Question 1:

IT ORGANIZATIONAL ASSESSMENT AND ANALYSIS

Case Assignment

For this module you will be continuing your description and assessment of your chosen organization. At minimum, please address these important descriptive and analytic questions, providing enough information to assure clarity:

Describe and discuss the organization from the perspective of its current (unclassified) IT operating technology (or the IT technology it provides its internal or external customers). Discuss its technology deployment, effectiveness, and contribution to organizational or customer success. Also discuss dominant IT strategies and tactics.

Describe and discuss technological barriers to, as well as circumstances which may foster, continued IT success and organizational contribution.

In particular, you may wish to add what you consider the most immediate and important IT or IT management change you would cause to be undertaken as the newly appointed CIO or other IT unit senior manager. Please note what, why, and how.

Consider yourself a corporate or military senior IT manager (Director/Senior Director/VP-CIO or military equivalent) in your chosen project organization. You have been mandated by the top executives (or military equivalents) to initiate a new organization-wide IT upgrade project (you may choose your own). You agree with this decision, its purposes, and the technology involved. You see this assignment as finally getting your long-sought mandate for improvement that will substantially leverage organizational performance.

And yet, significant IT changes have not always been welcomed within your organization. In fact, your most recent attempt at much less profound change developed some significant resistance. So this time you have decided that you and your unit must do considerable preliminary work to pave the way, gain support for, as well as reduce resistance to this new and vital effort. Obviously you could plow forward on the basis of your executive mandate. However, your MSITM coursework has suggested that IT change has its best chance for success when it considers GST/STS and is a carefully developed, initiated, and managed process -- planned change in a highly political organizational environment.

Please provide a very brief description of your intended improvement project. However, note that this case segment is 95% about the processes of planned change. Your discussion of the IT upgrade must primarily focus on your insight into and a viable process for bringing off this planned change. Please detail the what, how, and why of each step you intend to take to ensure this project is accepted and gets accomplished. It is not enough to note that the project has senior approval. In both the military and corporate worlds, project implementation can be given lip service and never fully accepted. This is why a viable change plan is so important. Please recall the admonition; "If you want it bad, (and have no viable change plan) that''s the way you will get it...bad!"

Assignment Expectations

In all of this, you will need to reflect on your description and analysis (and perhaps adjust it accordingly) to ensure that you are able to integrate insight and learning from previous classes (and other sources as fits the circumstances). This means at least five contiguous academically sound citations and later full references. Please use enough concurrent discussion so that the purpose of each citation is apparent to the reader. Please note that this paper is incomplete without five academically sound references (relevant magazine articles from such sources as CIO are OK. Also, you may use Wikipedia and military/corporate references, but they do not count as one of the required five).

You will be assessed on the appropriateness and completeness of the detail you provide regarding your selected organization, your use of citations and references as noted above, and your intellectual insight into topically important issues. You will also be assessed on how well you adhere to the specific Capstone Case Guidelines provided to you.

This is a draft, so if you have to make educated guesses at the stage, that is fine for now. Your paper should be at least four, if not more, double-spaced pages when finished. The issue in these case papers is not brevity; rather it is insight and completeness in dealing with the topic(s).

Note that you are expected to use correct grammar, spelling, and English vocabulary. Check your paper for missing or inappropriately used words. If in doubt, check the dictionary and not ''spell check.'' Please consider that this paper, and all others, will be reviewed by the CIO and/or your commanding officer. It is strongly suggested that you ask a trusted colleague to review and edit each of your papers. Papers which do not meet these guidelines will be returned to you.

Finally, you are not to use any government/military classified or corporate-sensitive information in the development of any course papers or in any Discussion participation.