chapter 5

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES

Organizational employees must work closely together to develop strategic initiatives that create competitive advantages. Understanding the basic structure of a typical IT department including titles, roles and responsibilities will help an organization ti build a cohesive enterprise wide team. Ethics and security are two fundamental building blocks that organizations must base their businesses upon.

IT ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

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: 

• Manager - ensuring the delivery of all IT projects, on time and within budget
• Leader - ensuring the strategic vision of IT is in line with the strategic vision of the organization
• Communicator - building and maintaining strong executive relationships

What Concerns CIOs The Most?

✍ 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.

Ethics 

• Ethics - the principles and standards that guide our behavior toward other people
• Privacy is a major ethical issue. Privacy is the right to be left alone when you want to be, to have control over your own personal possessions, and not to be observed without your consent.
• Issues affected by technology advances 

- Intellectual property

- Copyright

- Fair use doctrine

- Pirated software

- Counterfeit software

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