To make sure the company is doing the right things

To make sure the company is doing the right things (effectiveness) and doing things right (efficiency), alignment between IT and the business is urgently needed. Smith’s IT transformation plan intends to totally realign IT to ensure it is more accountable to business request and IT resources can be properly deployed. Furthermore, trust between the business and IT is rebuilt. In addition, improving the strategic position of IT in the company as business’ partner help increase the system functionality. Toda markets emphasize for greater collaboration between the business and IT and pay close attention to human capital, Smith reassigns half of the 240 IT employees to be responsible for the business areas, also she creates five new business unit CIO (BU-CIO) to be assigned to support an executive vice-president.
In this way, competitive use of IT will no longer happen and each specified IT group can be more focused on specific tasks which improves the efficiency. The alignment between BU-CIO and EVP facilitate the formation of visioning networks, which is vital to IT governance. Thus IT resources and priority are well managed. Monthly VP meetings are cancelled and instead an annual plan/budget process will be established to access the organizational projects or projects which need more budget applied by the business unit. Those worthless projects will be abandoned which helps reach the cost-efficient. In addition, the report relationship between IT and the business, leadership is recommended action to encourage co-evolution between IT and the business. A two-way relationship is created and enables the IT investments and capabilities to potentially benefit and change business strategy.
A backup data center and IT operations center is established to defuse the risk of service blackout. A backup data center is still accessible when disasters occur and the IT operations center ensure emergencies will be handled immediately. This combination of support service provisioning will provide 24/7 continuous service to the organizations clients, which directly enhances its key strength of customer service. All these activities make contributions to organizing efficient IT governance which can bring innovation value from IT to the business and make IT a strategic differentiator to West Jet.