Adventures of an It Leader Chapter 1 Reflection Question

Question 1: Why would Carl Williams ask a non-technical manager to assume the CIO position? Is it a good idea?

Since the former CIO, Davies, had a lot of background on IT, but he screwed things up before. So the managers want to try something new to get the company back on track. Through Jim Barton got no background on IT, but he was one of the most outspoken critics of Davies. Also, Jim Barton is a good manager, one of the best in the company, a lot of people have heard him loud and clear. So the members of the board of directors and Carl Williams thinks that Jim Barton worth a try. From my own perspective, I would see this is a good but risky idea. If people with good background could not handle the job properly, simply change one another people with good background may not solve this problem well. The idea that try to use people without any background may leads to fail in the end, and it may take longer time to help the company back to the right track. But people without any background may be more creative on this job, and come out some new ideas that effectively help the company. And if that people’s ability is good, I would like to think he worth a try, since his ability may help him handle job well and fast.

Question 2: If you were Jim Barton, would you take the job?

If I were Jim Barton, I would be pleased to take the job. At first, as it says in the reading, a lot of people got fire, retire, and reassignment. I would consider reassignment as the best situation since I don’t want to lose my job. Second, CIO is not a bad position, I believe I could get a not bad salary through working as a CIO. The last but not the least, I trust myself, I believe that if I was assigned to the CIO, even if I do not owned any background knowledge, I would still be able to adapt the new environment fast and well. I believe I could do it well through self-learning.

Question 3: What do the IVK Corporation exhibits, featured below, tell you about the current state of the company? Given this information, what does IVK need from a new management team under CEO Carl Williams?

Through the IVK corporation exhibit, I figured out that the IVK only owns 16% of the market, it’s not the leader of the market. But the growth of this company was really fast. The total assets of IVK came from $82,478,645 in the year X-1 to $341,143,531 in the year X. Though overall it may looks good, I believes that this company met some trouble before, since the stock price hit the peak on Jun X-1, but it instantly start fall down in the next few month. This may be why this company want to reform the managers. Under the CEO Carl Williams, there still need be the information technology department, capital markets department, corporate planning department, legal department, financial management department, business development department, human resources department, customer services