chapter 5: organizational structures that support strategic initiatives.

chapter 5 : Organizational Structures that Support Strategic Initiatives.

Organizational Structures.
- Employees must work closely together to develop strategic initiatives that create competitive advantages.
- Ethics and security are two fundamental building blocks that organizations must base their businesses upon.
- Information technology is a relatively new functional area, having only been around formally for around 40 years.

-Recent IT- related strategic positions:
= Chief information officer (CIO) - oversees all uses of IT and ensures the strategic alignment of IT with business goals and objectives.
= Broad CIO functions include:
1. Manager- ensuring delivery of all IT projects, on time and within budget.
2. Leader- ensuring the strategic vision of IT is in line with the strategic vision of the organization.
3. Communicator- building and maintaining strong executive relationships.
= Chief technology officer (CTO) - responsible for ensuring the throughput speed, accuracy, availability, and reliability of IT.
= Chief security officer (CSO) - responsible for ensuring the security of IT systems.
= Chief privacy officer (CPO) - responsible for ensuring the ethical and legal use of information.
=Chief knowledge office (CKO) - responsible for collecting, maintaining, and distributing the organization's knowledge.

The gap between Business Personnel and IT Personnel.
* Business personnel possess expertise in functional areas such as marketing, accounting, and sales.
* IT personnel have the technological expertise.
* This typically causes a communications gap between the business personnel and IT personnel.

Improving Communications.
> Business personnel must seek to increase their understanding of IT.
> IT personnel must seek to increase their understanding of the business.
> It is the responsibility of the CIO to ensure effective communication between business personnel and IT personnel.

Organizational Fundamentals- Ethics and security.
* Ethics and security are two fundamental building blocks that organizations must base their businesses on to be successful.
* In recent years, such events as the Enron and Martha stewart, along with 9/11 have shed new light on the meaning of ethics and security.

Ethics 
- The principles and standards that guide our behavior toward other people.
- Privacy is a major ethical issue-> privacy: the right to be left alone when you want to be, to have control over your own personnel possessions, and not to be observed without your consent.
-Issues affected by technology advances : Intellectual property, Copyrigth, Fair use doctrine, Pirated software, counterfeit software.
- One of the main ingredients in trust is privacy
- Primary reason privacy issues lost trust for e-business.

Security
-Organizational information is intellectual capital - it must be protected
-Information security- the protection of information from accidental or intentional misuse by persons inside or outside an organization.
- E-business automatically creates tremendous information security risks for organizations.