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.
E-R Diagram, Answer the Following Questions: *
This is a series of questions that involve IT decision making. Two of the three questions involve a computer inventory system for a pizza chain. The owner of two pizza parlors located in adjacent towns wants to computerize and integrate sales transactions and inventory management within and between both stores. The point-of-sale component must be easy to use and flexible enough to accommodate a variety of pricing strategies and coupons. The inventory management, which will be linked to the point-of-sale component, must also be easy to use and fast.