Sunday, August 18, 2019
Xerox and IT Management :: essays research papers
Xerox is one of the largest companies in the document processing products and services industry. Xerox held a virtual monopoly in the plain-paper copier market until the Federal Trade Commission intervened. In 1975 Xerox was forced to forfeit patent protection and had to license to competitors. Xerox’s markets share dipped from 80% in 1976 to 13% in 1982. In order to become more competitive, Xerox began to use benchmarking, Leadership through Quality and employee involvement initiatives. These initiatives helped grow Xerox’s market share back to 18% in the low end copier business and 35% in the mid-to-high end. Despite the improvements in market share the financial performance of the company declined. Therefore in 1992 a major reorganization was planned, Xerox would change from a geographic organization to a market segment organization. Xerox corporate information management (CIM) unit was established in the early 1970s. In 1987, CIM was moved to the General Services Division and was given the task to â€Å"Provide the overall information technology leadership to the company.†The leader of the CIM group quickly realized the task was not possible without significant organizational change. After bringing in consultants to review the Information Management at Xerox, the director of CIM realized the Xerox IM infrastructure could not support the company’s strategic direction. To address the IM problems, CIM started a new initiative, â€Å"IM 2000†. The goal of IM 2000 was to move Xerox to a new information systems infrastructure. The problems found with Information Management at Xerox †¢Ã‚     Aging application portfolio built on proprietary technologies †¢Ã‚     Large cost associated with keeping legacy system running †¢Ã‚     Duplicate work caused by corporate culture – autonomy The IM 2000 design team recommended the following four strategies 1.     Reduce/Redirect      Reduce overall costs by reining in the expense of legacy system. Use savings to fund new applications and infrastructure. 2.     Infrastructure Management      Move to a industry standard infrastructure that would be managed centrally – a client server environment. 3.     Leverage worldwide IM resources      Create library of shareable core modules. 4.     Business process-driven solutions      The current legacy system was to be replaced by solutions supporting new Xerox business process. Xerox’s earlier quality initiatives had created a corporate culture used to having a partner relationship with suppliers. Because of this, management suggested IM should look at outsourcing as an alternative. Typical Reasons for Outsourcing †¢Ã‚     Concerns about Cost and Quality o     Vendors save money by      Running much leaner overhead structures than their customers      More aggressive use of low cost labor pools (India)      Staff must keep up to date on newest IT practices      Purchasing Power      More efficient use of capacity
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