Enterprise IT at Cisco - Case Study Example

These strategies can encompass what are known as the four building blocks of competitive advantage; superior efficiency; quality; speed, flexibility and innovation; and responsiveness to customers. Discussion What was Pete Solvik's approach to IT governance? what was the primary style in use at the network/infrastructure level? What about the data level? How about the application level? Pete Solvik completely decentralized the IT functions and distributed the IT funding among all departments in a way that all functions and departments had the autonomy to make decisions regarding the IT system that they wanted to deploy and go ahead with the investment.

At the time, IT was considered as an overhead cost and this needed to be changed. He restructured the way in which IT decisions regarding the investment on applications were made. As the IT system of Cisco was failing and the technology was becoming outdated, Solvik decided to implement an Enterprise Resource Planning system to attain a more robust infrastructure. The ERP system was implemented to control the functions of the inventory and manufacturing department and to keep the departments in sync.

With the help of the infrastructure implementation, Cisco then launched intranet service for the employees and a web-base online resource for the customers. Solvik enabled all functions and department to select the IT systems that they wished to implement and gave them an autocratic environment of decision making as well as the budget to make the IT investments. He also divided the IT budgets among regional department to give different regions a choice to implement the systems that they found more feasible.

However, with the number of different systems deployed, data was being entered into the ERP differently through each department which made it all the more difficult to track information. Although this approach proved successful in the short run, eventually there were too many projects to implement and handle and this caused various issues. What problems did Cisco have with its internal IT by 2001? Why didn't the ERP system help more? There was a lot of investment over IT implementations but hardly any proved to be fruitful.

By giving all departments and functions the autonomy to have their own IT tools caused duplication. This was wasted funds over the same type of systems that had similar functionalities. This not only wasted funds but also caused miscommunication within the company. Also, different tools had different keywords to extract data which caused further problems. As Solvik decentralized the system, there was no single centralized group that overlooked the IT decisions and systems that were being implemented to ensure that there are no redundancies.

The problem with interfacing the ERP system was that the various different systems tried to access different information in different ways. Data from the ERP was used differently by the independent systems as there were a number of interfaced developed to communicate with the ERP. Implementing an ERP system is not enough, the system has to upgraded and extended with the passage for time for it function better. The updating and extension of the system was hindered with the different interfaces used to communicate with the system.

Moreover, the employees had become accustomed to the systems that