CIS 599 Week 6 Discussion 2
| Course Code CIS599_W6_P2: Office of the CIO | ||
| Slide # | Slide Title | Slide Narration |
| Slide 1 | Introduction | Welcome to Graduate Information Systems Capstone. In this lesson we will discuss the Office of the CIO Next slide. |
| Slide 2 | Topics | The following topics will be covered in this lesson: Situation; IT Strategy Creation Process; Creating Project Proposals As a Result of Driving an IT Strategy; Recommendations and Current Status; and Lessons Learned. Next slide. |
| Slide 3 | Situation | According to the text, certain trends like globalization, mergers and acquisitions, competition for market position and market share, regulatory compliance, and maintaining strategic advantage have become cornerstones in radically shaping business dynamics. For the CIO, every moment is consumed by next steps. This causes every dollar spent on IT projects to be scrutinized and justified. For the global corporation, the information landscape is comprised of a multifaceted portfolio of tools, applications, and projects across data warehouses, data marts, master data management, extract-transform-load, and business intelligence. Within the organization, control and management of data is immensely important. An organization’s cross functional and/or global needs can become compromised due to the lack of production of the integrated views of the data, complex data integration issues, and a weak information culture. An organization must be able to transform needs into a strategic advantage. Without proper oversight, some of the critical challenges could be: the current environment could be seen as heterogeneous by users; data redundancies and reporting redundancies could give rise to data quality and metadata issues; organizational silos could limit the use of know-how and skill sets; and creating cross-functional views could become time-consuming. It must be realized that the status quo is not acceptable. Armed with that realization, a company must embark upon a fundamental overhaul via enterprise-wide IT strategy creation, delivery, and implementation that could achieve a sustainable business impact from people, process, and technology perspectives. Next slide. |
| Slide 4 | IT Strategy Creation Process | Creation of an overall IT strategy is not a simple piece of work. The first thing that the CIO and IT organization must do is to determine the goals. The goals should fit the organization or industry and should be somewhat specific. For instance:
These goals are key to the realization of an IT strategy plan. Every companies would not necessarily use them all but surely would use some, and would probably add several other goals as well. Next slide. |
| Slide 5 | Creating Project Proposals as a Result of Driving an IT Strategy | IT strategy should be driven from various fronts ,which should ultimately lead to the creation of project proposals, business cases, and organizational structures. Some of the elements that constitute successful conclusion of information technology strategy are: Active communication between cross-functional team members and stakeholders. Communication can be accomplished in numerous ways, but the bottom-line is that it must be done. Communication can take the form of weekly conference calls, emails, video conferences, face-to-face meetings, or even workshops; Regular communication with various leadership teams should happen often. Lateral communication is important; however, upward communication should also be made a priority within the organizational structure; Subject area-specific data warehouse design should focus on finding an approach and stick with it. Settle for an approach that goes beyond the functional boundaries, adheres to the guiding principles, understands the fundamental information needs, formulates relevant use cases, and then devises the target number of data warehouses the corporation could need; As previously mentioned, strategic road map construction is a necessary element. It can be completed by prioritizing various project activities and by taking into account the functional area road maps; and finally, Work stream creation should use a divide-and-conquer approach that creates various work streams for critical areas, such as business intelligence, data warehousing landscape, and extract-transform-load. Next slide. |
| Slide 6 | Recommendations and Current Status | When the IT strategy is put into motion, it is advisable to reflect upon everything that happened. From the review, recommendations can be formed. Some noteworthy recommendations include: Establishment of a cross-functional program to drive alignment with the architecture and redirect data warehousing-related projects and operational activities where necessary; Funding a business intelligence competency center to establish a global platform in order to bring together the various business intelligence projects in a coordinated manner; and Funding a data integration competency center to establish a global platform in order to streamline data integration activities in terms of the resources, infrastructure, skill sets, and training aspects. When funding for all necessary items has been approved by the appropriate governance body, the project is able to move forward. Next slide. |
| Slide 7 | Lessons Learned | Some common themes that have been found in dealing with corporations are: One – Executive management sponsorship with the support of business executives. Creating and executing enterprise-wide strategies represents a great change management effort from the perspectives of people, technology, and organizational process. CIOs must support the IT strategic efforts through formal, top-down sponsorship; Two – Focusing on information requirements analysis. Think creatively about the future by incorporating the information requirements analysis. Document use cases and brainstorm to define architectural concepts at the right level of granularity; Three – Coupling portfolio planning and enterprise architecture skills. CIOs should appoint an individual who is well versed in the aforementioned disciplines to drive IT strategic efforts; Four – Selecting the cross-functional team members. Amplify chances of strategy success by selecting a team of people in the trenches who are technologically savvy and organizationally astute; and Five – Achieving Shared Goals. When working toward the shared goals, forge sustainable partnerships by developing trust, walking the walk, and demonstrating a high degree of integrity. By no means is this intended to be a finite list, but it should allow one to see the importance that the CIO, teamwork, and collaboration play in order to implement and achieve an IT strategy. Next slide. |
| Slide 8 | Check Your Understanding | |
| Slide 9 | Summary | We have now reached the end of this lesson. Let’s take a look at what we’ve covered: We began with an introduction to the current situation today’s CIO typically is facing. We looked at several trends shaping business dynamics, critical challenges for the office of the CIO, and the need for companies to embark upon a fundamental overhaul via enterprise-wide IT strategy creation, delivery, and implementation. Next, we looked at the IT Strategy Creation Process. We covered the process of creating goals, and listed several potential goals; Our next topic, Creating Project Proposals As a Result of Driving an IT Strategy, covered the need for strategy to be driven from various fronts, and noted some successful conclusion elements; We then moved on to Recommendations and Current Status, where we noted the need to follow recommendations received from movement of the IT strategy; and In our final topic, Lessons Learned, we covered some common themes that were found in dealing with many corporations. This Concludes This Lesson. |
