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Essay about Cathay Pacific Hbs Case Analysis

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Cathay Pacific Case Analysis 10/25/2007
Cathay Pacific (CP) is an interesting case because it is an example of a company attempting to work in isolation, vertically integrated and developing all their needs themselves. Truth is however; in today’s interconnected economy a company working independently simply can not compete. The world has become too dynamic and contains too many other companies developing better solutions to rely solely on one’s internal organization. Cathay eventually recognized this fact and turned to outsourcing to focus on its core competency, customer service and transportation.

Outsourcing should only be implemented when a company’s core competitive advantages are not affected and then when …show more content…

As a manager, deciding whether to use third party solutions that impact your core competencies, those cost savings benefits must outweigh the investments costs.

IBM becoming involved is a similar situation, the economy as a whole receives cost savings, which CP receives a portion of, but also competitors can immediately match those savings. When IBM took over the data centers in Sydney, it allowed IBM to import best practices from across the globe and also allowed the full capacity of the data centers to be utilized by serving additional clients. Best practices bring lower costs to an operation and higher capacity usage brings greater revenue, all good things but again CP only gets a portion and IBM receives the rest.

While costs and benefits are the ultimate management decisions, a coherent strategy from management allows IT professionals to more accurately estimate these value decisions. This is the critical area where CP made its mistakes. Due to the financial situations caused from 9/11, the new airport and China taking back Hong Kong; CP shifted to survival mode and cut costs by outsourcing indiscriminately. This damaged the company a few years later, because many of those decisions were reversed with the EVOLVE IT strategy.

Ultimately, CP did a poor IT job because all they did was recognize a problem, escalating

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