Analysis of Volkswagen Case Study

Analysis of Volkswagen case study

This case study described the new process of Volkswagen of America. The main purpose of this process was to determine the appropriate projects and to manage IT funding priorities. This paper will evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the new process, and the effectiveness of the new process, which led by Matulovic, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Volkswagen of America.

First of all, let's elaborate the advantages of the new process.  The new process was an improvement over the old process, because in the past the projects selection were through unstructured debate and business units were prioritizing the projects without checking its relevance to the enterprise goals. The new process allowed the business units to prioritize the projects and relate them to the enterprise goals and to rank the projects based on their importance to Volkswagen. In addition, Matulovic established a well organized system and facilitated a workshop with members of Digital Business Council (DBC) that through which all business units worked together and shared their proposed initiatives. Further the new process is divided into three phases, which carefully thought and executed. For example, phase II introduced a predefined template and also included detailed information about each project and the benefit of that is not every business unit by itself could make the template.Likewise in phase III there were three different types of investment,Stay in business, Return on Investment and Option- creating investment, and they also recognized the three types of technological application, Base-enterprise IT platform, Enterprise applications and customized point solution, the purpose of this investment and application type was to align them with business objectives and how it influenced the selection and prioritization process. Moreover, through

the new process they made clear the dependencies of many projects over other projects. And as a result of this activity the anticipated amount of $210 million was cut down to $ 170 million. Furthermore, through the new process they double-checked the accuracy of the projects goal associated with enterprise goal, and the DBC members found out that several projects favored by business units did not have sufficient enterprise value, which resulted in reclassification of the projects, and also they ranked the most important project for funding.