Case Study Report - It Alignment with Business Strategy and Organization and Sustainable It

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IT STRATEGIC PLANNING - ISIT901

CASE STUDY REPORT

IT Alignment with Business Strategy and Organization

and

Sustainable IT

BY

PADAMATA RAMYACHITRA: 5158072

ZIL-E-HUMA KHAN: 4744172

Table of Contents

Abstract        3

Introduction        4

        IT Alignment with Business Strategy and Organization        4

Problem Definition        5

Literature Review        6

Case Analysis        9

Preparing for the Case        9

The Case        10

Increasing the Sustainable Practices through Active contribution role        11

Decreasing the CO2 footprint of IT and the wider enterprise through Innovation enabling role        13

Looking forward – Towards 2020         17

Global Policy Framework        17

Evaluation        19

SWOT Analysis        19

Sustainability SWOT Analysis (sSWOT)        20

Sustainability Balanced Score Card (SBSC)        21

Conclusion        26

Recommendations        28

References        29

Abstract

Aligning IT with business strategy has produced remarkable competitive benefits to the organizations. To sustain the competitive advantage it is paramount to stay ahead of the competitors, which can be achieved either by creating or adopting the best practices or by innovation. IT sustainability has emerged as to be the major contributor in creating competitive value of the organization. In this scenario it is exigent for the organizations to work beyond achieving IT alignment and adapting the sustainable IT projects.

Intel Corporation is one of the major IT industry organizations that has been focusing on sustainable IT projects since long and has achieved a leadership position among other MNC’s in the IT industry. Intel has been seriously focusing on innovation and investments in the ICT technologies that can deliver sustainability benefits in future.

Intel is leading the industry with its remarkable environmental projects that are producing good results by controlling carbon emissions to reduce the carbon footprint within Intel and across the extended enterprise. Some of these include projects for energy and water conservation, data center optimization, energy efficient operations, solar installations, green power purchases, renewable power and alternative energy projects with the focus of reducing its direct climate “footprint” and increasing the “hand print”. Intel aims to significantly reduce the direct greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 without compromising on the manufacturing. Intel promotes and encourage innovative sustainability projects.

ICT’s footprint is expected to be increased exponentially by 2020 but at the same time with the increased trend towards the adoption of smart devices, virtualization and realization of corporate social responsibility, the abatement potential is expected to be approximately seven times higher than the increased footprint trend.

Keywords:  IT alignment ; IT Sustainability; Green IT;  Green grid; Carbon footprint; Abatement  potential ; corporate social responsibility.

Information Technology is the key asset for almost all organizations and they have expectations that the strategic investments in IT will benefit their businesses in future in the form of reduced costs, standardization of processes, greater productivity, improved risk control mechanisms and will eventually provide the firm the competitive edge over other organizations in the industry. This competitive edge will enable the organization to stay as the leader of innovation and sustainability.

IT Alignment with Business Strategy and Organization

Traditionally IT has been used as an implementation tool and was not involved in preparing the business strategy but now IT plays an important role in opening new business opportunities and in the development of the long term business strategy.  IT Alignment with the business strategy enables the organization to achieve the strategic business goals and maximize the value of the IT investments.

IT departments must develop significant sustainable IT capability to contribute into organization’s business strategy. Sustainable IT has the potential to be a significant contributor to an organization’s sustainable and competitive strategy and enabler for creating business value and competitive advantage. 

We have read a significant number of journals that gives insights about IT alignment with business strategy and organization. The literature review have the details of those papers but we have planned to mainly focus on the IT sustainability factor as it is a very important and critical factor being addressed by leading information technology organizations that aim for energy efficient and environmentally friendly operations and taking steps towards “Green IT” and “Green Communities”. The strategic and effective utilization of IT assets may lead to significant reduction of the carbon footprint. 

Companies need to align their business strategy with the corporate sustainability strategy to optimize the value that IT contributes to the enterprise itself as well as to the extended enterprise.

II. Problem Definition

We have taken the example to Intel IT to understand at the first place what steps Intel have taken to align their business processes with IT sustainability to achieve substantial cost benefits as well as they were able to successfully minimize the carbon footprint across the enterprise.

Secondly we aim to analyze the strategies that Intel have developed for securing the advantages of Sustainable IT and what strategies they have planned for the future?  How these strategies will benefit the Intel and extended enterprise in future?

We also plan to analyze the effectiveness of investing in the future sustainable ICT technologies that can help Intel in reducing the carbon footprint across the organization and the extended enterprise.

III. Literature Review

The alignment of IT with business strategy is crucial for effectively achieving the strategic objectives of the organization. (Cuenca, Boza and Ortiz, 2011) proposed an enterprise engineering approach to achieve the strategic alignment between business and IT and it was adopted in a critical process of a ceramic tile company for the purpose of aligning a strategic business plan and IT strategy and the application performed in the ceramic tile company had helped validate the usefulness of the proposed modelling framework as well.