The Main Features Of IT Management At Alcan

Case Study 1: Alcan Course Instructor Date How would you describe main features of IT management at Alcan in 2006? Would you consider IT resources to be centralized or distributed? Is the control over IT resources decentralized? Based on Weill and Ross matrix (see reading on IT governance), where was the organization situated at that time? What were the strength and challenges of the IT management model in place at Alcan in 2006? What features of IT governance would you like to see in place for Alcan? How would these address some of the challenges that you have identified in the previous question? Would these features be best achieved by a centralized IT structure or a decentralized IT structure? IT management at Alcan is more distributed, and the company lacks centralized IT systems, since there is no integration and standardization of the core IT processes. In the decentralized structure, the business groups operated independency making decisions, and the management made strategic IT decisions affecting these groups. The control over IT resources is decentralized and there is no clarity on how the resources are managed between the different decentralized groups. The IT governance decisions made focus on the IT principles, IT architecture, IT infrastructure, business application as well as prioritization and investment decisions. In the decentralized IT setup, Alcan, IT governance would be anarchy on the Weill and Ross matrix. Anarchy is a highly decentralized system where a small group pursues their own IT agenda, and at Alcan IT reporting was made exclusively to the business group heads. The current Alc...