Enterprise IT at Cisco Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Enterprise IT at Cisco - Case Study ExampleThese strategies can encompass what atomic enumerate 18 known as the four building blocks of competitive advantage superior efficiency quality speed, flexibility and innovation and responsiveness to customers. Discussion What was Pete Solviks approach to IT face? what was the primary style in use at the network/infrastructure level? What about the data level? How about the application level? Pete Solvik wholly decentralized the IT functions and distributed the IT funding among all told departments in a way that all functions and departments had the autonomy to make decisions regarding the IT system that they wanted to deploy and go ahead with the investment. At the time, IT was considered as an overhead cost and this needed to be changed. He restructured the way in which IT decisions regarding the investment on applications were made. As the IT system of Cisco was failing and the engine room was becoming outdated, Solvik decided to imp lement an Enterprise Resource Planning system to attain a more robust infrastructure. The ERP system was implemented to control the functions of the lineage and manufacturing department and to keep the departments in sync. With the help of the infrastructure implementation, Cisco then launched intranet service for the employees and a web-base online resource for the customers. Solvik enabled all functions and department to select the IT systems that they wished to implement and gave them an compulsory environment of decision making as well as the budget to make the IT investments. He also divided the IT budgets among regional department to give contrastive regions a choice to implement the systems that they found more feasible. However, with the number of diametrical systems deployed, data was being entered into the ERP differently through each department which made it all the more difficult to track information. Although this approach proved successful in the short run, eventua lly on that point were too many projects to implement and handle and this caused motley issues. What problems did Cisco have with its internal IT by 2001? Why didnt the ERP system help more? There was a lot of investment over IT implementations but but any proved to be fruitful. By giving all departments and functions the autonomy to have their own IT tools caused duplication. This was wasted funds over the same type of systems that had connatural functionalities. This not only wasted funds but also caused miscommunication within the company. Also, different tools had different keywords to extract data which caused further problems. As Solvik decentralized the system, there was no single centralized group that overlooked the IT decisions and systems that were being implemented to ensure that there are no redundancies. The problem with interfacing the ERP system was that the various different systems tried to access different information in different ways. Data from the ERP was u sed differently by the independent systems as there were a number of interfaced developed to fetch with the ERP. Implementing an ERP system is not enough, the system has to upgraded and extended with the passage for time for it function better. The updating and extension of the system was hindered with the different interfaces used to communicate with the system. Moreover, the employees had become accustomed to the systems that