Challenging Aspect of it Which

¶ … challenging aspect of it which is utilized internationally and specifically in your home country?

The greatest challenge of it both internationally and within my country is overcoming fear of new systems and resistance to change. Driven by the economic realities of today and the fact many employees are afraid of any change that might impact their salaries or jobs, it is commonplace to see strong resistance to change, even if the new system is going to mean greater global growth for the company (King, Flor, 2008). There is also a strong fear of jobs being outsourced and a lack of control over when and how jobs will be delegated to 3rd party it outsourcing companies (Mann, 2004). Resistance to change and the entire area of change management are the most difficult to manage from both an international and country-specific perspective today in the field of it.

A second most challenging aspect of it globally today is the need to integrate with and reliably use legacy systems in the daily performance of key tasks within an enterprise. Many times legacy systems were developed with a specific mindset of never having to be integrated with any other system or Web Services, which did not exist when many of these initial systems were created. At a global level, this lack of integration standards has drastically reduced the level of productivity and profitability of companies over the long-term. The use of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) platforms and the pervasive adoption of integration standards has set the foundation for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Web Services (Li, Berry, 2004). EAI-based integration strategies are highly effective for managing support fo and use of legacy data located across broad international and regional areas, and with secured networking now commonplace through use integration protocols as IPSec, organizations are now able to create highly effective global networks using reliable, secured technologies (Patel, 2002). This level of integration is making the next major challenge of it internationally and specifically in my country more surmountable.

The third significant challenge is creating an effective level of governance and enterprise security across systems internationally with specific focus on those in my country. Governance and security requirements vary widely across each of the geographies our company competes in, with the requirements in the Middle East being vastly different than the U.S. For example. Arbitrating all of these differences in governance and security across countries and borders, and contending with the compliance requirements within the U.S. alone take an entirely new level of detail and focus in strategic it planning and execution (Ebert, 2007). The wide variations in compliance regulations force an inordinate high level of costs and time on it departments to ensure compliance. What makes compliance from an enterprise it standpoint so difficult is the need to coordinate the many cultural and legal implications of system performance with international system update and performance objectives (Li, Berry, 2004).

If you were to design a globally focused it application for a multinational corporation, how would you introduce it and would the challenges be for the corporation?

Before beginning the design of a globally focused it application, I would first be sure to understand how its key features, functions, workflows and performance contributed to the users who would use the system daily. After having a thorough review of these key criterion and the development of workflows and benchmarking of existing processes to evaluate total performance, I'd get the initial phase of software development completed. Using agile-based software development methods, I'd continually refine the key functional and workflows areas of the application to ensure it performed as defined.

Next, the application would be tested for real-time data and process integration to the broader it infrastructure of the company. This would concentrate on the integration points across legacy, enterprise-wide and platform systems to ensure any future growth would be easily accomplish for a legacy system support perspective. The ability to integrate with legacy systems while creating global, enterprise-class applications is critical in any application development effort (Li, Berry, 2004).