The Alcan Organization Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

The Alcan Organization - Essay Example The company is highly vertically integrated having eight deposits and mines, seven alumina plants with a transport networks including rail and port facilities, seven alumina refineries, 12 electric power plants, 170 packaging material plants, 26 smelter, 50 engineered product plants and 18 laminated product plants (INDUSTRY CANADA, 2005). In an attempt to understand the Alcan’s IT structure, this paper explores a range of issues that are linked to the Alcan Organization as an IT oriented organization. This includes its organization and operating technology, its dominant IT Strategies and Practices, technological contributions linked to the organization, its technological barriers, as well as its business continuity plan. Organization and Operating Technology. In the Alcan Company, all groups are centrally coordinated. The information and technology organization works on the objectives of the organization rather than for each specific business IT group. The requirements of each group such as its activities are closely linked and cooperation amongst the business IT groups is up to date (Foster, 2007). The wish of the IT individuals is always to fulfill the particular demands of the whole organization and it is worth noting that estimating and analyzing of the costs of IT for the whole organization is achievable (Dube, & Roy, 2009). ... The group that is concerned with financial and other includes 14 resources that are divided among Singen, Montreal, Paris and Zurich. The Architecture group consists of three resources having technical skills corresponding to Infrastructure Planning and the Shared Infrastructure Service group. The technical skills for this group are middleware and Web technology. The Information System Solution group is composed of sixty resources that are distributed in five different cities. The cities are Issoire, Paris, Neuf Brisach, Voreppe and Warmley. This group’s major focus is on main SAP Implementation projects among the Engineered Product group. The last group is the Infrastructure Shared Service group which has about forty resources that are all located in 6 different sites. These are Montreal Paris, Singen, Chicago, Warmley, and Voreppe (Dube, Bernier, & Roy, 2009). This group helps in operation of the infrastructure components that include e-mail, global network and data processi ng. The group, as well provides workstation support alongside the collaboration of tools. All these groups are integrated (Foster, 2007). Technological Contributions to the Organization. The plan adopted by the Alcan management team has seen drastic changes in the IT sector of the Alcan organization. The plan has been a corner stone in so far as the implementation of the management services common to the business groups is concerned and the services are now handled by a central organization unit with the support of the internal billing mechanism. The centralization of the IT shared services has gone a long way in promoting economies of scale,