Alcan Case Study Alcan IT Infrastructure Case
The strategic challenges that Alcan is having to overcome in order to continually grow profitably is common across enterprises that have grown through mergers, acquisitions and lack of unified Information Technology (IT) strategic planning. The result is often a balkanized, diverse IT architecture that lacks integration at the system and process level, weakening enterprises from getting to their goals and objectives. Alcan has all of these characteristics as they have a diversified business model, highly balkanized IT architecture, and a divisional organizational structure that has further made the coordination of IT strategies even more difficult. Based on the analysis of the collection of case studies concerning Alcan, it is clear the highly decentralized nature of their IT strategies is limiting their ability to fulfill strategic objectives. The lack of integration across legacy systems and business units is also significantly reducing the ability of the company to share analytics, tacit and implicit knowledge, and accomplish complex tasks as a result. The goal of this analysis is to analyze the pros and cons (or advantages and disadvantages) that the existing Alcan IT platform architecture has today, followed by an analysis of the pros and cons of Robert Ouelette's proposal for the new Alcan technology infrastructure. The last section of this analysis will include recommendations of additional improvements to the Alcan IT infrastructure. Alcan's future will be predicated on how effectively they use their information assets, which will either accentuated and strengthened by the adoption of a more efficient IT architecture.