Decisions on investments in IT are controversial and crucial in an organization. With a thorough understanding of a company’s strategic context, managers can identify business and IT maxims that can help determine the IT infrastructure capabilities necessary to achieve their business goals.
Understand the strategy. Important for managers to prioritize and to ensure that most important messages are understood. Business mottos form a base from which business and IT executives can work together to identify IT mottos. IT mottos describe how a firm needs to connect, share, and structure information and deploy IT across the firm. Expectations for IT investments in the firm; data access and use; hardware and software resources; communications capabilities
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Lifexpress’ effect on Lenox’s productivity is that it cut the processing of all the necessary paperwork from four weeks minimum to a matter of hours. Lifexpress should be assessed on its own merits and not on comparisons to competitor systems. Lifexpress was received positively by Lenox’s technologically challenged agents. This could only mean that the agents will get the hang of using the Lifexpress system given time. Having a handicap of technological incompetence. The completion of the Lifexpress project in itself was a success. The project was made operational on time and in budget. It is given that Lenox Insurance Company has more product offerings than its competition so Lenox’s Lifexpress project should be expected to be more complicated and therefore will take more time to cover all of its services. Lifexpress has a long development life cycle. Lenox has used three years from analysis to implementation stage. In today’s competitive business environment, an IT system for a financial service company is time critical. The second problem is that agents are not yet properly trained to use the system because there are many old agents in the company and they have difficulties learn to use the new system. The significant problem for Lenox’s relative old agents to use the new system. The third problem is that the product lines are not completely …show more content…
It is very important for Lenox, because its agents are relatively old and not tech-savvy. Giving them a simple system at first then gradually adding more features to the system will better serve agents’ learning curve. When the project is finished, Lenox needs very little training for its agents, so it saves both money and time. Should get many feedbacks from users, the user experience would be significantly improved. It could also use breaking a project into small phases and developers cannot continue on to the next phase until the previous phase is complete. Because Lifexpress’s multi-functions nature, the whole projects can be divided into several phases based on functionality. For example, the first phase could the CRM module of Lifexpress. By the time the first phased is finished, the agents would be able to develop a thorough financial profile of a customer, identify and explore Lenox’s most appropriate policies. By doing so, business value could be achieved much sooner. Such practice ensures the reliability of the project. Information systems developed as solutions to the wrong type of problem. Lifexpress was delivered on time, on budget, and met all the specifications that were agreed by the board. However, the resulting system was not satisfactory – the new system would not provide Lenox with an improved bottom line, increased market share or a competitive advantage. In the best case, it would only catch
Middleton Mutual is a large insurance company that is seeking innovation. The Chief Information Officer, Dennis Devereaux, and Vice President of Information Systems, Max Vargo, are trying to push for a new expert system to ease up the underwriting process of their company. The issue that arises in the company is that certain higher ups aren’t willing to fund this one million dollar project without proof of return. Within the next year, the company will be losing two underwriters. Devereaux has his hands full with trying to get the company’s financial approval.
...takes to set up information in the system. The level of understanding would improve through partaking or getting involved and henceforth could be adapted easily. All the bits and pieces of the project would rapidly increase or grow as per the workflow process. At the end, the overall CPOE system should be able to compare the manual method with the new electronic system and tell which is best and accurate to use and also tell how much time and money will be saved when using either system. At the end of the project the team should be able to come together and discuss whether or not the project met all of the company’s needs such as if it is reliable, efficient, safe and secure and also does it save time and money. Then, if the system has more advantages than disadvantages and it is worth all of the team’s time and effort it would be best to continue with the project.
Loblaw's Shoppers Drug Mart bid escalates grocery war as well as the new competitor Amazon and Walmart. The purpose of the competition is increasing market shares. Loblaw to boost its presence in metropolitan areas and reply to increasing need for smaller stores that provide a wide range of merchandise and are easily accessible in densely populated metropolitan locations. The almost 100-year-old Loblaw chain is great at offering one-stop shopping in large-format stores.
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.
They need an IT network that could scale up to match the size of the organization it projected to become in few years. There is a problem of scalability in their system. Their IT infrastructure is further complicated by incompatible IT system it has inherited through acquisitions and as a result it is facing need of huge IT investment to get things in right place.
Keri E. Pearlson and Carol S. Saunders (2010). Strategic Management of Information Systems, 4th Edition. John Wiley & Sons, New York
This article deals with the topic of how organizations should go about implementing new technology systems. The article is built around Murphy's Law that, "Whatever can go wrong, will." When organizations implement new system a lot of know problems cannot be avoided and unforeseen problems arise with even grater frequency. Chew outlines seven points to help launch a new system with greater success since they are essential for long-term survival.
Base on the case of “Your Choice Furniture”, we marked this system's analysis to formulate solutions in this report; it assisted in evaluating the impact of recent change information technologies of “Your choice furniture” business system for evaluating how well the firm will be performing.
As threats evolve and change with each new technology introduced organizations will also have to strive to improve the techniques used to protect their critical Information Technology (IT) assets. Gartner's IT Key Metrics Data for 2010 which was based on a survey of companies worldwide found that a company spent 5% of their IT budget on IT Security (Kirk, 2010). Connie Guglielmo, a Forbes staff member noted that IT spending will hit $2 Trillion in 2013 and Worldwide IT spending will rise 4.6 percent this year (Guglielmo, 2013).
In conclusion, the benefits of the system implementation are vastly distant. This does not mean, however that a decision to drop the project should be made. As the projected revenue for 2006 is targeted at 108,368 million, this signifies that the investment will be paid off in the long term. This will be in 5 years from the time of release. As the market is favoring Teletron here because they can capture much of the market share, I believe that it would be a wise decision to approve the system and immediately begin on the implementation of the system. Much of the business can still function during the development phases for the software application. This will mainly be the consulting services performing the similar services as it always did.
Henderson and Venkatraman proposed a model for business – IT alignment; it was intended to support the integration of information technology (IT) into business strategy by advocating alignment between and within four domains (see figure 1). The inter-domain alignment is pursued along two dimensions: strategic fit (between the external and internal domain) and functional integration (between the business domain and the IT domain). The objective of this model was to provide a way to align information technology with business objectives in order to realise value from IT investments. The authors argued that the potential strategic impact of information technology requires both an understanding of the critical components of IT strategy and its role in supporting and shaping business strategy decisions and a process of continuous adaptation and change. Hence, they presented a model that defines the range of strategic choices facing managers.
When faced with the task of creating an IT Strategy, its usefulness may be questioned. Completing one takes time and effort, and requires funding, and it is unlikely to have any immediate benefit. As the name implies, the benefits from a well thought out IT strategy are strategic in nature:
A successful business strategy will identify changes in the external trends in the market place. Plan out what the company’s future direction is. Set out the goals for the management team. It will identify a vision of where the company wants to be in the future. Keep all employees informed of the direction of the company.
One main apprehension that they have against Information System is the high investment cost. In addition to this there is the high maintenance and upgrade costs associated with the deployment of new IT systems. In fact they prefer to outsource the heavy IT department expenditures to other companies having IT as their core activities. In return they expected to receive a full solution pack to meet their requirements and they are ready to pay these IT services as an operating cost. At the same time the risks associated with IS are being shifted to the other
Computer Economics, a research and consulting firm, surveyed 209 IT organization worldwide regarding their IT investment plans. The leading trends “were identified as low risk/high reward based on their cost predictability and their positive return on investment for organizations within two years’ time.” CRM tops the list for 2014 (Mackie, 2014)