Delivering Business Value with IT at Hefty Hardware
The case study of Hefty Hardware shows a typical lack of inter-department communication, among company main business units and the IT department. Managers and stakeholders are unable to estimate the value that IT department brings to company business, and tend to neglect or debase it; the IT team, on the other hand, fails to communicate their milestones, technological difficulties and incompatibilities when implementing new projects and other aspects of IT operation in a comprehendible manner. The recent of suggestion by company CIO is to take some managers and top-ranking of IT department out into the field, to see for themselves how ...view middle of the document...
The absorptive capacity and communication decoding competence are the key factors in current case study. Both management and IT personnel are unwilling to “decode” the terminology of the opposed party, moreover, they are unable to absorb the information that is communicated to them. Especially when a crisis is taking place, effective communication to company stakeholders or top management are extremely important, because a typical crisis response strategy of every party would be to protect their own reputation (Vielhaber & Waltman, 2008); and it is recommended to choose a single spokesperson to deliver important messages in a consistent, relevant and understandable format (Vielhaber & Waltman, 2008). In this scenario, independent consultants would play role as mediators inside Hefty Hardware; moreover some authors suggest that hiring consultants is especially good for private organizations, because they usually operate through a “for-profit lens” and possess a repository of re-sellable ideas collected from other similar organizations (Hayes & Westrup, 2014). An extrinsically motivated, highly credible consultant communicating information among parties who are intrinsically motivated, at a level and language that optimizes the clients’ absorptive capacity, employing communication encoding/decoding competence, will establish a less arduous relationship and thus be able to facilitate effective knowledge transfer and improve company project implementations (Dong-Gil Ko et al., 2005).
The other managerial approach is to focus the IT and other departments on solving business-essential company needs, through introducing a balanced scorecard for employees and managers. Being a valuable performance evaluation tool, the balanced scorecard can be also used to strategically manage the organizational development (Murby & Gould, 2005). Implementing a balanced scorecard within the IT department would help objectively measure their performance, across the complicated set of processes and reviews they use in their operation (Smith & McKeen, 2012); and suggesting management or business-related topics as personal study goals to IT managers and personnel, would help to transform their skill set, thus expanding their absorption capacity for information coming from the company’s business side. Ideally, the same should be symmetric towards the management, especially to information-related positions, like the CIO. If the top management is less willing to engage in additional IT training, they can always rely on consultants (Hayes & Westrup,...
