AgCredit Case Study

Discussion Questions

1. Propose an organizational structure for the IT department that you feel would support the transformation of AgCredit into a process centric organization.

Turning AgCredit into a process-centric organization is the most important thing at the moment. However, the process should get handled with care. The organization should make the staff recognize business processes especially the department of IT. The organization should also have committee mandated with overseeing implementation of projects. Besides overseeing project implementation, the committee should ensure that they remain within the goals and objectives of the organization. The Chief Information Officer (CIO) should also have a part to play in the boardroom meetings and decisions in the organization (Ali, Warne, Bopping, Hart, & Pascoe, 2004).

2. Outline a project selection process for AgCredit to ensure alignment with the enterprise business vision.

The current situation at the AgCredit does not allow informed selection of projects. Therefore, the organization requires a committee with absolute powers of decision making. Project selection process should ensure that the project has elements of the overall vision of the organization. Besides meeting the overall vision of the organization, the process should also that it incorporates needs and requirements of each department while remaining within the dimensions of SOA (Mittal, Risco-Martin, & Zeigler, 2009).

3. How should Manley "make the case" for SOA to ensure that the executive team at AgCredit buys in?

It is not easy for Manley to convince the executive to buy the idea of SOA. One of the best of the way to convince the executive is showing how AgCredit stands to gain from SOA. Some of the gains that Manley should present are: SOA will consolidate customer details into one repository hence saving the organization time and financial resources required to retrieve the information from fragmented repositories. Additionally, a common process in the organization will enable collaboration between the departments thereby enabling quicker attainment of the organization’s goals and objectives. The technology will revolutionize the business processes at the organization thereby giving the organization competitive advantage (Koetter & Kochanowski, 2015).

4. What new internal IT capabilities will have to be developed in order to create an IT department to support AgCredit’s future business architecture?

The capabilities that AgCredit requires are the management and information management tools. It also requires mechanisms through which information will get delivered within and outside the organization. Furthermore, there is a need to improve the organizational relationships with customers and also elaborate and evaluate roles each employee should play within the organization. However, all the capabilities and tools must align themselves with the requirements and standards of SOA. They must also remain within the authoritative regulations during and after implementation (Marinos, Nikolaos, & Vincenzo, 2015).

5. What aspects of IT governance do you think would be important in supporting this transformation?

The current situation in the organization is in the mess to an extent that each department has different objectives from the overall organizational objectives. The objectives should be similar to one another before implementation of the IT governance. The transformation also needs a committee that will help steer it in the desired direction. The Steering Committee should also involve views of the CIO, who handles the department of IT. Besides the CIO involvement in the steering committee, stakeholders should also play one of the vital roles in IT transformation (Peterson, 2004).

References

Ali, I., Warne, L., Bopping, D., Hart, D., & Pascoe, C. (2004). Organizational Paradigms and Network Centric Organizations. Issues in Informing Science & Information Technology, 1, 1089-1096.

Koetter, F., & Kochanowski, M. (2015). A model-driven approach for event-based business process monitoring. Information Systems and e-Business Management, 13 (1), 4-36.

Marinos, T., Nikolaos, B., & Vincenzo, M. (2015). A Framework for Service-oriented Architecture Adoption in e-Banking: the Case of Banks from a Transition and a Developed Economy. Information Technology for Development, 21 (3), 460-479.

Mittal, S., Risco-Martin, J., & Zeigler, B. (2009). DEVS/SOA: A Cross-Platform Framework for Net-centric Modeling and Simulation in DEVS Unified Process. Simulations, 85 (7), 419-450.

Peterson, R. (2004). Crafting Information Technology Governance. Information Systems Management, 21 (4), 7-22.

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