Requirements for the Corporate Computing Function

 

The new Corporate CIO of XLZ Data Systems has devised a nine-point mission statement for the company. I am one of the operations managers in the department and have received a memo on the new policy and an associated task. The CIO wants to address the new strategy in a three-phase rollout plan and my feedback on LAN and MAN technology. As a reference point, the table below addresses  the nine points of the mission statement of the CIO.

Analysis as to  why the fifth point, “Meet information requirements of management”, is in the CIO’s list of nine (9) points.

Stallings, W. (2009) It is very important that the development of data processing activities at the               departmental level can at times increase the difficulty of obtaining data for the effective use of               executive management making their job more difficult, the information difficult to interpret.               The adoption of differing departmental standards and means of summarizing data makes               uniform collection of data for upward reporting more difficult. (p. 54). Therefore, it is of my own opinion that the reason why CIO stressed that point is to make sure that we address the complexity of understanding the massive amounts of data that is produced and presented to management and that the process be as streamlined as possible. This makes it possible for the CIO to make better business decisions without having to spend more time that should be sifting through vast amounts of data produced that was not designed as it was outlined in the business requirements documents.

First Phase Rollout Items Listing

Since the first phase of the rollout will only contain three of the nine points of the mission statement, I would make a case that the items to be included in phase one would be the following for the reasons listed:

1. Item number one (1) I believe would have to be part of the initial rollout: “Provide computing capability to all organizational units that legitimately require it. ” After all it is our mandate to provide IT services to all corporate customers and departments within the organization and this could be done on a cost savings basis by acquiring cost efficient systems that include servers, personal workstations and personal computers.
2. Item number two (2) would be number 9  of the mission statement: “Make the work of employees enjoyable as well as productive.” I firmly believe that our employees are our greatest assets and should be treated as such and considered just as valuable as the IT Systems hardware and software. Having access to all the resources that our employees need to perform their job tasks is an essential and I might add, critical aspect of productivity. This benefits the company bottom line.
3. Last but certainly not least, the third item of the initial rollout I believe would be mission statement item number seven (7): “Allow organizational units sufficient autonomy in the conduct of their tasks to optimize creativity and performance at the unit level.” Stallings, W. (2009) Widespread use of small computers can provide highly individualistic service to all the departments needing computing, allow users to establish and maintain autonomy in their operations using their own equipment, and provide users with hands-on opportunity to enjoy computing use while improving departmental productivity. (p. 54)

Now that I have addressed the first three items to be part of the phase one rollout of the CIO’s mission initiative, I would like to take this opportunity to address what I believe to be the most critical and necessary part of any IT Corporate Initiative and that is Security. I strongly recommend to the CIO that XLZ Systems. It does not matter how large or small our company currently is, there is a need to have a cyber security plan to ensure the security of our information assets. The cyber security plan that we implement must take into consideration the protection of the following:

• XLZ Systems customer information, that includes all confidential information is currently held on behalf of customers and business clients.
• XLZ Systems financial information, and this information includes market assessments and all of our company’s own financial records and other miscellaneous financial corporate data.
• XLZ Systems corporate products information, that includes any designs, plans, our patent applications, source code, and any and all drawings.
• As we have seen from other corporate data security breaches such as Target to name a few, failure to protect our data’s confidentiality might result in our customer credit card numbers being stolen, with legal consequences and a loss of goodwill. This can and more than likely will result in lost customers and the potential for lawsuits.

So in closing, in addition to the nine points of the mission statement I would amend it to now number ten with security ranking as high as number one. This will be my report to the CIO.

References

Schlossbauer, S (2015) Management Requirements and Changing Values in the Information                             Age Retrieved from: https://us.experteer.com/magazine/management-requirements/

Stallings, W. (2009). CIS 505: Business Data Communications: Custom edition (6th ed.). Upper                             Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Stallings, W (2009)  Standards Organizations Retrieved from:                             http://www.box.net/shared/9dtnzvwys8/1/15730219/164146343/1

Zaharia, A (2016) 10+ Critical Corporate Cyber Security Risks – A Data Driven List [Updated]

Retrieved from: https://heimdalsecurity.com/blog/10-critical-corporate-cyber-security-                            risks-a-data-driven-list/