Volkswagen aims to boost car production
worldwide by embarking on an IT strategy that will give its IT
staff a greater say in how its
enterprise resource planning systems should be run and used by
the business.
The company, which currently uses SAP, plans to develop a set
of ERP systems by 2015 to improve the quality and speed of
information sharing between manufacturing and management
departments.
The IT processes and organisation strategy aims to maximise the
effectiveness of the ERP systems by giving IT departments a greater
say in how they are used by the business.
The IT function will also have a say in how staff who operate
the ERP systems should be organised.
Volkswagen predicts that by 2011 the strategy will allow it to
design new ERP systems and integrate them with business processes
much more quickly, giving it an edge over its competitors.
"The pressure to reduce production costs and complexity by
increasing the efficiency of our IT applications is a key driver
for our IT function being able to influence business processes,"
said CTO Stefan Ostrowski.
Ostrowski said the IT function would become a "co-designer" of
the business processes. Steering committees, consisting of both
business and IT representatives, would be formed to take joint
responsibility for IT budgets.
The traditional view on IT development has focused on deploying
"better technology", without fully considering the needs of the
department it works in, said Ostrowski. But he said reversing this
was necessary if IT systems were to be truly effective at reducing
complexity and cutting costs.
Forrester founder and CEO George Colony went further, saying
that for businesses to get a true return on IT investments they
must allow IT departments to get involved with steering business
processes.
"When developing innovative applications, IT must lead the way
and tell business units they are going to have to change the way
they work, and the way that the division is organised - it can not
be something that IT should be afraid of doing."
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