Illustrators to take creative-educational books to market

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Reference no: EM132260107

Starfish Publishing is a leading publisher of children’s books. Starfish works with a large number of authors and illustrators to take creative and educational books to market. Over the past decade, Starfish has expanded its offering beyond hardcopy books to include (1) e-books and (2) supporting online content, such as interactive games, promotions, activities, downloadable materials, etc. In addition, the company has recently added online content for elementary school teachers that can be used for educational purposes in the classroom as accompaniments to the books. All of these innovative offerings are closely-tied to the books that it publishes.

You have just left a planning meeting with the CIO of Starfish Publishing and her direct reports – VP of Customer Applications, VP of Operations Applications, VP of Infrastructure, Chief Architect of ITS, VP of Information Security, and VP of Vendor Management and Procurement. It is May 15 and planning for the next year is already beginning. On May 22 there will be a follow up meeting with this same group in which each ITS department leader will present their initial thoughts on their departments’ initiatives for the overall ITS plan. As the Manager of Finance assigned to support the ITS organization, you are considered a key member of this planning process and have a good overview of the entire ITS function and process. In particular, you will be the one that has to provide the financial justifications and metrics (the numbers) behind the ITS plan.

The backdrop for the plan is that the Starfish Publishing CEO has identified several strategic initiatives for the enterprise for the coming year.

1. Improve operational reliability.

2. Enhance the customer experience across the various customer contact points.

3. Increase the pace of innovation, especially the time it takes to get new products and services to the marketplace.

The CEO has directed his direct reports (which includes the CIO) to build their plans to support these strategic initiatives. In mid-June, a series of interlock meetings will take place where the leaders from the respective corporate functions (Finance, Marketing and Sales, Human Resources, Operations and ITS) will come together to share their preliminary plans and initiatives and begin the process of aligning individual department plans into cross-functional plans.

In the interlock meetings, it will become clear what the business functions will be needing from ITS in order for the various business leaders to execute their plans and achieve their objectives. The CIO and ITS will need to develop its plan to support those business functions. However, independent of those business function initiatives, the CIO would like to propose some fundamental ITS initiatives that would provide ITS-based platform and process enhancements in support of the strategic initiatives.

You want to bring some ideas regarding the ITS-based platform and process enhancements to the CIO’s meeting next week. Your observation is that the ITS organization at Starfish has not stayed current with best practices and trends in ITS management for some time, probably 10 years or more. Armed with a solid understanding of enterprise ITS from your ITSS course, you have some thoughts on what the ITS organization could do to support the CEO’s strategic initiatives agenda.

Deliverables

For each of the strategic initiatives listed above, identify some areas and/or ideas where ITS might be able to contribute. Explain how or why those areas/ideas will support the strategic initiatives. Use your knowledge of hardware, software, development methodologies, enterprise systems, infrastructure management, data and analytics, and overall ITS management principles (such as BATOG) to frame your responses.

Reference no: EM132260107

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