chapter 5: Organizing structures that support strategic initiatives

Organizational Structures

       

Employees across the organization must work closely together to develop strategic initiatives that create competitive advantages. Understanding the basic structure of a typical IT department including titles, roles, and responsibilities will help an organization build a cohesive enterprise wide team. It also as communication flowcharts that communication in which managers at various levels is required to deliver information to too many people for too many levels of approval. Well-designed organizational structures will produce efficient communication channels and encourage fast, clean decisions. To develop strategic initiatives that create competitive advantages organizational employees must work closely together.

IT Roles and Responsibilities

Every organizational should have organizational structures. Information technology is a relatively new functional area having been around formally in most organizations only for 40 years. Job titles, roles, and responsible often differ dramatically form organization to organization. There are 5 important roles in IT department.

·         Chief information officer (CIO)

·         Chief technology officer (CTO)

·         Chief security officer (SCO)

·         Chief privacy officer (CPO)

·         Chief knowledge officer (CKO)

For the first roles, Chief information officer (CIO), its responsible for (1) overseeing all uses of IT and (2) ensuring the strategic alignment  of IT with business goals and objectives. The CIO often reports directly to the CEO. CIO must be concerned with more than IT. Broad functions of CIO include:

1.             Manager - Ensure the delivery of all IT projects on time and within budget.

2.             Leader - Ensure the strategic vision of IT is in line with the strategic vision of the organization.

Communication - Advocate and communicate the IT strategy by building and maintaining strong executive relationships.

The next roles in IT department is Chief technology officer (CTO) is responsible for ensuring the throughput, speed, accuracy, availability, and reliability of an organization's information technology. CTOs similar to CIOs but except that CIOs responsible for effectiveness of ensuring that IT is aligned with the organization's strategic initiatives. CTOs have directed responsible for ensuring the efficiency of IT systems throughout the organization. CTOs possess well-rounded knowledge of all aspects of IT, including hardware, software, and telecommunications.

Chief Security officer (CSO) responsible for ensuring the security of IT systems and developing strategies and IT safeguards against attacks from hackers and viruses. If there are no CSO, many hackers easy to hacks the website and collect the data from the website.

Chief privacy officer (CPO) is responsible for ensuring the ethical and legal use of information within an organization. CPOs is the newest senior executive position in IT. Many CPOs are lawyers by training, enabling them to understand the often complex legal issues surrounding the use of information.

Chief knowledge officer (CKO) is responsible for collecting, maintaining, and distributing the organization's knowledge. The CKO design programs and systems that make it easy for people to reuse the knowledge. These systems create repositories of organizational documents, methodologies, tools and practices, and they establish methods for filtering the information. The CKO must continuously encourage employee contributions to keep the systems up-to-date.

Gap Between Business Personnel And It Personnel

The gap between the business arm in a company and information technology is exist because presence of perception business people that the Information Technology Department generates expenses not income. This means, they looks alike liability and not asset to the company. In the same time, The Information technology department is “hidden” from the customer often classified as a “back office” business initiative or process. This creates a different perspective to the business personnel and the result, a gap is existing.

Ways to Decrease Gap between both  IT  Personnel and Business Personnel

        i.            Communication

·         Communication is the main ingredient that will close the gap between the business personnel and the IT Department. Business leaders must understand, really understand, that Information Technology is not optional but critical to the success of the business.

·         The head of the company sets the tone for the entire business.

·         In addition IT department teams need to understand the business practices of the company.

      ii.            Cross Training

·         Rettig suggests that initiating cross training is one way to reduce the distance between business and IT.

·         Cross   training   is   a loaded  concept  and  most  technologists  will be specialists  with  years  of  training  in  their  chosen  fieldt. This mean, the IT personnel could be train with other department skills to instill some confidence in them. Not to give them other job.

ORGANIZATIONAL FUNDAMENTAL

1.     ETHICS

Ethics is the principle and standards that guide our behavior toward other people.

Descriptive ethics is exactly that a description of "what is"  in the land of business ethics.  This perception seeks to recognize moral & ethical systems shared by people, cultures, and societies.  This form seeks to know prevailing views and actions about ethical performance.  One problem to this school of thought is that using this perspective may lead one to believe that an actual unethical behavior is satisfactory because "everyone is doing it."

 Issues Affected By Technology Advances:

2.     PRIVACY

The right to be left alone when you want to be, to have control over your own personal possession, and to not be observed without you concern. Some of the most problematic decision organization faces lies in the murky and turbulent waters of privacy. The burden counts from the knowledge that each time employees make a decision regarding issues of privacy, the outcome could sink the company someday.

For example, the boundaries and content of what is considered private differ among cultures and individuals, but share basic common themes.

3.     SECURITY – how much will downtime cost your business.

The old business axiom “time is money” needs to be updated to more accurately reflect the crucial interdependence between IT and business processes. To reflect the times, the phrase up time is money. The leading cause of downtime is a software failure followed by human error, according to Informatics Research.

Unplanned downtime can strike anytime form any number of causes, ranging from tornado to sink overflows to network failures to power outage. Although natural disasters may appear to be the most diver stating causes of IT outages, they are hardly the most frequent of biggest threats to up time.