Information Systems for Managers

Answer 1

Introduction:

Farokh is keen to revamp D'Costa Cosmetics IT Infrastructure and align it to the Corporate
Strategy. So, he must study the fact that divide between business and IT is so culturally
evident that it reads like a workplace joke's punchline.
Of course, there is a divide between people who work in traditionally defined business units
and those who work in IT. This divide was intentional in the initial stage, but as technology
became slowly grew important, the requirement surged for local and global businesses. This
divide is now seen as a burden. Companies now recognise the need to align business with IT.
A recent Gartner report predicts that worldwide, half of organisations have achieved
increased IT-business alliance by 2022. Though, the problem is that IT-business alignment
isn't easy to achieve.

Most companies opine that IT and business aren't working as closely as they should have
been to optimise their product delivery service. Reason being, the working of technology is
different from the traditional business approach. Other reasons come into perspective that
stereotypes continue delusions about how IT sees business and vice versa. Personnel, who are
not IT savvy, think IT is too technical to understand. They might fail to know that IT takes
part in core revenue-generating activities like customer service, sales, marketing, etc. Some
people are more comfortable working with spreadsheets and numbers, while writing makes
sense for some people.

Despite the advancement of roles like CIOs and CTOs, tech leadership does not stop to report
significant struggles when they attempt to team up with business units. This indicates that
these differences are affecting many businesses, as they often show problems like:
 Unexpected ROI for Expensive investments.
 Underperformance
 Bottlenecks that obstruct service delivery, via buggy or slow deployments
 Confused customer service
 Hurdle between solutions and processes
 Ineffective support & communication for potential customers and end users
Definition of ‘alignment’ for business and IT

The idea of business and IT alignment is rooted within the longstanding reality that the
business people and the tech side couldn't connect bridge their communication, knowledge,
and skills gap to work in effective assistance and successful service delivery.

Benefits of aligning IT and business

 Reduction in IT expenses
 Increases collaborations
 Fine-tunes investments
 Improvement in ROI
 Highlights visibility into problem areas
 Speeds up time-to-market
 Upskills your employee and industry knowledge
 Synchronises all units to become agile

All these boost your bottom line, and benefits result in top customer experiences.

Achieving IT-business alignment is always the best practices

Discussing alignment, and achieving it, represent two separate things. Achieving true IT-
business alignment is rather a tough job, specifically due to the fact that its cultural by
practicality. Culture changes may appear easy but those efforts hardly succeed. On the
contrary, achieving alignment needs a specific strategy. And that strategy should be an
iterative process: this mandates defining one change, putting that change in place, watching
the change perform, and finalising whether to tweak it or not. Consider the Plan-Do-Check-
Act cycle, so that changes can be implemented.
Consider these best practices to align IT and business:

a. Consider IT as a business transforming device - If you're interested to know how IT

can support other business units like sales, marketing, product development, etc.
you're still foolwing the archived approach. Make the ambiance of a customer
experience the #1 factor -- Aligning everyone under a single goals will be directly
supportive to the customer, will be easier to break down discipline silos of traditional
types. Make sure your tech teams can focus directly on the customer too.
 b. Use a single language -- Every company and every industry have its lingo. Help in
clarifying what every team does -- Start by standardising your enterprise's language
across all departments.

c. Maintain transparency to all departments -- Discontinue any unnecessary mysteries,

instead, management and executive decisions should be transparent.

Infrastructure Law Farokh has to follow

For the base stations, the deployment of the infrastructure must be adhered to the "Law for
the Strengthening the Telecommunications Infrastructure’s Expansion, (i.e. Law No. 29022)
and its related regulations, and requisite amendments whose purpose is to establish a
temporary, yet special regime to implement the type of infrastructure necessary for the
provision of public telecommunications services all through the national territory, particularly
in rural areas.
FHWA estimate, i.e. Highway Authorizations Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. On
the other hand, Infrastructure Law does not relate to the issues that concern land tenants who
occupy a property or plot without the requisite land title claiming ownership. Overall, the aim
of the Infrastructure Law is not only to streamline but also to standardise environmental
licensing and land acquisition processes in transport infrastructure projects.

Conclusion

Farokh's keenness to revamp D'Costa Cosmetics IT infrastructure and also align it to the
corporate strategy must take care of the above important points. He is also expected to take
care of spinning business and IT employees to encourage understanding, promote an
inclusive and vibrant culture, understand changes in humans, and finally, create an alignment
plan with exclusiveness.

Answer 2
Introduction

Arthur D Little, Inc. (ADL) played an important role in bringing in a change initiative in
BPCL that started towards the end of 1996. In co-creating a vision for the company, the
strategy of ADL involved a cross-section of the organisation, who all determined the
company's current reality, conceptualised the gaps between current reality, and vision, and
finally developed a change plan to connect these gaps. The rise of customer focus took place
as the overriding dimension of this exercise. Therefore, the initiative of the company down
the line was transformed into a program called — Customer Service and Customer
Satisfaction (CUSECS).

SBUs (Strategic Business Units)

The alternate plan, led to an important and restructuring delayering of the organisation. It
abolished the previous departmental silos at the same time creating six strategic business
units (SBUs), viz., Refinery, Industrial and Commercial, and Aviation, Retail, LPG, and
Lubricants; in addition to offering services and support entities which included finance,
information systems, human resources, etc. As compared to the former seven or six layers,
the new structure came up with four layers. According to (Senge, 1990), it involved in
intangible terms, alternate approaches that would remodel BPCL into a learning organisation.

Since the complete change plan required effective integration and needed to be premised on a
massive growth in the organisation’s information intensity. It was intended to a great extent
that IT could make contribution to this and thus began the project to adapt as an information
system for the organisation.

BPCL’s IS Plan

The IS plan of BPCL envisioned the complete system's creation for assisting the business
aspirations of the company. A small team of 9 people was drawn from the CUSECS and IS
programs set out to map the prevailing business systems (legacy systems) and additionally
the future needs characterised by resource optimization, customer focus, integration, and
flexibility. The team concluded that it was essential to replace the prevalent "batch-process-
oriented legacy systems” with a “state-of-the-art ERP system”. The IS plan team, as part of
the selection process, mapped all the major processes in BPCL with the help of conceptual
insights and people identified as possessing expertise in their business areas through a series
of process workshops, and conclusively came up with over 600 process maps. These
workshops were conducted at all 4 regional headquarters, viz., Mumbai, Calcutta, Delhi, and
Chennai. The team a with a all-inclusive questionnaire, developed a detailed to-list, based on
these processes, and finally came up with some scripts so that they could capture credible
business scenarios.

Validating or pre-selecting the ERP products

The questionnaire and requirement list served the purpose of validating or pre-selecting the
ERP products for detailed evaluation, while the scripts were used in the final evaluation of
the product. While the team was preparing itself for the ERP products' objective evaluation, it
was the supporting functional entities and SBUs that had to own it up. As per one IS team
member,
The presentations were extended to a wider cross-section of people in the organisation at a
later stage. Each vendor, after deciding upon the possible ERP vendors, was asked to put up
presentations to an identified set of over 100 people from different businesses. The objective
of putting up these presentations was to make key people clear their doubts, understand the
working of ERP systems, create a felt need in them and eventually make them commit
themselves to ERP in their implementation of respective businesses. Following this process,
each business came out with its predictable qualitative as well as quantitative benefits, which
formed the basis for the approval of the project.

Project ENTRANS

A short form for Enterprise Transformation i.e. ENTRANS name was decided by the top
management for the venture that applied their SAP R/3 project. The name represented the
vision of BPCL's top management to transform BPCL and make it a new BPCL. The
uniqueness of BPCL's ERP implementation is that it has been a robust business initiative that
too right from the project's conception.

Although for the duration of phase of software selection, on account of the criticality of
technological problems, BPCL’s IS had to get into the role of a process anchor, and
subsequently, the implementation segment was led by a non-IS person. A PSC (Project
Steering Committee) was constituted with the heads of all the HR, IS, SBUs, and Finance as
its members. The PSC's mandate was to validate decisions taken by the project team, and
then take decisions on interfacing the Entity / inter SBU issues, followed by identifying and
soliciting decisions from the Apex Council on issues with wider organisational/strategic
implications, supplying resources, and reviewing the project's progress. The PSC used to
meet at least once a month and as and when the issues mandated resolution.

Conclusion

BPCL ‘s two-phase implementation was worked out to implement almost all the SAP R/3
modules. The implementation was to be completed in two phases. The first phase was
constituted of the Conceptual Design and Planning (CDP) while the second phase was
designed for the Detailed Design and Implementation (DDI). The necessity of engaging an
external agency — an SAP Implementation Partner having relevant expertise and experience
— was generally agreed upon. It was the PWC (Price Waterhouse Coopers) who were
selected, through a bidding process for the CDP phase, as the implementing partner.

Answer 3A

Introduction

Jennifer Roberts's enthusiasm to go ahead with the Infra Revamp initiative Hawthorne
Investments and has started her journey by targeting BYOD as her first initiative. As the
requirement of the assignment, we need to highlight a few of the important Tips for
establishing a successful BYOD policy in the company.

Anyone like Jennifer is in the process of developing a corporate BYOD (Bring Your Own
Device) policy, still hasn't gotten around to creating a policy yet, or might already have one
that is outdated, the following few tips that will help in addressing IT security, IT service,
application use, and many other components.

1. Specify only the permitted devices

Employees these days are pampered with choices, with a whole variety of devices from
Android phones to iOS-based mobiles. Above all, it is important to specify what exactly is
meant by 'BYOD'. Should you instead be saying bring your iOS device and not your Android
device? Or should you be saying bring your no other gadgets, except your iPad? You need to
clarify what devices can be used, and what devices are acceptable by the company.
2. A strict security policy should be established for all devices that enter the premises.
Generally, device users refuse to move to lock passwords and screens on their devices. They
face disruptions towards the ease of access to the content on their device and also their
functionalities. However, this is an invalid complaint. A lot of sensitive information becomes
accessible by linking phones and other devices to corporate servers. If employees are
interested to adopt the BYOD initiative, they need to configure their devices with complex
passwords for protection. A lengthy and strong alphanumerical password needs to be put in
place – not just a four-digit PIN.

3. Defining a clear service policy for devices under the BYOD system is a must
It is mandatory that the management needs to set the rules when it comes to questions about
employees' devices and resolving problems there-in. Policymakers will need to answer the
following questions, to enable themselves to implement this:
What all will be the policies for supporting personally owned applications? What support
needs to be provided for devices that might get damaged? Etc.

4. Clear needs of all forms of communication to be applied on who owns whatsapp and
data.

While it may look rational for the organisation to own solitary rights to the personal
information that is stored on the servers, complications are certain to arise when wiping the
device in case of theft or other details.

Conclusion
As per the traditional system, when a device is resetted, all digital elements on the device are
erased as well, which can contain personal data that the individual might have paid for. At
times, these items are irreplaceable.
Thus, this gives rise to a valid question -- whether the BYOD policy that is created will
allow the wiping of the entire device data that is brought into the network?

Answer 3B

Introduction
BYOD or Bring Your Own Device is the latest IT trend. It is a practice under which
employees are encouraged to make use of their personal devices to access systems and data
of the company. Being a small part of the larger trend of ‘IT consumerisation’ – where
software and hardware of the customer are allowed into organisational premises – BYOD is
such a policy that can affect from the CEO to the hourly worker, i.e. each individual in the
company.

The IT department's effort to stay on top of constant technological advancements is strong

even these days. The system has emerged as an increasing desire among employees who
carry their own devices for accessing corporate data. The umbrella term BYOD (Bring Your
Own Device) has also come to refer to several other initiatives such as BYOT (Bring Your
Own Technology), BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC ), and BYOP (Bring Your Own Phone).
These initiatives have emerged as the enablement of the workforce and also aligning them
with the concept of 'IT consumerisation.

The Pros of BYOD policy

As mentioned above, BYOD has many a merit:

1. Ensures employee satisfaction

2. Improves user engagement
3. Brings down technology costs for field service firms
4. Providing training for using new devices.
5. According to Cisco Internet Business Solutions Group, these savings add up to $3,150 per
employee per year.
6. Additionally, when employees bring their own devices, they tend to take extra care of
their hardware and thus save you the additional cost of providing alternative devices.
7. Up-to-date Technology --- they are likely to be more vigilant about keeping their all
devices, including laptops up-to-date and installing the latest available update.

The Concerns

1. No matter the background or the situation, problems will always arise. No uniform end-
user support is available there. Since most employees will be working on makes of devices
and different types. It is of foremost importance to understand and equally remain aware of
this.

2. Security is a never ending concern across all platforms today, and this is no exception for
a BYOD policy as well, yet, it is not impossible to tide over this challenge. All it requires is
the sensible preparation of IT departments to remain alert. Antivirus programs and Password-
protection need to be installed to separate apps and work decks from personal information.

3. Data retrieving: What happens to the organization's data when an employee leaves the
company? Do they have their phone number? Who will discontinue their access to your
company data? What happens if/when clients were calling that number directly?

Conclusion

For an employee in the sales environment, this BYOD system becomes extremely risky, and
BYOD policies need to be understood very carefully and so, address this issue. Otherwise of
it, an ex-employee may suddenly turn into a competitor with easy access to client
information.