1. Cisco suffered from inertia when an attempt was made to engage business management in selecting software for their individual areas, and/or agreeing to participate in the ERP implementation project. List and explain reasons why management would hesitate to become engaged in the IT process/project.
Below are reasons Cisco hesitated to take on an ERP project:
a) Fear of decentralization
b) Fear of “mega-projects” that ERP implementation often becomes
c) Disruption to the business
d) Need for strong internal team and strong partners
e) Balancing standardization versus proprietary functionality
f) Cost
Fear of decentralization
Cisco’s CEO believed that Silicon Valley firms had a tendency to decentralize too rapidly while not
…show more content…
Support and continued enhancements
The vendor provides the support and continued enhancements for the product based on the current industry standards and any requirements from agencies if the software interacts/used for contacting any regulatory agency. They also provide the enhancements and bug fixes based on the other customer’s experiences. When building custom software sometimes small changes to functionality might require redesign and reengineering would end up being expensive.
Reliability
The “software off the shelf” is more reliable as it is developed with broader audience and scalability in mind. It will under go several rounds of testing with different customers perspective. In custom built even though some features might work when used alone, but when interacting with other components might fail.
Business Involvement
For custom software development it requires major participation from the business team to define and train the development team about the process and workflow design. Even after all the great efforts getting all the required functionality would be challenging. With “Software off the shelf” business users spends some time initially to understand and define the new business process based on the current process. Once it is defined and system has been configured it would be easy to maintain.
Cisco’s Approach Cisco’s approach was to do this quickly
The reason 2013 intangible assets make up more of the total assets compared to 2013 intangible assets is due to the NDS acquisition that occurred in 2013
1a. How did Cisco find itself in trouble with regard to its intended IT prior to Brad Boston's arrival?
b) Software programs combined with extensive customized programming updates / additions. The software and software customization industries both have numerous suppliers. However, given the complexity and uniqueness of such an information network, there are probably only a limited number of software and customization companies that can provide a carrier with a high quality system that is capable of smoothly integrating all the operation and customer service divisions. Furthermore, the switching costs have the potential to be extremely high because such a transfer could disrupt communication between the divisions, leading to poor quality service. In addition, the company would
1. Study the networked supply chain concept as implemented by Cisco. What are its strengths and weaknesses?
Bombardier is the world’s only manufacturer of both planes and trains, it is present in more then 60 countries and is headquartered in Montreal, Canada. Both Bombardier Aerospace & Bombardier transportation employ over 70 000 and posted a revenue of over 18.3 billion in the fiscal year ended December 31,2011.
1. At the start of the case, Cisco’s information systems are failing, yet no one steps forward to lead the effort to replace them. Why is this? Why were no managers eager to take on this project?
4. Assists with the testing and development of new systems or updates to existing systems to meet customer needs.
The CIO might also have been influenced by the IT productivity paradox, which states that little or no performance effects are associated with increasing IT expenditures (e.g. Grover et al., 1998). The original solution was that all of the main functional areas are allowed to make their own decisions regarding the application and timing of the move from the old to the new application. By giving autonomy to the functional areas, conflicts associated with centrally mandated changes are avoided and the functional areas will also be allowed to pursue their independent initiatives, while reducing the risk of implementation project failure (Olson, 2004). Unfortunately, the functional areas showed resistance to change and Cisco's legacy environment started to deteriorate. As a result, on one day the Cisco's database was corrupted and business shut down for two whole days. It was now clear that the autonomous approach did not work and that a different approach was needed: the implementation of an ERP system.
Changing the IT infrastructure however would prove problematic. Cisco had a policy of centralized IT yet the company had several legacy systems that had become siloed, and lack of integration to them was slowing down sourcing, supply chain integration to manufacturing and also drastically slowing down revenue recognition as exemplified with the many problems with general ledger and other core transaction processing applications. Making matters worse, Cisco has deliberately created system workarounds to circumvent their legacy systems that had been causing the slow-down in core manufacturing and accounting system.
The ERP information management system consolidates all of the healthcare organization's operation into one simple, easy to use system by eliminating redundancy and decreasing repeated keying of the same information into multi-information systems so the organization can better process and manage information throughout the organization. In most healthcare organizations, the ERP information management system is used for finance, quality, inventory management, and procurement (Brooks, August 28, 2013) (Langabeer II & Helton, 2016).
(TCO B) List three organizational factors that can prevent a firm from fully realizing the benefits of a new information system, and provide examples of each.
According to Chambers, Cisco CEO, the company is all about the network not a single relationship. Their ultimate goal is to be a comprehensive Internet solutions provider. In order to achieve this goal, Cisco expanded both products and markets through employment of acquisition strategies and associated management structure adjustments. These are elaborated in the following sections.
Page eight of the case begins to outline some of the challenges that the HP-Cisco alliance had already faced concerning the sale of joint products. For example, we learn that at HP, Cisco products did not count towards a sales representative’s quota and this resulted in a decline in sales of Cisco equipment by HP sales representatives. Further, if HP or Cisco sales staff had to master not only their parent company product line,
They faced challenges from acquiring many companies because during the acquisitions Bombardier inherited the data, processes and systems of each company which created inefficiencies. Systems didn’t communicate with each other resulting in low inventory turns and price inconsistency. This was not productive for Bombardier and was time consuming for the employees. The biggest problem was the low visibility of inventory and the lack of communication between systems. Bombardier had now a global presence but was not organized to maintain growth without changing the vision and processes. Another challenge is resistance to change, this factor can have a huge impact on the new vision and
Communicating between departments is extremely important for many businesses regardless if they are small startup or a fortune 500 company. Different forms of Software are key to this communication. A very specific system that has proven to do this the best is Enterprise Resource Planning, also known as ERP. Enterprise Resource Planning Systems integrate business management along with technology. There are many different areas and functions of an ERP system that include; Manufacturing, Finance, Human Resources, Accounts Payable, and Accounts Receivable. ERP systems have been known to save organizations time and money in many different ways. Although ERP systems have helped businesses integrate their multiple systems into one system there are also many disadvantages of ERP systems that businesses must be known before purchasing.