Individual: Organizational Roles

Individual: Organizational Roles

Introduction

The intention of this paper is to answer two questions .This paper will answer the following questions; describe your role with respect to information systems in your organization. Do you consider yourself to be working in an operational, tactical, or strategic role? Describe person(s) in your organization that fulfill each role, and explain the purview of their responsibilities and privileges?

Consider organizations such as Amazon.com and Wal-Mart as implementers of information systems that have revolutionized their respective industries. How did their systems change their organizations, industries, and the societies in which they operate? What opportunities exist in your organization to do the same?

Roles at My organization

My organization has its own unique way of doing business, but still maintains the traditional pyramid levels of organization. The pyramid consists of four levels which are defined by (Haag, et al. ,2006): First, strategic management, which directs and guides the organization For example, setting the goals, building strategies and creating visions and guideline. The second, tactical management, which takes the goals and strategies outlined by strategic management and develops them. The third phase, operational management, which supervises the day-to-day operations and implementations of the goals and strategies developed by tactical management. Finally, non-management employees, who execute daily activities, such as administering IT servers, developing and producing goods and services, and supporting customers. For instance the strategic management at My organization includes the COO and CIO. Tactical management includes general managers of functions under CIO. Operational management includes directors, functions managers such as business intelligence team manager. The final level will include developers, testers, system analyst and user support.

My role is in the tactical management level at My organization. The tactical management’s primary focus is on the Software Design Life Cycle (SDLC). SDLC as described by (Haag et al., 2006) includes seven phases where the software cycle starts and ends. However, these phases may sometimes interact with each other.

The first phase, planning, has three primary activities which are performed by project manager and product manager: Define the system to be developed, set the project scope, and develop the project plan. The project or program manager depends mainly on development and test managers’ feedback on developing the reasonable project plan. In this phase, my role is to assist the project manager assign resources and time estimation for quality assurance’s work. The second phase, analysis, has two primary activities: gather the business requirement and requirements definition document. My role in this phase is to give feedback to the program manager or the analyst on the quality assurance about the requirement’s document accuracy and completion. The Third phase, design, the architectures and developers will presume three primary activities, design the technical architecture, design the system models, and design document. My role in this phase is to ensure that the recommended solution and design best meets business requirements. The fourth phase, development, is where the development team performs two main activities: Build the technical architecture and Build the database and programs. My main role in this phase is to make sure the test team will get the code completed time as expected. On occasion I may need to be involved in unit testing before the code release to test.

The fifth phase, testing, is where the test team verifies that the system works and meets all the business requirements as expected and defined in the analysis phase. This phase has two primary activities, which are: Write the test conditions and perform the testing of the system. My role in this phase is leading the team in testing effort by planning, create test cases, executing test cases and developing automation. The sixth phase is implementation. The user support team performs two primary activities, which are: Write detailed user documentation; provide training for the system users. The final phase, maintenance, is where the system support team performs two primary activities which are: Build a help desk to support the system users, and provide an environment to support system changes. I don’t have direct role in this phase. However, my team interacts with them when issues arise that require my help. In the overall SDLC phase, I have a primary role and secondary roles where I participate on different levels. In the end, SDLC is a group effort.

The three major roles summarized by Haag et al. (2000) is to fit major business who uses IT. The First role is the domain expert presents the domain expertise in the form of problem-solving strategies and regularly works with an IT specialist. The second is knowledge engineer, who formulates the domain expertise into an expert system which is suite my role at My organization. The third one is the knowledge worker or user will then apply the expert system to the problem of what to do.

IT revolutionized organization

Organizations like Amazon.com and Wal-Mart have implemented information systems that have revolutionized their respective industries. In this paper I will try to find out. How did IT systems change their organizations, industries, and the societies in which they operate? What opportunities exist in My organization to do the same?

My organization is an IT producer, it produces technologies such as Customer Relation Management System (CRM) ,Supply Chain Management Systems(SCM) , Decision Support System (DSS) , Knowledge Management Systems (KM) and many software and hardware used all over the world . Many organizations implemented these technologies and used them for their competitive advantage.

I will use Wal-Mart as an example of an organization that implemented information systems which have revolutionized the retail industry.

Laudon and Laudon (2006) describes Wal-Mart’s success in the retail business:

Wal-Mart is famous for its low prices, and you may have experienced its low prices first-hand. At least, you have probably seen its motto, вЂ?Always Low PricesвЂ"Always.’ One of the biggest reasons Wal-Mart is able to sell at prices lower than almost everyone else is that it has a superefficient supply chain. Its IT-enabled supply chain