...Alignment - Using the Balanced Score-card to create Corporate Synergies By Robert S Kaplan & David P Norton, Harvard Business School Press, 2006 Introduction Most large organizations are divided into business units. The challenge is to coordinate the activities of these units and leverage their skills for the benefit of the organization as a whole Alignment is multidimensional in scope, involving financial synergies, cross selling of products and services to deliver unique solutions to customers and sharing of knowledge and expertise across the organization. Alignment needs to be planned and executed carefully to maximize shareholder value. Generating Synergy When an organization aligns the activities of its various business and support units, it creates additional sources of value in various ways. Corporate financial synergy revolves around issues such as where to invest, where to harvest, how to balance risk and how to create an investor brand. Customer synergy means enhancing customer relationships by offering a range of complementary products and services from different business units. Internal process synergies can be created by generating economies of scale in activities such as procurement, logistics and infrastructure. Learning and growth synergies can be generated by developing and sharing critical intangible assets including people, technology, culture and leadership. Despite various innovations in organization design, there is nothing like the best...
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...Business-IT alignment is one of the modern and popular management concepts in industry. It refers to the consistency between the business and IT strategies. To align It with business, the basic challenge is to relate the business goals with the latest trends in technology. The company should have clear business goals and enables to implement IT system to achieve these goals. Any Business-IT alignment model should have the capability to optimize the goals regularly and provide optimize returns to the business from IT investment. Every IT activity should have the ability to increase the business value. The main function of the alignment is to build relationship between the activities perform by management of various departments (Human Resource, Accounts, IT, etc.) in an organization. Therefore alignment will be on both the concepts, how IT will is in the harmony with business as well as the business will be in the harmony with IT. Alignment must develop a relationship between the businesses as well the IT strategies. To align business with new trends in IT is a complex task. According to Jerry Luftman, it is a dynamic process which needs support from all levels of management, strong relationships between employees, strong leaders to guide, trust, and communication, as well as a good understanding of the business as well as IT goals. Achievement of alignment could be achieved with the maximization of enablers and minimization of inhibitors. The main function of B/I alignment is...
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...Oldenburgh Jr. Marylee Luther, the HR Director at Clapton Commercial Construction has requested recommendations for a performance management plan. Clapton Commercial Construction is a medium sized organization based in Detroit, Michigan. They have an annual net revenue of $10,000,000 and are now looking to expand their business to the State of Arizona. Alignment of the Performance Management With Clapton Commercial Construction moving to Arizona and adding more staff it is very important that staff is trained properly. With majority of the training coming from the Detroit office there is a good chance that if the new staff is not trained properly the business will not be successful in Arizona. “One of the biggest challenges for any company lies in achieving organizational alignment: that desired state in which the entire enterprise is working together to achieve business goals. But just like the tires on a car, if just one piece isn’t aligned with the others, there will be no forward movement. And unlike a car, creating full alignment in an organization can’t be achieved just by tinkering around with a few key components. Instead, achieving alignment involves a top-to-bottom transformation, in which leadership communicates goals and expectations and everyone has an understanding of what is expected and what they must do to advance the organization. (Messier, 2015) Organizational performance philosophy We recommend that Clapton Commercial Construction create an environment...
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...Ryan Parsons Student ID #: 1237934 Assignment #1 | Spa Works | Memorandum To: | John Smith, President | From: | Ryan Parsons | cc: | | Date: | January 8, 2014 | Re: | New Integrated System – Committee Members | | | Hi John, The purpose of this Memo is to notify you that I have selected the committee members for the development of the new system that you have charged me with overseeing. Here is the list of the individuals selected for this committee: * Jillian Koch – Spa Manager Jillian is 29 and currently manages the spa on Parkland Dr. She has been with Spa Works for 5 years and was very excited to be part of this committee. She believes that this is a great opportunity to have some input to make the new system more user friendly for her employees. She seems to have a great relationship with her employees, and should be able to excel in the team environment of this committee. * Joe Carlson – Fitness Center Manager Joe is 31 and currently manages the Fitness Center on Quinpool Ave. Joe has a background with Computer Systems from University and I thought this might be a great asset for this committee. Joe has some great ideas about what is needed or needs to be improved in the new system from the Fitness Center perspective. As a member of this committee, Joe will be the liaison between the committee and the Fitness Center personnel and will be expected to contribute ideas for the system that will benefit the three fitness centers. * Elizabeth Vogel – Accounting...
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...2-23-2006 Using the Balanced Scorecard to Achieve Sustained IT-Business Alignment: A Case Study Qing Hu Florida Atlantic University, qhu@fau C. Derrick Huang Florida Atlantic University, dhuang@fau Follow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais Recommended Citation Hu, Qing and Huang, C. Derrick (2006) "Using the Balanced Scorecard to Achieve Sustained IT-Business Alignment: A Case Study," Communications of the Association for Information Systems: Vol. 17, Article 8. Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol17/iss1/8 This material is brought to you by the Journals at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in Communications of the Association for Information Systems by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact elibrary@aisnet.org. Communications of the Association for Information Systems (Volume 17 2006) 181- 204 181 USING THE BALANCED SCORECARD TO ACHIEVE SUSTAINED IT-BUSINESS ALIGNMENT: A CASE STUDY Qing Hu C. Derrick Huang Department of Information Technology & Operations Management Florida Atlantic University qhu@fau.edu ABSTRACT High levels of investments in IT and related products and services by firms over the last several decades produced only mixed results. Research shows that one of the most significant determinants of successful IT investments is the alignment between IT and the competitive strategies of a firm. Yet it is...
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...Aligning Information Technology With the Business Presented by: Paul Osborn Page 1 Discussion Objectives • Define what we mean by “Aligning IT with the Business” • Discuss why alignment is important • Share ideas regarding how to establish and maintain alignment • Provide a framework for establishing alignment Page 2 Aligning IT With the Business Creating and managing a business driven IT organization for which the primary focus is implementing information oriented solutions that are most important to meeting the business goals, objectives, and strategies of the enterprise. Page 3 Why is this an Issue? • IT organizations do not have a clear understanding of what’s important to the business. • The value of IT is not understood by business executives (and some IT executives). • Opportunities to use information technology are not identified, authorized, prioritized, and implemented, based on importance to meeting business objectives and goals • The business does not participate, from an enterprise-wide perspective, in decisions regarding IT direction and priorities. Page 4 What is necessary to align IT with the Business? • Assure that all IT activities contribute to the goals, objectives, and strategies of the business. • Encourage Executive Business Management to become continuously involved in plans and decisions regarding the use of information technology. • Position the IT organization to best address the needs of the business • Create a customer focused culture in...
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...html version of the file http://www.gettingoin.com/files/33124941.doc. Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web. InterClean Inc-Strategic Alignment-MBA-530 Running head: INTERCLEAN INC-STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT-MBA-530 InterClean Inc-Strategic Alignment-MBA-530 Brian R. Duncan University of Phoenix February, 2008 InterClean Inc-Strategic Alignment-MBA-530 Introduction In developing human resources (HR) management approaches to the InterClean Inc. scenario, fundamental principals are necessary for the completion of a unified plan. The creation of business unit interdependence, based on a central company vision that is communicated throughout the organization is considered the primary key to achieving sustained competitive advantage. Rather than viewing the InterClean Inc. transition as a problem, this paper attempts to organize the process as an enterprise opportunity to address real issues necessary for the new products/services campaign. Included in this analysis through the 9 step PBL model, are concepts meant to support informed business decisions that have proven to help real world companies succeed in growing from change proposals, to achieving and maintaining effective HR practices. Describe the Situation Restructuring the framework of InterClean Inc. requires an organizational commitment towards accomplishing...
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...Running head: INTERCLEAN INC-STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT-MBA-530 InterClean Inc-Strategic Alignment-MBA-530 Brian R. Duncan University of Phoenix February, 2008 InterClean Inc-Strategic Alignment-MBA-530 Introduction In developing human resources (HR) management approaches to the InterClean Inc. scenario, fundamental principals are necessary for the completion of a unified plan. The creation of business unit interdependence, based on a central company vision that is communicated throughout the organization is considered the primary key to achieving sustained competitive advantage. Rather than viewing the InterClean Inc. transition as a problem, this paper attempts to organize the process as an enterprise opportunity to address real issues necessary for the new products/services campaign. Included in this analysis through the 9 step PBL model, are concepts meant to support informed business decisions that have proven to help real world companies succeed in growing from change proposals, to achieving and maintaining effective HR practices. Describe the Situation Restructuring the framework of InterClean Inc. requires an organizational commitment towards accomplishing new objectives. The main focus for management should be to communicate clearly with all departments how important operational effectiveness and strategy is, for making the products services vision work. Each business unit must be aware of the necessity for activities to interrelate, while consistently...
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...security is at the forefront of many organization’s priorities. Such actions as hiring of security executives, restructuring the information security structure within a company or increasing budgets for security have helped companies to feel more secure and pass that on to their shareholders and customers. Companies have prevalently relied on technology based solutions, but that is only part of the solution. There needs to be a connection between the security entity and the business. This will allow for the budgets and policies to be more in line with the business requirements. A technically focused information security strategy was followed in the past. Since security was technically focused, organizations placed the information security group as part of low level function which operated independently from business which in turn did not serve the business effectively. To overcome this, current information security strategy follows a socio-technical security strategy which is strategically focused or business driven. Global spending on security was at $56 billion in 20111. According to Gartner that number will be $71.1 billion in 2014 and will grow to $76.9 billion in 20152. With this amount of money being spent on information security, it will become more crucial to spend that money more effectively with proper planning and methods and potentially spending less money by keeping security at an appropriate...
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...Compensation Defined The definition of compensation is generally accepted as: a form of payment (monetary or non-monetary) for work performed as required. And the text defines compensation as all forms of financial returns and tangible services and benefits employees receive as a part of an employment relationship. (Milkovich, age 677) This can be translated into an employee doing work to receive a form of payment from the employer. The payment can be a combination of pay, paid time off (or vacation time), benefits packages such as health insurance or life insurance, bonuses and other forms of compensation determined by the employer. Compensation is not given an exact definition within the text due to the varying definitions in regards to the different perspectives of compensation. There are many different points of perspective that can affect a person’s view of compensation. The text identifies five different perspectives: society; stockholders; managers; employees and; incentive and sorting effects of pay on employers’ behaviors. Each perspective brings a different view to the concept of compensation and the reward of being compensated. The value of compensation is different to each perspective and has a different meaning that is applied to being compensated. Key Concepts – The Pay Model The pay model within the text shows the three basic building blocks for the framework of a pay system. The three basic building blocks within the pay model are: the compensation objectives;...
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...Lack of Accountability - Project Management Introduction Over the years, project management has become an integral part of business operations in a wide array of industries. It can be defined as “the application of knowledge, skills and techniques to execute projects effectively and efficiently. It’s a strategic competency for organizations, enabling them to tie project results to business goals – and thus, better to compete in their markets” (What is Project Management, n.d.). In order to project managers to meet their projects objectives and goals, accountability and communication is imperative. One of the 10 top reason’s projects fail is due to a lack of accountability, according to Villanova University (n.d.). This paper will go into detail regarding how a lack of accountability and communication can affect a projects overall success. It is important to remember project managers and project team members all need to hold themselves accountable for the success and outcome of project (Mullaly, 2013). Additionally, the project manager is not only responsible for holding themselves accountable but also the whole project team, all on top of their other responsibilities and projects. For this very reason, understanding accountability and creating a system to foster it plays a significant role in the success (Mullaly, 2013). Mullaly (2013) explains that project managers have a set of tools, some more than others, to help in efficiently fulfilling their job and responsibilities...
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...Value Alignment with Kudler Foods Name withheld MGT/521 May 2, 2011 Bob Armbrust, B.S., MBA Value Alignment with Kudler Foods According to my Ethics Awareness Inventory, I tend to base my ethical perspective on an individual’s duty or obligations to do what is morally right. In judging whether a person’s actions are ethical, I look to the intent behind their actions, rather than focus on results. From my perspective, ethical principles must be: (a) appropriate under any circumstances; (b) respectful of human dignity; and (c) committed to promoting individual freedom and autonomy. Human beings must never be treated simply as “means” to the accomplishment of some defined “end.” The end does not justify the means. In my ethical style, I believe that human beings have intrinsic value and the right to individual respect. I believe that fostering personal growth takes precedence over achieving efficiency through organizational and social structures that tend to “dehumanize” ethical decision making. Moral decisions must reflect the free choice of individuals if we ever expect to hold them personally responsible (The Williams Institute, UOPX). Kudler Fine Foods Kudler Fine Foods is a small business established in 1998 to fulfill Kathy Kudler’s vision of establishing her own gourmet food store. Kathy had a passion for gourmet foods but could not find the kind of selection of fine wine, cheese, produce, and meat that she was looking for. She valued a one-stop shopping...
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... Significance of Alignment Family Name of student | Student ID | Email | Mobile # | 1. | TAWFIK | 4113032 | waleedtawfik77@gmail.com | 0507214854 | Subject Code: MGMT 915 Subject Name: Management of Change Session: Autumn 2012 Table of Contents | | The Concept of Alignment and its Importance | 3 | Models and Different Views to Alignment | 4 | Discussion | 8 | References | 10 | | | The Concept of Alignment and its Importance There is no doubt that ‘alignment’ became more significant now than ever before, due to the recurrent changes occurring to the business environment in terms of technology, market demand, and even the customer preferences, which always lead to regular changes to organization strategies, systems, and processes, as noted by Schreyogg and Kliesch-Eberl (2007), that firms today are experiencing significant changes, and in response, many are significantly changing their strategies. In this rapid-paced changing business environment; alignment process becomes an even greater challenge, (Higgins, 2005), and more important and significant for successful change implementation process. The process of alignment shouldn’t have a start or end point, where it is an ongoing process of ‘fitting’ all organization’s functions in the right direction toward achieving the vision and the strategic goals of the organization. The same as Miles and Snow (1984) suggest that rather than viewing ‘alignment’ as a state, because...
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...ก (align) ก F F F F IT-Business ก ก F F IT F IT-Performance Model 3 IT Strategic Alignment at Kimberly-Clark: The Innovation Design Studio The Strategic Plan: Kimberly-Clark (K-C) Dallas Texas 16.7 B$ ก ก ก K-C กF ก ก ก F ก F Fก ก ก F F ก F ก ก F กFก ก F ก ก F F F F Fก ก F ก ก consumer product HQ F ก ก F 55,000 F 37 ก ก Fก F F F F F 4 2006 ก กF K-C ก Aligning Information Technology with Strategic Plan: IT F ก F Fก ก F ก F 1) ก ก 2) F F F Senior Level F functional area F F F F ก 3) ก F F F F ก F F F F functional area ก F F 4) F Portfolio approach กF F ก ก ก (opportunity) ก กF ก ก F F F CEO Fก ก 5 The Innovation Design Studio: 2007 K-C F Innovation Design Studio Neenah, Wisconsin กF F ก virtual store F F F ก ก Store ก F http://www.kimberly-clark.com/investors/viewer.aspx?s=web&article=3Q2007/3.inc 6 The Impact: Innovation Design Studio F F K-C ก F F ก กF ก F F กF ก ก ก F F F 50% F F F F F F 7 13.1) IT Strategic Alignment Business Strategy ก ก Information system (IS) strategy ก F ก F ก ก Fก IT ก ก The relationship among business, IS and IT strategies 8 Information technology (IT) business alignment: (degree) IT F ก F ก ก F F F F ก F F IT-Business Alignment 1) ก ก F F ก ก ก IT F Fก F ก F IT F ก ก F F ก ก F IT Alignment 2) ก ก F IT F F ก ก F Fก F F ก ก ก ก ก IS ก F ก ก ก ก F IT strategic alignment 9 Governance Structure for IT-Business Alignment Fก Fก IT-Business alignment CIO F IT F ก IT CIO ก F กF...
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...Strategic Alignment and Core competencies Strategic alignment refers to how an organization can create sustainable competitive advantage by linking its business strategy to its core competencies. This shows how an organization can achieve superior performance by gaining alignment between its environment, strategy, core competencies and Organization structure. There are several frameworks, which can be leveraged in this process to assist a manager in building a high performance organization. The case highlighted how Singapore Airlines(SIA) navigated through the various challenges faced by the airlines industry such as over capacity, commoditization of offering and proliferation of low cost carriers through the execution of its business strategy and dispel the notion that competition advantage can only be created either by Cost leadership strategy or a differentiation strategy. The case show that SIA made a clear strategic choice of giving priority to profitability over growth and leveraged related diversification along with its operational practices, such as continuous people development and rigorous service design as drivers to achieve its strategic choice. SIA had unique challenges of competing solely on international routes due to the absence of domestic routes which acted as a catalyst in driving its goals of being just a little better than its competitors in the value chain and to achieve its strategic choice. The analysis of this case provides an insight into the...
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