduced need for employee overhead.” The contention is that once a technology has evolved from being considered a proprietary technology into an infrastructural technology then the differentiation from one company to the next is inevitably lost.

For the social aspect, it is important to highlight that the company will have to invest in develop new skills, that it is new even for education. In this case, this is a relevant factor for the company, however the Organization already invest in laboratories and university to improve IT knowledge. As per the technologic factor, the concern is how the company will work to continue being leader in this segment, as the competitor can duplicate their system and produce different options in some case with lower cost. The compromise of IBM in invest in technology is a significant differentiate factor in the market, but represent cost and risk. Technology is changing constantly and the company cannot accept the idea of the products and services will continue being demanded by the client. (Mc Donald and Wilson, 2011). “Powerful new computers technologies let them dismantle your new idea, millimetre by millimetre, and them replicated it” (Trout and Rivkin, 2000; p.22). The other significant framework is Porter’s five force, that contribute to identify the threat of competitors in the micro

In large organizations, all the three domains, projects, programs, and portfolios, have to meet the maturity standards. The IT portfolio plays high-level strategic roles by ensuring that project investments are being managed most appropriately. The main benefit of IT portfolio management is enabling measurement and objective evaluation of IT investments and alignment with the business strategy which will maximize the value of IT investments while minimizing risk. However, the ignoring of the IT portfolio management will impact negatively on the communication and alignment between IT and business leaders, which lead to the wrong distribution of the resources and budgets on projects