CHAPTER 5 - ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES THAT SUPPORT STRATEGIC INITIATIVES

                                       ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES

• Employes across the organization must work closely together to develop strategic initiatives that create competitive advantages.
• Understanding the basic structure of a typical IT department including titles, roles and responsibilities.

                              IT ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

i) Chief Information Officer (CIO)

• Responsible for overseeing all uses of information  technology and ensuring the strategic alignment of IT with business goals and objectives.
• Often reports directly to the CEO.
• Posses solid and detailed understanding of every aspect of an organization coupled with tremendous insight into the capability of IT.
• Broad functions include: Manager, Leader, and Communicator.

ii)Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

• Responsible for ensuring the throughput, speed, accuracy, availability, and reliability of an organization's information technology.
• Have direct responsibility for ensuring the efficiency of IT system throughout the organization.
• Posses well-rounded knowledge of all aspects of IT, including hardware,software,and telecommunications.

iii)Chief Security Officer (CSO)

• Responsible for ensuring the security of IT systems and developing strategies and IT safeguards against attacks from hackers and viruses.
• Posses detailed knowledge of network and telecommunications because hackers and viruses usually find their way into IT systems through networked computers.

iv)Chief Privacy Officer (CPO)

• Responsible for ensuring the ethical and legal use of information within the organization.
• Newest senior executive position in IT.
• Lawyers by training, enabling them to understand the often complex legal issues surrounding the use of information.

v)Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO)

• Responsible for collecting, maintaining, and distributing the organization's knowledge.
• Designs programs and systems that make it easy for people to reuse knowledge.
• The systems create repositories of organizational documents, methodologies, tools, and practices and they establish methods for filtering the information.

• All the above IT positions and responsibilities are critical to an organization's success.
• Each organizations may not have a different individual for each of these positions, they must have leaders taking responsibility for all these areas of concern.

           THE GAP BETWEEN BUSINESS PERSONNEL AND IT PERSONNEL

• Business personnel posses expertise in functional areas such as marketing, accounting, sales, and so forth while IT personnel have the techological expertise.
• Communications gap often exists where business personnel have their own vocabularies based on experience and expertise. While IT personnel have their own vocabularies consisting of acronyms and technical terms.
• Effective communication between IT and business personnel should be a two-way street each side making the effort to better understand the other.

 Improving Communication

• Business personnel must seek to increase their understanding in IT which it will benefits their careers to understand what they can and cannot accomplish using IT.
•  Business-oriented IT magazines should be read by the business managers and leaders to increase their IT knowledge.
• In addition, an organization must develop strategies for integrating its IT personnel into the various business functions.
• IT personnel must understand the business if the organization is going to determine which technologies can benefits the business.
• CIO must ensuring effective communications happen between business and IT personnel.

            ORGANIZATIONAL FUNDAMENTALS-ETHICS AND SECURITY

• Ethics ans security are two fundamental building blocks that organizations must base their businesses on.
• When the behavior of a few individuals can destroy billion-dollar organizations because of a lapse in ethics or security, the value of highly ethical and highly secure organizations should be evident.

I) ETHICS

• The ethical issues surrounding copyright infringement and intellectual property rights are consuming the e-business world.
• ETHICS : the principles and standards that guide our behavior toward other people.

• PRIVACY: the right to be left alone when you want to be, to have control over your own personal possessions, and not to be observed without your consent.
• Privacy has become a major ethical issue as some of the most problematic decisions organizations face lie in the murky and turbulent waters of privacy.
• Widespread fear about privacy continues to be one of the biggest barriers to the growth of e-business.
• If an organization can effectively address the issue of privacy, its customers, partners, and suppliers may lose trust in the organization which will hurts the business itself.

II) SECURITY

• The leading cause of downtime is a software failure followed by human error, according to Infonetics research.
• Unplanned downtime can strike at any time from any number of causes, ranging from tornadoes to sink over flows to network failures to power outages.
• The reliability and resilience of IT systems have never been more essential for success as businesses cope with the forces of globalization, 24/7 operations, government and trade regulations, and overextended IT budgets and resources.
• Unexpected downtime in business environment has the potential to cause both short and long term cost with far-reaching consequences.
• by understanding the information security's role in a business is critical to keeping downtime to a minimum and uptime to a maximum.