Information Technology Integration
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The case study presented in Case 4 is about the South Australian Water company trying to align information technology in a publically owned organization. This case describes the experience of a CIO and the need to drive a wide range of business applications as well as the IT infrastructure to improve the quality of water as the corporate goal. The main challenge confronting the management team is to add value to the business through IT and outsourcing arrangements. The student will analyze the case in six sections in the order followed. Also, these sections must be used to format level 1 heading titles in the case report.
1. Give the case background and organizational environment.
2. Describe the case situation and structure of the organization.
3. Identify the key problems and issues in the case.
4. Describe how the organization responded to those issues with technology and leadership in terms of successes, failures, or unforeseen results.
5.Provide and assessment and reasons for supporting those solutions.
6.Review the case finding and conclude how the solution could be improved or propose something different.
This case was available free to read and download from the Palgrave McMillan Journal of Information Technology site. Cases for free change every week, but the journal offers this disclosure "Palgrave Macmillan and the editorial team have selected this set of papers from the archive of the journal to give a representative sample of the best of our content. These papers, listed in chronological order, are available free to read and download." The case is included in this page for easy access.
Torogoon, A., Jetton, P., Vlasic, A., & Spiller, J. (2004). Raise your glasses - the water's magic! Strategic IT at SA Water: a case study in alignment, outsourcing and governance. Journal of Information Technology. 19, 130-139.
Minimum 3-5 pages excluding cover page and references (since a page is about 300 words, this is approximately 900-1,500 words).
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Solution Summary
The response provides you a structured explanation of information technology integration case at South Australian Water. It also gives you the relevant references.
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1. The background is that in 1990s South Australian Water was given additional goals by the government. The government was concerned about the quality of water. The corporation was asked to become more customer focused, more commercial, and develop a vigorous export-focused water industry based on water-testing laboratory. The corporation was restructured along functional lines. At that time the information services unit reported direct to the head of Water Technology department. The organizational environment was that SA Water had a history of poor IT performance and specifically, a reputation for uncompleted projects. The poor record of IT discouraged units at South Australian Water to invest in IT and some units even bypassed the IT function. The IT infrastructure was unable to operate industry standard systems. For example, the infrastructure could not even support an effective email service. There was little investment in Geographical Information System beyond its implementation in 1980s.
2. The case situation was that in 1999, David Johnson was brought in as the CIO. He introduced the concept of a business focused IT and set out to raise the IT profile throughout the organization. He received approval for a major upgrade in IT infrastructure to support the development of new systems in September 2000. The new CIO changed the divisions' name to Information Services and set a goal to deliver the right information at the right time to the right destination regardless of the location. According to Johnson's model, the business owns the information and the system. He wanted IS to be a contributor to the strategic future of South Australian Water. There was radical repositioning of IS at SA ...
Education
- BSc , University of Calcutta
- MBA, Eastern Institute for Integrated Learning in Management
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