Alcan is facing significant challenges related to their organization of IT and governance implementation. The lack of corporate IT leadership forced senior management to finally address the IT issues present in the company and hire Robert Ouellette as the new Vice President of Corporate IT. Analyzing the current IT structure and establishing effective governance, along with new IT priorities, will be crucial in determining the future success of Alcan. Accenture IT Governance Model Alcan is positioned in the “Efficient, Predictable Operators” quadrant of the Accenture IT Governance model. This quadrant is characterized by a lower rate of change and competition based on operational efficiency. Demand for aluminum is high and vertical integration …show more content…
Although business groups may have their own principles guiding their objectives, there are no enterprise-wide statements that outline how IT usage will create business value. In fact, Alcan’s IT staff was never required to collaborate with each other and were authorized to “meet the specific needs of their own business group” (Dubé). IT infrastructure was fragmented across business groups since standardization and IT sharing was not present across the whole company. IT architecture had similar issues and in some cases, there was no architecture in place for applications. Furthermore, business application needs were defined independent of each other and often lacked centralized leadership. Issues with IT investment and prioritization arose due to the lack of non-standardized documentation and reporting of costs. Ouellette discovered a more accurate $95 million discrepancy in what the company thought it spent on IT activities and what it actually did spend. Costs were difficult to estimate because of the differences in each business group’s processes, which made it even harder to set priorities around. Advantages & …show more content…
Architecture and Governance magazine highlights the top ten signs of poor IT governance, some of which are suitably demonstrated by Alcan and include: “limited visibility to make informed decisions…lack of identification of costs…inefficiencies in operations…[and] the inability to align IT execution to the business strategy” (Rogers). The problems and challenges facing Alcan can be directly attributed to poor IT governance; as a result, Alcan cannot continue using its current governance structure when making decisions across related IT