Evaluate and defend leadership and organizational strategies associated with technology-intensive enterprises

Scenario-Leading and Implementing Required Change in an Organization

You are the Chief Information Officer of a high-tech, electronic components manufacturing company located in Austin, Texas. Besides the United States, your company has manufacturing operations in Ireland and Malaysia and sales operations in Tokyo. Your IT department provides support for all of these operations in these countries. Over the past three years, you have standardized your company’s application systems and network topography.

Your company has three key strategies:

Your company wants to be viewed by your customers as an innovator. This is critical because it allows your company to charge a higher price for its products.

Your company must be first to market with new products. In this industry, the company that comes to the market with a new product first gets the lion’s share of the market and consequently dictates the price.

Operating costs must be minimized in order to maximize the funding for research and development.

Your company has announced that it is acquiring another manufacturing firm that produces products that are similar to those fabricated by your company. It is headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri and has operations in Mexico. Your executive team has indicated that the disparate operations will be assimilated for efficiency and quality control with a single management structure.

It has already been decided by your company’s executive team that your department will have responsibility for IT support for the acquired company’s locations. You have been challenged to make all computer hardware, application system, network, data, and staff changes in a period of no more than two years. All computer hardware and software will be capitalized to the extent that accounting rules will allow.

Questions to be answered:

1- Describe the process that you would go through in order to develop aproject planthat satisfactorily addresses and accomplishes the consolidation of the IT operations of the two companies. Describe the key IT strategies this project plan would have to embody.

2- Describe how you would address the issues associated with normalizing the IT staffs of the two companies. Describe how these solutions may or may notdiffer for the short-term versus the long-term. Describe how the staffs of the two IT may view the situation differently and how these differences are considered in your solutions.

3- How would you turn this potentially difficultand risky situation into a positive experience for you, the staffs involved, and your company?

1000 words - APA format