Free Individual Report of MeadWestvaco Corp Essay Sample

CHAPTER 1

As the CIO of MeadWestvaco Corp, my duties concerning IT and the business architecture of the organization is to reevaluate the mode of operation in terms of service delivery and customer satisfaction. As the organization transformation in the IT and business for the last decade and so has focused on service delivery rather than maximization of profits, my duty would be to transform the IT sector within the organization so that delivery of service shifts from being the priority to being the mechanism of facilitating the priority – customer satisfaction. Besides this, security of the Information System is a notch below the international standards and within the networking, frameworks that our 10 divisions operate on; cyber-attacks are eminent and have the potential of crippling the safe operation of the organization. After all, customers need an e-commerce service that respects the privacy and security of their details.

As a means of reaching to the customer and maintaining contact between the divisions of MeadWestvaco, a telecommunication foundation would help market the products and services of the organization. Inspite of the objectives of the organization to venture full into the e-commerce, the world is transforming into a digital cell hence telecommunication would affect the MeadWestvaco’s marketing and trading tactics.

The business world is a vital environment when it comes to establishing networks that would allow operations to run smoothly and profitably. For this case, organization needs to collaborate with other organization so that the efficacy of the organization can be established and maintained. Partner relationship management is a means to controlling the roles and significance of various departments both internal and external that have a direct or indirect influence on the organization’s operation. The achievement of this management would affect organizations like MeadWestvaco in assuming string business interrelations that foster success and development.

Currently, the state of the economy, technology, and probably the customer spending routines are all related in that various economic constrains have face these areas. As markets flourish to welcome the digital era, information systems have the need to be open to expansion, transformation, and some degree of flexibility when integration of other technologies is needed. The effect that system development will have for MeadWestvaco Corp will reflect the IT’s department flexibility of welcoming new technologies and serving clients with up-to-date technology backbone.

Information in an organization in an organization travels multilaterally. The channel used and the urgency of the messages to be communicated determine the movement of information. Information in the internet is open for everyone as long as it is public in nature. With the intranet and the internet, information is passed through networks upon with web-peers, hackers, and cyber criminals operate in. Information security for MeadWestvaco is a significance shield from attackers and the loss of vital data and business documents. In addition, information security is fully ensured if the systems management personnel is designated and given specific responsibilities. This way, the organization would not suffer the risk of losing business strategic plans to the competition.

The process of contracting business functions from one organization to another or to shareholders is outsourcing. The effective use of this functionality is that organizations have the advantage of bearing less of unproductive business outcomes as it has it accruing favorable outcomes. Offshoring is simply movement or business across the globe. Offshoring is an effective way and strategy of avoiding negative economic impacts in one state and taking advantage of favorable economies of scale of in other states. Outsourcing and offshoring planning is effective to an organization like MeadWestvaco in that it outlines the possible outcomes of joint ownership, partnering, direct foreign investment, and marketing in unstable economies. For a case like MeadWestvaco’s, the responsibility of sustainable growth and fair market share depends on the outsourcing and offshoring planning.

Business continuity is relevant to a business that has been running for a long period and that has survived both economic and financial crisis. Business continuity depends highly on the issue of strategic planning in terms of operational models that are responsible for both economical and survival means of the business. The models are then linked with one another both internally and externally in an effort to eliminate the chances of business disasters. Disaster recovery is security module that puts a standby solution to economical catastrophes like stock market crunch and financial crisis. For MeadWestvaco, business continuity and disaster recovery are planning elements that are responsible for keeping the organization from engaging in risky behavior and running out of business.

Risk management is the identification, assessment, and ranking of risks as the effect of uncertain objectives. The risks can be positive or negative but the aim of the risk management is to coordinate economical application of resources in order to minimize, control, monitor, and eliminate the possibility of unfortunate occurrences. For MeadWestvaco, risk management affects the running of the business with minima or nil risks that could be damaging or unbeneficial.

Portfolio Management for a business model refers to both investment management and/or IT portfolio management. Investment management refers to the coordination of asset management in terms of investors and market share opportunities. This management aims at assessing and coordinating the activities of the investment firm with the motives and objectives of the investors. IT portfolio management is the ultimate organizational structuring or monitoring program for enterprise information systems. It is responsible for coordinating larges classes of items as managed by the enterprise information technology capabilities. For MeadWestvaco Corp. portfolio management will affect the way of transacting business in that investments and reinvestments would be coordinated closely by the use of reliable information technology systems therefore limiting the chances of uncertain risks.
The alignment of IT strategies and business strategies is the IT governance. Its use is to ensure that companies and organizations focus with straying on goals and objectives. It also creates an opportunity for implementing favorable measurements for IT performance in the organization. The stakeholders’ interests, inspite of how diverse they are, are taken care of the IT governance through a database that records the personal or majority interests of stakeholders and making sure, they are taken care of. The purpose of this governance is to provide feedback on the overall performance of the IT department, metric needed by management, and the amount of returns IT is giving back to the organization from the investment made.

E-business is made of different components that are responsible for the organization of activities from the users of the services to the providers and vice versa. Amongst these components are CRM, SCM, ERP, and EAI.CRM: Is the Customer Relationship Management and firms to reengineer its organizational vision and culture using it. The aim of the CRM is to transform customer relations into great profitability by providing prospects for repeat purchase rates and reduction of customer procurement costs.

SCM: Is the Supply Chain Management and its use is to manage all supply chain activities so as to maximize customer value and foster the growth of sustainable competitive advantage. It represents cognizant efforts by the supply chains to route and cultivate supply chains in the most operative techniques conceivable.

ERP: Is the Enterprise Resource Planning program used to integrate the e-business programs in order to produce a procedural approach easy for use by customer. The program is mainly used to enhance the connectivity.

EAI: Is the Enterprise Application Integration and is an integration framework that made of technologies and service that create a middle platform (middleware) that enable integration systems and applications across the enterprise.

The above components enable an organization to operate its e-business in terms of coordination of different parts from the order applications to delivery through the specified supply chains.
 
Preparation for Cloud & Pervasive Computing

Strategic Planning for IT architecture changes

The IT department is one of the most vital components of the organization that hold the backbone of success of the organization. The position of the IT department currently lags behind in terms of usability and reliability. Pervasive computing is a requirement that is user-based and integrates efficiency with affordability. For this reason, MeadWestvaco Corp has the obligation to implement changes in the IT department to strengthen its backbone for stability, sustainability, and customer satisfaction of the ever-growing market for computing platforms and e-commerce practice. By accessing the link between data processing, handling of requests per minute, and measuring the amount of possible traffic; strategic planning for IT architecture would have to be upgrade through the installation of mainframe computers are capable servers that would reflect the requirements of the customers as well as take care of applications that coordinate the e-business practice. For MeadWestvaco Corp, digitalization in marketing strategies would have to integrate fast, reliable, safe, and easy-to-use application that deliver data to the customer in respect to cloud and pervasive computing.

Strategic Planning for Telecommunication changes

Telecommunications go beyond the normal routine of sending and receiving signals back and forth a remote area. It integrates the usage of the system, its reliability, and flexibility. The usage of the telecommunication is mainly in form of calling, sending messages, e-mailing, sending and receiving of data messages, and monitoring the stock market. For this reason, the strategic planning for telecommunication changes is to put up integrated systems that have the capabilities to serve in place of one another if malfunctioning occurs with one. Certain systems can be the telephony, the internet, and networked systems linked with automatic satellites so that the cover of another can reinstate failure or slowing of one system. The benefit of integrating systems for MeadWestvaco Corp. is to transform the face of conducting business by avoiding the challenges of system breakdown and vandalism by ruthless rivals.

Strategic Planning for System Security changes

System Security changes are some of the activities in the IT firms or business that are mostly unsafe. As security, models are verified and one chosen in the end, the security provided by that particular model is mostly likely to be breached if strategic planning is not resulted to. The reason for this is that IT departments rush to implement security models that appear better than the rest while ignoring the fact that they have the potential of having loopholes that can be used by an attacker to launch attacks to the organization. As of the case of MeadWestvaco Corp., a strategic security planning would put the risk of open platforms out by ensuring that the system is covered in terms of stability and resistance from external malicious activities.

Strategic Planning for System user-friendliness and usability changes

The idea of cloud and pervasive computing is to increase the user experience by promoting speed and flexibility to the system. For this reason, the system changes especially in the IT architecture should be tailored to allow flexibility in terms of user connectivity, ease of finding and placing information on the system, and guarantee that the desired need will be served efficiently and within a considerable timeframe. For MeadWestvaco, strategic planning for System user-friendliness and usability will draw more customers to use the e-business strategy while in marketing; partners may desire to place ads in the system considering the ease of use. In the long last, the business motives of the organization will be achieved by addressing an entirely different aspect.

CHAPTER 2

ITIL Framework For Managing Services

Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a publication that comprises of good or fathomed-to-be-good practices for ITSM (Information Technology Service Management) that thrives to align IT services with the needs and requirements of business. Amongst the processes of ITIL, include:

Service level management: Review of the levels of IT services, continual identification, and the Service Level management does monitoring as specified in the Service-Level agreements (SLAs). The Service level management ensures that arrangements are in place for both internal service-providers and external suppliers in the form of OLAs and supporting indentures.

Availability management: the availability management ensures the cost of IT services in that it has to be kept running with reliable cost. The highly prioritized activities in this process are compiling availability plan, Monitor availability, release availability plan, and monitor maintenance availability.

Capacity management: This helps organizations to provide IT services by matching IT resources to business demands. Activities for this service include the following; Capacity planning, performance management, workload management, modeling, resource management, demand management, and application sizing.

IT service continuity Management: The management of plans to ensure that IT services can recover or continue after a grave incident takes place is covered by the ITSCM (Information Technology Service Continuity Management).

Information Security management system: This provides the definition of structured fitting of information in organizations management. The main goal or objective this service is to ensure maximum security of information.

The popularity of the ITIL framework has been attributed to the reliability of the services and the set of considerable favorable practices. Given the reason that every organization is planning or is in the process of stabilizing its IT services, the ITIL frameworks allows them to implement the changes systematically following an certain order. That order is provided by the ITIL and given the covered areas, it is noteworthy that MeadWestvaco can effectively use such framework to control its IT services and improve its business transaction strategies.

Cloud Computing And Its Related Technologies

Cloud computing is the delivery or provision of computing as a service rather than a product within which shared elements, information, software, and resources are delivered to corporate or personal computers and other devices as utility over a specified network (mostly the internet). In terms of marketing, Cloud computing is a combination of technologies that provide services, data, software over the internet to end-users who to their side do not require to know the infrastructural system model or design and the physical location of the system responsible for the delivery of the services. Cloud computing describes, consumption, new supplement, and the delivery of IT services based on the protocols of the internet. Its work is to provide dynamically measurable and visualized resources.

Web-based tools provide the user with the ability to use and operate applications over the internet through web browsers. This access allows the users to interact with the web therefore using services and applications that are stored on remote server. In some cases, legacy applications are used so that users can share information and data through screen sharing technologies while the primary provider of the service and information is located at a remote location.

MeadWestvaco is legible to apply this technology in that it has been a popular marketing tool for most of the successful organizations. The popularity this and related technologies have been gaining is through the efficacy and ease of information access that has made advertising and marketing especially the e-business flourish over the last half decade or so. With this technology, MeadWestvaco Corp qualifies to use this technology in that it is a business firm with an IT backbone. For this, it can deliver more information and services remotely to customers hence increase its market share.

Pervasive Computing and Its Related Technologies

The idea of computing is making the world smaller at the wake of every day. Devices are being manufactured that have the capabilities of connecting to one another over some wireless network. For this reason, internet as the biggest network and the network connecting networks has been the platform where this devices link with one another. As for the business and corporate world, e-commerce has been in the making with many organizations involving themselves to the practice. As a means of propagating their businesses, organizations have tried to implement pervasive computing to their operations so that they can reach and bigger market margin. With the differences that wireless computing and the telephony computing have, the former is getting more attention as people are moving from the analogue to the digital era.

The popularity of pervasive computing is in the level of multiple platforms that the technology can be accessed from. Smartphones, handheld computer tablets, and personal computers are some of the platforms that are popular in the moment and have the capabilities of joining and leaving networks through Wi-Fi networks and service providers. As for MeadWestvaco Corp., pervasive computing suits the marketing plans and objectives in that the clientele base comprises of handheld and personal computing platforms ready and eager to explore the capabilities of their devices as well as the flexibility of marketers.

Green Computing

Global warming is the byproduct of greenhouse gas emissions brought by technology that uses fossil fuels and other human activities. With the negative effects surpassing the hope for change, computer manufacturers and users are involving themselves with green computing. Organizations that manufacture and distribute computers are focusing on more energy efficient platforms and limiting the possibility of negative effects to the environment in terms of usability, disposal, and biodegradation.

The popularity of the green computing is due to the campaigns world leaders are initiating to urge people and other nations to take action against pollution of the environment. For this reason, the availability of environment-friendly computers and computing platforms has pushed the environmentally sensitive customers into buying such devices.

MeadWestvaco Corp. can apply this technology to into their marketing strategies and operational models in terms of providing applications that sensitize the market about the effects of polluting the environment. Green computing is also a technology that MeadWestvaco Corp can apply because it thrives to make the world a better place. Furthermore, there is ready market for the environmentally friendly devices and computing components.

 

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