Organizational Structures That Support Strategic Initiatives

IT Roles and Responsibilities

Chief Information Officer (CIO) 

Responsible for :  > Overseeing all uses of information technology
                           > Ensuring the strategic alignment of IT with business goals and objectives.

Broad functions of a CIO include :

• Manager - ensure the delivery of all IT projects, on time ad within budgets
• Leader - ensure the strategic vision of IT is in line with the strategic vision of the organization
• Communicator - advocate and communicate the IT strategy by building and maintaining strong executive relationships 

Chief Technology Officer (CTO)

Responsible for :  > Ensuring the throughput, speed, accuracy, availability and reliability of an
                             organization's information technology
                           > Have direct responsibility for ensuring the efficiency of IT systems throughout
                              the organization

Chief Security Officer (CSO)

Responsible for :  > Ensuring the security of IT systems and developing strategies and IT safeguards
                              against attacks from hackers and viruses.

Chief Privacy Officer (CPO)

Responsible for :  > Ensuring the ethical and legal use of information within an organization.

Many CPOs are lawyers by training, enabling them to understand the often complex legal issues surrounding the use of information.

Chief Knowledge Officer (CKO)

Responsible for :  > Collecting, maintaining and distributing the organization's knowledge.
                           > Designs program and systems that make it easy for people to
                              reuse knowledge.

• These systems create repositories of organizational documents, methodologies, tools and practices and they establish methods for filtering the information.  
• The CKO must continuously encourage employee contributions to keep the systems up-to-date.

Okay now lets move on to another subtopic which is The Gap between Business Personnel and IT Personnel!

• Business personnel possess expertise in functional area such as marketing, accounting, sales.
• IT personnel have the technological expertise.
• The gap happen because of there is no effective communication whether through written or oral communication between both parties.

The way to decrease the gap can be done by improving communications between both parties.

• Business personnel must seek to increase their understanding of IT. This is because it will benefit their careers to understand do's and don'ts regarding IT.
• Organization must develop strategies for integrating its IT personnel to understand various business functions.
• CIO is responsible to ensure effective communications between business and IT personnel!

Organization Fundamental :

ETHICS > The principles and standards that guide our behavior toward other people. 

• Privacy is one of the biggest ethical issues and become one of the biggest barriers to the growth of ebusiness
• Several types of ethical issues in IT are plagiarism, piracy, hacking

SECURITY > Downtime is a software failure and unplanned downtime can strike  at any time from any number of causes