Star Air Questions

STARS Air Question

For this memo, focus on what your strategy will be to make a 10% budget cut in IT.  You should detail what changes you will make, in what order you will be making the changes, and how those will be implemented (briefly).  

Key Issues at STARS:

1. Awareness about Importance of IT and how critical it is
2. Role of Information Systems Department at STARS
3. Roles of IT staff members
4. Trust and Credibility of IT as a department
5. Excessive use of consultants and number of projects (No Project status)
6. Distributed nature of IT
7. Lack of Skills in IT (Functional and technical Skills)
8. Lack of control over Operations by Former CIO (Problems at Levels of Authority)
9. No IT Strategy in place (No defined strategy to align with STARS strategy)
10. Supervision and reporting

My Analysis and Recommendations:

Firstly, the STARS must get the basics right. The importance of IT department is very vital for a complex organization like STARS. CIO must challenge the opinion of “IT is not critical, because STARS still operate even during system outage”. The higher executives must be made aware of the importance of IT and how critical it is. The trust between the employees of different departments is important; to raise awareness and to show how much impact it has on overall organization. IT also lacks skills, both functional and technical. This can be the reason other departments don’t seek help from the IT department and even if they want to, they will communicate with their favorite person in IT. This shows that the nature of the existing infrastructure is distributed, where everyone looks for solutions within the department and there is no centralized process defined to seek help from the right department, which is, IT.

Trust and Credibility is another important aspect of the IT that requires attention. IT team must show their presence in different organizational meetings and establish good relationship with senior managers from various departments at STARS. IT department must also set up a Help Desk platform to respond to the daily requests/calls from different departments and provide solutions accordingly. This will increase IT credibility and trust. This will also help in providing reports of support requests to the higher management on daily/weekly/monthly basis.

The excessive use of outsourcing must be stopped. The Consultants are not contributing in any proper way and it does not worth paying them the specified amount. Consultants should not be recruited without a clear project outline and supervision of the CIO. Although, this would require CIO to have full authority on all IT related work and projects. To centralize the hiring of new staff and outsourcing of a vital work to consultants, CIO must have control over the Operations and recruitment process. These actions will reduce the cost.