Business and IT

Business with IT

ANS 1

CIO is defined as the Chief Information Officer. It is considered to be the wheel of a company. The primary objective of the CIO is managing the resources of Information Technology in order to implement the strategy of the venture. A CIO provides the vision of the technology as well as the leadership in order to develop and implement the initiatives of the IT. This aids the venture in maintaining a competitive advantage over its competitors. Since the importance of the technology has been increased vastly, it has triggered a significant need of CIO officers. These officers are required to work effectively and efficiently, not just with the unit of Information System but with all the units of the organization.

A CIO is required to possess both the business as well as the technical skills. It must be able to realize the vision of the company and keeping that in mind, it must analyze how the department of information technology can help make this vision possible. A CIO manager is considered to be both the operations as well as the strategist manager. The demand of the CIO officers has enhanced in complexity as well as scope. One third of the additional corporate functioning is managed by the CIO managers. Whereas three third of the CIOs report directly to the president, COO or the CEO of the organization. There are four basic profiles that tend to distinguish the leadership roles of the CIO. These include:

IT Orchestrator: This person is considered to be an effective leader of the Information System who is also involved in strategic decision making of the company.

IT Advisor: this individual ensures the IT and strategic abilities to be effective but not sufficiently funded.

IT Laggard: These officers enjoy a high level of the authority in the decision making. However, it does not possess the business or strategic skills.

IT Mechanic: these officers have lower levels of strategic effectiveness, along with the authority of decision making as well as the business skills.

ANS 2

The profile management of information systems are referred to as the continuous decision making regarding the right mixture of investments from management, funding as well as the perspectives of the staff. Their objective is to provide the company the information so that it could fund and invest in the most valued initiatives which may reward the business with maximum benefits and rewards. Professor Peter Weill and colleagues at MIT's Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) describe four asset classes of IT investments:

Transactional systems: these are the systems that tend to cut or streamline the costs of a business.

Infrastructure systems: these are the IT services which are shared. These systems may be applied to servers, databases, networks and even laptops.

Information systems: these are the systems that tend to provide information which may be used for controlling, managing, communicating, analyzing as well as collaboration.

Strategic systems: these are strategic systems that are used to attain a competitive advantage over the competitors in the market ...