MULTINATIONAL MANAGEMENT

Multinational Management

Multinational management: Interview Method

In this paper, I attempt to determine if the principles we are learning in class apply in real life by conducting an interview with an IT manager. The subject is Rick MacDonald, who is the director of Systems and Operations at Cornell Information Technologies, which serves a significant amount of the computing needs of Cornell University.

Organizational Overview

Cornell University has 19,518 students at its campus in Ithaca, NY, along with 2,627 faculty and 8,572 staff. Cornell Information Technologies supports the business infrastructure, informational software, and instructional and operational needs of much (but not all) of Cornell's voice, video, and data customers.

Management

The biggest challenge MacDonald faces is managing a staff spread among many technical services and many buildings on a large campus. Among four areas of management people, knowledge, process and money, the IT manager was ranked people management first in importance, with the others tying as runner-up.

The secret to his success with managing such a disparate group is to delegate and to motivate. The organization is not flat but hierarchical, and he sees that the people closest to the work have as much responsibility and authority as they need to accomplish their goals. As a non-profit, CIT cannot offer variable pay schemes to motivate personnel, so he tries to build a satisfying environment that encourages professional development and offers recognition for good work. MacDonald encourages staff to take advantage of training opportunities offered by HR. Indeed, some of the professional development seminars, such as the supervisory certification, are mandatory.

Further complicating the people management issue is the decentralized environment at Cornell University. Many academic and research departments do not rely on CIT but instead have their own IT staff.

At the same time, some aspects are centralized. For example, diversity is an important issue at Cornell and ...