Navigators of Canada Case Study

Navigators of Canada Case Study List three problems the Navigators are facing. Unless you feel all problems have been covered, please put forward three problems that no one else has raised. Hint: Consider issues related to strategy, structure, and systems. Also, using appropriate models or frameworks from this week's readings may help you to organize your analysis. There are many, many problems the Navigators of Canada are suffering from in the context of the case study.

Most severe is the lack of process integration at the local and regional levels of the Navigators in terms of managing donors, having a consistent set of it standards, and also definition standards of collaboration. This single issue of a lack of coordination across these three areas seriously constricts the Navigators' ability to get their strategies accomplished.

Second, the lack of consistency on operating systems is going to eventually lead to significant costs for the Navigators, as they will end up having to spend on maintaining out-of-date applications that will no longer scale up for future needs. Third and most significant is the lack of strategic collaboration in process, system design and roles of local Navigator chapters. This lack of collaboration permeates down to the process level and is creating a chaos at the it, donor process, accounting, and ministry strategies of the Navigators today.

In conjunction with all the factors that are mentioned above, there is a lack of systems integration across the most critical systems of all for the Navigators. These are the four accounting systems including outsourced payroll to ADP, FAST, NewViews, and Quicken. Making this lack of system integration worse, the local offices of the Navigators are using Quicken on their own, not reconciling their financial records with the headquarters organizations.

All of these factors combined are going to lead to extensive costs from a process standpoint, and an exponential increase in confusion at the process level of the Navigators' organization over time. What alternatives are available to Rains, given the constraints facing the Navigators of Canada? For Mr.

Rains the alternatives are to incrementally take on the challenges of a lack of process consistency and standards for it purchasing, lack of collaboration across platforms, and most critical, the lack of a collaborative it framework that aligns with how the Navigators get work done. Mr. Rains also has the challenge of standardizing how accounting expenses are reported and standardized across the four, non-integrated systems the Navigators use for managing their financial reporting and strategies. Third, Mr.

Rains has the alterative of allowing smaller workgroups to form and eventually create systems integration across each one. Using a small group-based strategy would create a star networking topology that would force even greater emphasis on system and process integration. Select an alternative and propose an implementation plan. As the strategic plan for the Navigators is concentrating on how to integrate processes, systems and strategies at the local level, Mr. Rains needs to first create a collaborative platform or it framework to unify the entire organization.

This could be an Intranet portal based on Microsoft SharePoint for example. Next, the processes that unify the local offices and headquarters need to be streamlined using the business process management applications and tools on Microsoft SharePoint's platform. Third, the Navigators.