Madura's Problem Definition and Concept Map Narrative - Case Study Example

Madura: Problem Definition and Concept Map Narrative Lecturer: Maduras current large-scale IT systems are too fragmented making the enterprise unable to adapt to new strategic fronts; moreover, the fragmentation is inhibiting business process changes to support company growth. In defining this problem, the various areas responsible for the prevailing state will be evaluated. Such areas include unequal IT systems across the enterprise functional areas, IT systems not supporting changes to standard operation procedure and the fact that the various branches of the business make their own alterations to business processes. As well, the study in evaluating Madura’s prevailing EA state will establish the issues and background of the problem illustrated in the knowledge map with keen interest on information assurance discipline. Section 1: Defining the problem Part 1 IT Systems are disparate across Functional Areas IT solutions in Madura initially focused on training and certification. The retailer devoted resources to channels based on the fiscal capability of the channel. Although this was essential in maintaining consistency in training materials, the various channels in different geographies added their flavor to the elements. This made it difficult to evaluate effectiveness of the distant programs. To address the resulting gaps in execution the enterprise needed to come up with mechanisms of patching the gaps through spreadsheets, emails, SMS messages and phone calls. Consequently, this led to inefficient access to business information. For over a decade, Madura was at the cutting edge of innovation since it outsourced most of its IT tasks leaving strategic tasks to the internal IT team. However as the company grew, the enterprise IT infrastructure came under strain from the evolving information systems. Most of the applications and technologies like 3GL, COBOL, Ingress, Visual FoxPro and PowerBuiler were out-dated and increasingly becoming archaic (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). Business process re-engineering was the only solution only if it aligned technology solution with deployment strategy. At the time, SAP enterprise planning solution gained momentum, which led to the implementation of a nationwide integrated system based SAP’s solution. The positive effects associated with the move convinced other functions like finance and operations at Madura to join and become part of the ERP. However, SAP solution did not support retail-specific functionality like distributing stock to stores, promotions, and merchandise planning. To fill these gaps, Madura implemented Oracle Retek and integrated it with SAP. This was necessary in order to create an environment that supports efficiency, productivity, and manageability in the various business components while allowing functional areas help other areas through collaboration. In carrying out data management, technology plays a huge role across the various stores, channels, networks, and brands at Madura (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). At Madura, brands and channels consolidate data from the various stores and input the information to the system. However, some brands incorporate software within the ERP to minimize errors and manage the processing time making it possible for the brands to mechanize data management. IT Systems do not support SOP Changes Retailers have always had the opportunity of selling their products through branded stores, departmental stores or even through franchise outlets. However, the development of the web allowed them to begin selling their product online. The channels brought the challenge of integrating the two. Success in operations of retail relies on masterful treatment of two essential aspects that include value and relationship. Although customers realize the value of justly purchased product, Madura’s problem was developing relationship that transcended a single transaction. Since Madura empowered front line personnel to foster good customer service, it is also essential for the organization to manage technology at the low levels of the organization. The same way the front line personnel were expected to comply with SOPs, managing technology at low level would enable employees to comply with SOP. Today, technology is a game changer that spurs high growth and even develop new business model. For a long time, there were declarations of the way technology can transform means of doing business; however, this seems to have come true because technology is taking root while at the same time its pace of change accelerates. Managing technology is crucial in enhancing customer experience because consumer expectations are constantly increasing. Since Madura embraced social media to engage and interact with customers, managing technology at low level enable employees to function seamlessly in multichannel sales and offer support capabilities. This in return enables a customer to carryout business transactions using the preferred channel while at the same time allowing the enterprise to capitalize on the customer interaction (McKinsey & Company, 2012). Although standardization is essential in SOP, functional areas like in Madura need the opportunity to customize certain aspects of the IT system. The retailer improved its strategic position through being able to interpret and adapt to the uncontrollable variables like competition, seasons, economic conditions legal restrictions, and consumers. Therefore, it is essential that the IT system encourage users to surpass the typical features in trying to develop competitive advantage. Shifting the need to succeed to low levels of business offers employees more autonomy in solving problems, making it capable of foster improvement. This way a manager would no longer be considered the individual with more powers but rather the leader whose role involves demonstrating leadership. The IT system fails to support measurement of compliance and effectiveness in SOP because incorporation of SAP solution, which had some gaps in its operations, illustrated the lack of quality control unit that guarantees SOP compliance. Functional Areas have own Business Processes Changes Innovation is core to the success of Madura especially in the continuously changing business environment. Business heads in Madura need to make innovation part of the daily business in order for the organization to have a prolonged presence in the market. It is through such innovation; the organization can attain the necessary income and profit stability that can stir improved performance. Therefore, business leaders at Madura need to manage in a manner that supports and compels innovation. Innovation is an essential element and the various business leaders at the enterprise need to develop principles essential in innovation process (Brocke & Rosemann, 2010). Technology enables innovation through various provisions like products and services; hence, business leaders in Madura need to innovate. Within the prevailing competitive environment, insufficient integration of systems can result in transactional delays and can even result in loss of business. Corporations engage in business process change initiatives for various reasons; however, the initial aim involves improving a certain business process. Changing the business process in a way that matches the speed in the marketplace is crucial in ensuring that transactions and business process at Madura are in line with those of its competitors. For instance, implementing online purchase system, the enterprise substantially decreases the time taken to process any order and enables comparison of products to those of competitors. Ensuring that the business process change is the same with the prevailing trend in the market ensures extension of the company’s market reach. Moreover, implementing business process changes according to the market trends help make purchasing process efficient (Tsai, 2002). Nevertheless, these trends have not changed the way of doing business at Madura because the distribution channels as well as the pricing methods remain the same. Up to sometime back, organizations did not have integrated information systems but rather every system supported tasks of individual functional areas in business. Today, it appears obvious that a business needs to have an integrated system for managing the various functional areas (Monk & Wagner, 2009). However, it appears Madura is still in the past with various systems that need to be integrated. At the operational level, employees need support from office automation systems as well as support from information systems in functional areas (Jensen, Cline, Owen & International Business Machines Corporation, 2011). Moreover, managers get support from office automation systems, dashboards, information systems and expert systems. The information systems in functional areas help support certain functions in an organization. Information systems support entire organization through ERP systems (Rainer, 2008). These systems help tightly integrate functional area information systems through a shared database. In Madura, information system does not fully integrate the various interorganizational information systems that support several operations in the enterprise. Moreover, integration of the various systems in the organization that can help shape the organization’s competitive advantage seems out of reach for the enterprise. The failure to integrate these systems in Madura is significantly affecting the firm’s competitive advantage since it increases competitive disadvantage for the enterprise. Products supplied to Retail Channels The ability to crosscheck stock in the organization’s various stores is essential. The prevailing engaging environment, in which the enterprise finds itself in, necessitates the organization to facilitate information sharing across the large ecosystem of channel partners, customers, and employees (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). The organization’s insufficient integration of IT systems increases the difficulty of being able to view stock in the various stores. This leaves many issues in the supply chain since one store can order something in bulk while another order in small amounts. The retail channels require a system that provides up to date information for the stores to be able to place orders efficiently. The current fragmented IT system remains the main challenge for the supply of products to the retail stores because the poorly integrated system can result in transaction delays paving way for potential loss of business in the enterprise (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). Supplying products to the retail channels has to meet the essential performance indicators like accomplishing inventory and dormancy reduction. However, meeting these KPIs in the organization seems a huge challenge because the organization’s IT system is inadequate since the relevant information necessary in accomplishing the KPI is not easily accessible. Moreover, attaining lead-time reduction in both debtors and creditors is a huge KPI for the organization. However, the fragmented IT systems in the organization sacrifice cohesiveness since the systems do not fully integrate solutions like the inventory system or even the business process manager (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). Section 2 Maduras current state of the architecture for the enterprise Madura keeps many applications that solve specific business problems with many of them solving a single problem more than once. The redundant applications overlap even though they have a few unique instances they support. The company has not been successful in integrating every business application it acquired through acquisition or mergers into one system for the enterprise. The amounts of funds spend supporting these redundant applications are essentially pure waste. Moreover, the huge number of IT applications mushrooming up in the different sections of the enterprise often lead to almost unmanageable jungle of unnecessary applications and data stores. For an enterprise architect, these redundancies are often a headache. For instance, some brands have different management systems scattered across the enterprise’s various business units hence spreading them over the many IT departments in the business units (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). To reconcile issues arising from the brand management systems, the enterprise architect needs to collaborate with other program managers in order to facilitate a common understanding. Madura’s escalating cosmos of enterprise IT tends to be increasingly complex which means that any opportunity to eradicate unnecessary complexity as well as IT costs at the organization needs to be leveraged. The architectural impacts of the redundant application to the organization include the need to develop system interfaces and various platforms that need to be supported. Although Madura invested considerably in information system, its various stores operate in different ways allowing every brand to operate within and compete with each other. This led every brand to have the autonomy to innovate especially in its business processes and function differently because functional heads began demanding installation of point solution in an attempt to attain their development targets. The liberty given to the various brands led to systems that resulted in IT failure to address these problems brought about by the redundant applications. The ability to have different information systems for different brands creates an information system configuration similar to silo because the various business units seem to have their own stacks that are unconnected to other business units. These silos existed in the past to support only certain activities, which enabled different information systems to meet certain tasks (Monk & Wagner, 2009). Although, the unintegrated systems may work well in individual functional areas, to achieve the enterprise goals, the enterprise architecture needs to allow sharing of data across the functional areas. The prevailing inefficiencies in Madura’s enterprise architecture result from the lack of integration of various information systems. For instance, in 2004 Madura launched an innovative online solution targeting upscale Louis Philippe stores in order to cater for its high-end customers (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). The solution needs to be integrated with Madura’s back-end ERP in order to collaborate with stock functionalities. Since Madura appears to focus a lot of attention on business process standardization, it is crucial for the enterprise to ensure that IT infrastructure digitalize business processes while at the same time automating core competencies of the company. By connecting the essential elements like digitized business process, shared data, IT infrastructure and customer interfaces, the EA offers strategic dexterity since it is not necessary for the company to begin from scratch with new strategic initiatives (Harmon, 2003). Nevertheless, Madura enterprise has not been successful in fully automating the core competencies of the organization because the available EA does not sufficiently integrate the organization’s competencies. Therefore, putting in place the right EA would benefit the organization since it would be beneficial in developing IT capabilities instead of meeting only immediate needs. For instance, after the organization implemented SAP’s enterprise planning solution it found that the application lacked retail-specific functionality that later resulted in implementation of Oracle Retek to eliminate the gaps (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). If the organization had the appropriate EA, it would have been possible for the company to develop IT capabilities instead of merely meeting the prevailing needs. For some time, Madura has been using software tools to automate tasks and decrease manual interactions. Most of the business processes are initiated by the availability of work like online ordering that prompts a sequence of activities. The various applications in the enterprise help automate tasks with the aim of decreasing or even increasing human interactions. However, the business process management suite at Madura does not fully support the various environments shared by business analysts, IT architects, and process engineers. The environment help expose various vulnerabilities in supporting the various roles of the stakeholders in the company. Madura has not been very successful in automating various activities that are core to the company making it almost impossible to efficiently adopt and use its EA. Part 2 IT systems at Madura are fragmented in such a way that the essential features associated with information assurance like confidentiality, integrity and availability are hugely compromised. For instance, the fragmented IT system is unable to adapt to strategic fronts when targeting the retail market because of the diverse function areas distributed across many geographical areas (Venkatagiri & Prakash, 2013). Moreover, the fragmented IT systems prevent business process changes to sustain SOP changes. As well, the various functional areas carryout business process changes that in return change the SOP. Madura’s fragmented IT systems require integration in order to link the IT applications within the enterprise. Since the organization’s IT department could not match the rate at which process changes were taking place, the organization launched workarounds. First, the organization introduced outsourcing while the internal team focused on strategic tasks. Since the company’s CIO acknowledged the necessity to support the retailer’s IT strategy together with its business strategy, he started advising functional heads regarding technologies capable of helping them align to the organization’s goals. The “blank check” the various IT teams were given to implement IT solutions gravely hampered integration and availability of information because the solutions did not align with the enterprise’s business strategy. The IT systems are unable to link to the new strategic fronts because many solutions implemented in many business units across the enterprise solve specific problems. Madura has to broaden its strategic fronts partly because of the increasing demand in the local market since demand for apparel tripled and the middle class in increasing. By broadening its strategic fronts, the company would have a fighting chance against the increasing retail competition. Information Assurance goals Information assurance identifies and incorporates various policies, standards and mechanism to preserve integrity regarding people, information, technology, and the supporting infrastructure (Willett, 2008). Information assurance usually involves three elements that include confidentiality, integrity and availability. Confidentiality guarantees that information is accessible as required and prevents any unauthorized access while integrity ensures that data is never either deliberately or accidentally deleted or corrupted (Willett, 2008). The availability aspect in information assurance guarantees the accessibility of information as required and supports the enterprise’s capability to operate and even realize its objectives (Willett, 2008). In Madura’s case, these information assurance aspects do not receive enough attention in their implementation because IT systems in the organization are not fully integrated to ease the availability of information necessary for the company’s growth. Various applications implemented in separate business units in the enterprise hinder ideal performance of IA systems. At Madura, information assurance mainly focuses on the desire to protect systems from external and internal attack, accidental damage, and environment threats while maintaining the business objectives. Although this is an essential element in information assurance, it has led the organization to have a ‘fixed state’ approach. This is evident through changes in systems that can be considered as temporary switch between static states that breed tolerance of decreased security during the transition period. By adopting problem-prevention perception, Madura has extremely limited the organization since it only allows the organization to introduce new systems that are rigid and sometimes unable to respond to the changing needs. Relationships between disciplines Quality assurance entails guaranteeing availability, integrity, and confidentiality across the various operations carried out in the organization. To accomplish this, various fields like Database technologies, Software Engineering, IT Management, and Systems Engineering play significant roles. IT Management communicates with clients listening to their needs and advising them on where IT can improve the business. Moreover, the project team is under IT management that agrees to costs and timescales as well as standards that need to be met and even monitors the project team. Moreover, IT management is responsible for getting in touch with the management and clients to update them on the progress and evaluates every project stage. Software engineering helps design systems through the leadership of a software engineer, who coordinates the functions of developing new software. Software engineers are useful in developing software that integrates various business units (Dubois, Pohl & International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE, 2006). This capability is essential in guaranteeing availability and integrity of the system while at the same time offering the necessary functionality to the various business units at Madura. Database technologies offer a crucial feature for providing internal representation of the external world. In return, DB systems rely on infrastructure such as networks, client-server computing architecture, skilled analysis of data and skilled DB development methods to be effective. Database technologies in guaranteeing information assurance they ensure that they store and organize data while at the same time coordinating changes in the database. This notion is ideal in harmonizing the discrepancies that exist at Madura by eliminating the many IT applications in the enterprise. To establish information assurance, system engineering helps investigate and utilize latest technologies as well as procedures to increase security capability in order to enhance integrity of the system. The link between information assurance and system engineering is the ability to design and develop security systems that guarantee confidentiality and integrity of the system. Information assurance in system engineering involves translating user needs and the environment of information system into objectives and functions (Curts & Campbell, 2002). This concept of the relationship between system engineering and information assurance is ideal for the integration of the various IT applications at Madura. References Birchall D., Ezingeard J., McFadzean E., Howlin N., and Yoxall D. (n.d) Information assurance: Strategic alignment and competitive advantage. 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