Chapter 15 Article Review : Lenovo Restructures as Emerging Market Focus Grows

Lenovo will create developed and emerging market units in the place of its regional business divisions as it moves its focus back to emerging economies. Lenovo’s new mature markets division will focus on Western Europe, North America and Japan. Its emerging markets units will include Africa, the Middle East and most of Asia, including China. Building a presence in emerging markets could boost Lenovo in the long term. China, Lenovo’s most important market, accounted for 45% of the company’s sales in the last quarter.

Case Study : Nestle Tries for an All-for-One Global Strategy

2) Nestle allowed each local organization to conduct business as it saw fit, taking into account the local conditions and business cultures. To support this decentralized strategy, it had 80 different information technology units that ran nearly 900 IBM AS/400 midrange computers, 15 mainframes, and 200 Unix systems, enabling observers to describe its infrastructure as a veritable Tower of Babel. This strategy was not appropriate for Nestle’s business model.
3) Nestle’s management found that allowing these local differences created inefficiencies and extra costs that could prevent the company from competing effectively in electronic commerce. GLOBE was formed to standardize Nestle’s business practices. The greatest challenge to GLOBE was personal, not technical. Managers resisted the idea of giving up control over their business process to participate in a centralized solution. The resistance was fortified by the fact that each country’s operations would have to spend its own money to pay for the project.
4) To help with these problems, Johnson asked each country to name a GLOBE manager who would facilitate the adoption of the system. These managers also provided value to each other by exchanging their experiences with the system and the solutions they employed for specific challenges. Johnson also established a steering committee at company headquarters to schedule and manage the rollouts. The steering committee oversaw the reduction of company data centers form 100 to four, including the center in Vevey, which stored the GLOBE templates, Best Practices Library, and central functions.

5 Tips for Businesses Entering Web 2.0

Communication and the tools to do it are forever evolving. All these ways to connect represent a tremendous opportunity for building communities to help us find and share information faster and more easily. Tapping into social media to manage projects is a very efficient and forward-thinking way to keep everyone in the loop and come up with the best ideas for project managers. This class has been tapping into social media to teach us many valuable lessons. We are blogging, which is a social networking tool. This article suggests five social media practices. Number one is to be an information seeker and sharer. Blogging and twitter allows great information to be shared quickly. This can relate to chapter 14, Project Management : Establishing the Business Value of Systems and Managing Change. A manager can communicate information quickly and effectively using the social networking tools. Thousands of people tweet insights and URLs for great articles. Blogging and tweeting are ways to learn to share tools that are needed. I also love to share information. I post many videos for my class on youtube. These videos are also seen by people all over the world and it makes me feel good to know that I am helping the dissemination of knowledge.
A second practice is to provide a sense of community. By searching communities like LinkedIn and Facebook, you can become connected to other project managers who share your interests. You can even ask questions about things that have you stumped or help other people who may be facing challenges. A third practice is to be clear about what is allowed. You have to be clear about using social media for formal, business purposes verses informal, recreational fun. A fourth practice is to leverage social media’s potential for cooperation and collaboration, while using common sense. You should not post things that you do not want your grandmother or a prospective employer to read. A fifth practice is to be an expertise hunter. Invite your team to hunt for hot spots of expertise on the web, from blogs to groups within social networks. As a team, you can become your own social network for filtering information and staying on top of key trends in your industry. This is very relevant to our class because for those of us participating in the team project, this is exactly what we are doing. We are filtering information to stay on top of key trends in the industry of the company that we are working with.

Reference : LaBrosse, Michell. (5/31/09). 5 Tips for Businesses Entering Web 2.0. Computerworld. Retreived 6/7/09 from PC Magazine. Website : http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/165802/5_tips_for_businesses_entering_web_20.html

Can the U.S. Army Reserve Pay Soldiers Correctly?

1) There were many problems with the U.S. army pay system. The army conducted an audit in the fall of 2005 that showed payment irregularities for 14 percent of the 24,000 soldiers that had been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan or evacuated for medical reasons. The Government Accountability Office reported that at the time of the audit, the Army had logged $1.5 million worth of overpayments to 1,300 soldiers wounded or killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. The GAO also found that non-injured soldiers were regularly receiving inaccurate paychecks, the result of reaching different stages of their deployments and redeployments. A GAO study determined that over 90 percent of soldiers in units that were mobilized in 2002 and 2003 experienced some kind of pay error that was primarily due to the lack of compatibility between the payroll and personnel systems. Before 2004, the Defense Finance and Accounting Services had been using a pay system called the Defense Joint Military Pay System. DJMS actually consisted of separate systems for active duty soldiers and reserves. The two systems did not work together easily. The DJMS Reserve Component was responsible for payroll management. Salaries, bonuses, and benefits for 200,000 reservists originated from this custom built payroll application. But the payroll management system needed information from the personnel system, known as the Regional Level Application Software system, and the two systems were not well integrated. The computer language used to write DJMS dated back almost 40 years. A new systems solution must address all of these problems and make data integration more feasible.
2) The specific improvements of Forward Compatible Payroll included a clearer Leave and Earnings Statement for soldiers, instantaneous updating of pay records, and better capabilities for updating state tax rates. The Forward Compatible Payroll phased rollout was scheduled to begin in March 2005 with the Army Reserve and National Guard, and over the course of a year extend to the active duty Army, the Air Force, and then the Navy Department. The Forward Compatible Payroll provided more automation for the mobilization process for soldiers called up for active duty. A pay administrator could use a Web browser to review mobilization orders in the personnel system and access and update files in the personnel database without duplicating the data entry for the mobilized soldiers. The mobilization application requested additional information from the administrator, such as the beginning and ending dates of deployment for each soldier, before setting the pay rate for each and adding the appropriate entitlements. After the pay rate was set, the process required a unit commander to approve and sign a hard copy of the mobilization order. Only then were the data transmitted in a nightly batch to a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database at Reserve headquarters at Fort McPhearson, Georgia. The SQL server formatted the data so that the Reserve payroll system could process them. The data were uploaded to a local server at a pay processing center, where staff members used Web browser software to review the pay records. Soldier tour of duty dates and pay data were then exported to the Reserve payroll system, which then paid the soldiers. This process should be improved by being capable of replacing over 30 legacy applications in the Army branch of the Armed Forces alone. This process should eliminate redundant data entries, simplify all processes related to personnel and payroll, and greatly reduce the number of mistakes that find their way through to pay stubs.
3) End users and technical specialists have a big role in analyzing the problem and developing a solution. End users can tell when something goes wrong in the system. People can tell when they are being underpaid, not necessarily when they are being overpaid though. Soldiers brought attention to the fact that they were not being paid correctly and this caused the system to change. Technical specialists must develop a solution to these complex problems. Technical specialists have a role in both analyzing and getting an understanding of the full scope of the problem, and then introducing steps to solve the problem.