Case Analysis: USAA
Question: Is USAA a typical insurance company? List all reasons supporting your answer.
When USAA started in 1922, they were a property and casualty insurance company however, with time they expanded their services to their members and became a financial institution.
Their objective when starting the company was to provide auto insurance to military officers. In 1988, they owned 32 wholly-owned subsidiaries. Their main scope remained property and casualty insurance with automobile liability and damage insurance constituting over three-quarters of the company’s P&C business[1]. They also kept the membership limited to military officers and their dependents.
USAA is considered a financial institution for
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Due to the “centralized management of systems development” from the San Antonio office, the data systems support the “single USAA customer image,” and information is treated confidentially as the chief source of the organization[4]. USAA has decided to develop its IT infrastructure to better answer the demands of its members. By the 1980’s the company’s many divisions had started developing their own systems. McDermott saw the need to create an Information Services Division to integrate all the company’s systems and member information. His new vision of USAA is that the company is so integrated that members lose something of value when they go to a competitor”[5].
Question: Which factors contributed to USAA being a leader in the use of IT in its industry?
The USAA gradually emerged as a leader in the use of IT in the insurance industry because of the vision provided by its leaders, who deployed and upgraded appropriate IT systems for meeting the specific requirements of its members. McDermott upon his arrival decided the company wasn’t functioning to its potential with the high staff turnover as well as the paperwork which was impeding the employees to have the good information when needed.
The company’s growth was closely linked to its information system infrastructure. The company took the initiative to buy the “multicar policy processing system” in 1969 that enabled the company to offer discounts, reduce the number of
As a member of management Clive Jenkins is responsible for boosting employee morale to ensure that company goals are met
The applicants are morally correct as long as their action promotes their long term interest. If their action produces or will produce for them a greater outcome of good, versus evil in the long hall than any other alternative, than that action is the right one to act on, and the individual should take that to be a moral act. An Assessment of Morality by Ethicsinbusiness.net
b.What are the amounts and timing of the acquisition investment’s free cash flow from 2013 through 2022?
For the long-term objective, Lenox should reach out to different academic resources so that the top managers can be aware of how IT systems can bring value to their company, and holds great importance for future growth. Having the top executives understand the full benefits and functions of the IT systems will prove to be a substantial long-term solution. The overall lack of knowledge in regards to the new IT systems has resulted in the competitors surpassing Lenox. By having a more user-friendly system, the competitors were also able to catalog their products within their system before Lenox., National Life's implementation is ahead even though their rollout began months
A strategic planning and cross-functional team at NIBCO INC. realized in early 1995 that if they did not update their current information systems, the company would not grow (Brown&Vessey, 2000, p. 2). Nibco was seeing many of the same problems that a hospital sees with a purchased information system: the separate modules, or pieces of the system, were not working together. In other words: Nibco did not have an information system, Nibco had information components. These components had to be integrated to create a working system. As planning for a new information system continued, Nibco management and hired consulting groups (later defined as the Tiger team) determined three main problems: the organizational chart, the customer master
| Tenure-track faculty ($75-150k salary, $5,000 annual travel budget, desire to combine conference & personal travel)
Conceptually, FoxMeyer’s information system planned to conduct business with its customers on a daily basis. FoxMeyer focused its value chain on activities in their business where competitive strategies could be best applied. (Porter, 1985) However, the implementation was inconsistent with the changing business environment. The new system caused problems at every step of implementation. Problems ranged from inadequate time allocation for development, testing, debugging, lack of interaction between management, systems personnel, consultants and low user involvement.
Without centralized IT leadership defining program goals, alignment within the agency’s IT programs was not possible. Culturally, existing tools, such as the Automated Case Support (ACS) system, were under-utilized, and agents did not trust them to protect evidence and confidential sources (OIG Audit Report 05-07, 2005). Numerous techniques exist that would have allowed Trilogy leadership to gain key input from system users, which would have had the dual benefit of creating understanding of the ground-level needs of users and fostering user buy-in at the project’s outset.
a. Use Exhibits H and I, estimate and evaluate ratios for ROI, Profitability, liquidity, and financial strength.
In this project, we hope to clearly convey the current situation of the company ALTS, the changes it wishes to implement and the factors
Information technology has had as much impact on our society as the industrial revolution. In the information age, companies are finding that success or failure is increasingly dependent on their management and use of information. Therefore, companies need a good information system that enabled an efficient and effective use of information to give them more competitive advantage (Moscove, Simkin, & Bagranoff, 1999).
Secondly it is a one-time event set to ease the tension and strain on the adjuster-member relation. USAA has been in a comfortable 1st place in comparison to it peers but now with the sudden rise of third party insurance companies the pressure has created the need for a change in strategy. The customer-employee relation team was very instrumental in it deliveries. The roads show which was intended to produce and effective strategy to implement which was very success and cause some very satisfying results.
“Information systems are becoming of ever greater interest in progressive and dynamic organizations.” (Adeoti-Adekeye). The need to obtain access easily, quickly and more economically makes it vital to create procedures for the design, management and application of databases in organizations. Management information and information systems, in particular those related to effective decision-making processes in an organization, are observed as valuable organizational resources. In fact, the increased value of information as a basic concept in recent times, coupled with the continued rise of computer-based information systems and the integration of separated information systems led Getz in 1982 to suggest coalescence as an expected chance. To explain the coalescence, Getz has seen the manager of an organization that results from this coalescence as a generalist, with a solid understanding of technology but with a better understanding of business conditions and needs. However, he is not without his unfairness for MIS managers, but he feels that they are the right professionals to play the role of information managers in the organization. As he concludes that either the MIS manager will take the initiative to lead this fusion of the firm’s data resources activities and make some sense of their management, or a
* The organization has also created a reputation for itself as it has been in the industry for 4 generation. The company carries a high amount of experience in the industry and can be considered a key player for over 100 years. The experience gained shows that the company has sound knowledge of the industry and how to operate effectively.
Accenture is an organization that was the result of the separations of the firm known as Andersen Consulting from its parent, Arthur Andersen. As independent organization, Accenture had to overcome many challenges and issues to become self-efficient and keep up with the fast-pace changing market. A new technology infrastructure different from the Arthur Andersen’s system was required in order to reach the desired stage that could help the company to meet their organizational and business goals. This paper provides Accenture’s organizational profile, gives a brief overview of the company from an enterprise level and the IT level by describing the current organizational structure and background information, customer profile, IT values and crafting a vision and mission statement for the IT department that aligns the company as a whole.