Essay on Volkswagen a Case Study

The purpose of this article is to illuminate the need for any organization to have its IT strategy and business strategy properly aligned. While many organizations view IT and business alignment as an event – it is actually an on-going process, or continuous journey. Therefore, the main problem is that many organizations of today still hold these two principles (business mission & IT strategy) as two separate entities. However, in the Information Age – collaboration is key to capturing and retaining market penetration. To not have alignment with the IT and business strategy together is not a matter of want it is a matter of survival. This report will expand upon the need for business and IT strategic alignment as well as examine what happens in lack of a comprehensive plan. This will be done by examining the Vermont Teddy Bear company prior to and after the arrival of Bob Stetzel, the Vice President of Information Technology. This document will view it findings and make recommendations on the immediate and future operations of the company.

"In 2014, Air Canada achieved its best full year financial performance in the Corporation 's 77-year history," said Calin Rovinescu, President and Chief Executive Officer. (Air Canada Website CIO 2015) Adjusted net income was $531 million, representing an increase of 56.2 per cent year-over-year.” The purpose of this paper is to examine how Air Canada in 2011 successfully aligned their business strategy and Information Technology (IT) by managing information resources on several levels to accomplish a competitive advantage over other airline carriers and gain the attention of their customers through innovation. Finally, this paper will address suggestions to achieve better Business-IT alignment to meet Air Canada’s goals for the future and continued success.

In 1937, the German government founded Volkswagen to mass produce a low priced "peoples car." A Nazi organization called the German Labor Front operated the company originally. They brought in Ferdinand Porsche to design the car. He used elements from his type 32 prototype NSU that he designed in 1934. Such elements were an air cooled horizontally opposed four cylinder rear mounted engine and torsion bar suspension. Production was supposed to start at the Kdf-Stadt factory in September 1939, but this turned out to be the same month that world war two was declared and the car was put off. As the war raged on, the factory was used to produce military vehicles. By 1943 the factory had 12,000 prisoners of

Henderson, J., & Venkatraman, N. (1993). Strategic alignment: Leveraging information technology for transforming organizations. IBM Systems Journal, 32(1), 472-484.

I do not purport to condone the recall of Volkswagen Passenger Cars; what they did was wrong; and objectively they deserve a swift and severe punishment. However, the media’s response to ‘dieselgate’ is an excessive overreaction. First of all, we cannot go around adding the gate suffix haphazardly to every transgression and gaucherie. Bob Bernstein and Carl Woodward worked for over a year trying to piece together the Watergate controversy. They risked everything for it: jobs, reputation and even their lives. There should be perspective on this controversy, diesel Volkswagen Passenger Cars having devices designed to cheat emissions tests did not and will not ever result in (arguably) the most powerful person in the world resigning.

Business–information technology alignment is the tight integration of the IT function with the organization’s strategy, mission, and goals. That is, the IT function directly supports the business objectives of the organization. Such an alignment enables firms to adhere to business objectives, and to maximize the value from investments. An excellent alignment will reduce costs, standardize processes, enhance productivity, improve workflow and communications, sustain repeatable service levels, improve Risk control mechanisms, implement new business strategies, facilitate growth, facilitate competitive advantage by exploiting new technology, enable IT driven projects to meet time and budget requirements, help to optimize the IT budget utilization. As more and more new business opportunities are created, IT plays an

This letter is to inform you that we would like to add our daughter Amanda Ljiljana Kukich to the title of our VW Golf. We will continue to make the payments as before.

As the new CIO of Volkswagen of America (VWoA), Dr. Uwe Matulovic brings an impressive resume that includes ample experience in aligning business process management (BPM), business process re-engineering (BPR) and the insights necessary to create the Business Process Technology Organization (BPTO). As the IT projects within VWoA have lacked governance and are facing a severe budget shortfall of $150M, Dr. Matulovic has a formidable challenge. He must first align all existing IT projects to strategic initiatives, which is the essence of effective IT governance (Huang, Zmud, Price, 2010) and then he must define processes to stabilize these strategies yet ensure integration still occurs at the process and system level (Korac-Kakabadse, Kakabadse, 2001). All of these factors need to be taken into account as VWoA is evaluating up to 22 new models with will have an exponential, nearly chaotic impact on their existing IT systems and their ability to respond. Further, the VWoA business has continued to suffer from a lack of unified focus of IT spending to overall strategic initiatives. This lack of governance has created a process of defining IT priorities more defined by the persuasive ability of managers, their ability to build compelling Return on Investment (ROI) arguments, and

To address the problems The Company is facing the IT strategy has to be aligned with the business strategy and some improvements must be made to The Company’s IT system.

1. This course explains and records and interprets some important existing theories, models, and practices in the IT governance and strategic alignment domain. IT governance be defined and its relationship with corporate governance and IT management clarified; devoted to the concept of strategic alignment, a detailed set of IT governance structures, processes, and relational mechanisms is discussed that can be leveraged to implement IT governance in practice.

The Toyota Prius was in the market introduction stage then it matured into the market growth stage. In the Product life cycle there are four different phases. There is market introduction, market growth, market maturity, and sales decline. The Toyota Prius as explained by the book was a new experimental technology that Toyota wanted to test and introduce to the market to see how it would react. Toyota was at a point in their business where they wanted to innovate something new. Some of the ideas that Toyota was considering prior to the Prius were

To begin with, a companies should align IT and business objectives. In the past, IT departments have used

The solution to what ills the alignment of IT strategy and business strategy can be found in the alignment of the organization’s CEO, CIO, and CFO. In order for the business strategy and the IT strategy to come together to for any type of alignment (cutting edge) there must be harmony among this group. The reason why this select few people are important to the alignment process is because of their roles inherent within the organization. Below is an illustration followed by a brief description of each role and what that person would be expected to bring to the organization.

Strategic alignment occurs when the Information Technology (IT) and business strategies are in dynamic symmetry with the structures that support strategy execution, which include; organization framework and Information systems (Lapiedra, Alegre, and Chiva, 2006). Therefore, when this alignment exists IT can predict what the business future requirements are and set up a trajectory to meet those upcoming needs (Hu and Huang, 2007). Luftman (2003) noted that for over two decades IT to business alignment has been classified among the top management concerns in organizations. Although IT-business alignment has been identified as a promoter for IT investment to enhance organizational performance, fear prevails among management teams that the return of investment in IT will not be achieved. The main reason of failure to generate return from IT investment is the practice’s challenge faced by many implementers due to external forces, like transformation of IT (Luftman and Kempaiah, 2008), cost, and lack of understanding on alignment framework and models to use at different strategic planning levels (Oana, 2010).

Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft (AG) is a German automotive company that was founded in 1937. Since then Volkswagen has continued to grow into a multinational corporation with production facilities in China, India, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Mexico, and The United States (Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft). Volkswagen also produces other brand name vehicles such as, Lamborghini, Audi, Bugatti, and Bentley (Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft). In order for a business to grow it must have worthy Business Ethics and Social Responsibility. It must be able to deal with Economic Challenges Facing Contemporary Business, and have the ability to Compete in World Markets. In this paper I analyze how Volkswagen AG achieves each of these concepts and