Pros and Cons of the current Alcon IT management system - Essay Example

Another major disadvantage of the management at Alcon is the autonomous operation of each of the business groups in the execution of their activities. They have adopted a culture of independent operation for each of the group and minimum cooperation among the groups. This leads to the independent execution of tasks from each group. Cooperation among different business groups in any organization helps in providing support and improves work handling. The position of Corporate Director of IT plays a vital role in the management hierarchy of the organization (Stair & Reynolds).

Its long vacancy has affected the operation of the other groups below it in the hierarchy because they were operating without corporate governance. This put the organization at such a disadvantage that they had to create a new position to help with the situation. The decentralization of the management process can also play as a strength for the organization. This is in the sense that, with their own management of operations some groups will execute their operation better that others, hence singling out the poor performing branches.

This can serve as a wakeup call for the improvement of the poor performing branches. The decentralization of operations also improves accountability in the dispensation and use of funds. With every branch allocated its own budget, accountability for the use of these funds in achieved more comprehensively The Alcan management also outsourced a lot of the work. This made then unaware of some of the workings and utilization of resources. The new enterprise architecture management system The vice president of Corporate Information Technology, Robert Ouellette had a vision of how he wanted to run the management at Alcan.

After being brought on board, he performed an analysis and decided to come up with a new way of operation. His main target was to achieve cohesion and cooperation among the business groups. This was to be achieved at different levels. The new system, although with advantages, did not come without a few setbacks. The main advantage of his system was development of better working relations among the departments. This helped improve work execution, although as a disadvantage, the lesser performing groups could easily go unnoticed, because their work seems complete.

To tackle this, he made it a requirement, that in every team, the head of department and their officers were to report on the progress on their activities to higher management. This immensely improves accountability. The other major problem was the definition of roles in the management hierarchy. Due to unclear definition of roles, some activities were not properly executed. The advantage of Robert’s system is that, it clearly defines the roles of each position. Robert looked to reorganize the operations of the major braches in the organization.

This was to be achieved by the implementation of the enterprise architecture. The architecture ideally centralizes operations and integrates the business activities of the organization with the IT infrastructure (Anderson). This greatly improves coordination among all the functions. This will lead to the creation of a centrally shared business center for the Information Systems within the organization. The disadvantage of this change is that implementation is mostly achieved at the management level; hence, the human resource at the