Fmb&T Case Analysis

FMB&T Case Analysis

Problem Statement

As the president and CEO of FMB&T, Marshall Pinkard needs to clarify his new excutive vice president and chief information officer, Ayishia Coles’ authority and responsibilities. At the same time, the company’s traditional vertical organization is making the new IT department hard to involve and leads to great confusion, so Marshall needs to reconsider the company’s organizational structure.

Issue Identification

• What can the new IT department executive manager do to get along with other departments?

• What improvement of the company’s structure can be made in order to make it more efficiency?

Issue Analysis

• Every employee need to has “an appointed task, line of authority, and decision responsibility” (p. 225). Since there is no clear statement of the IT department’s responsibilities and authority, the relationship between IT and the company’s other business units was muddled, which often causes confusion, friction, and inefficiency.

• Employees within each department perform only the tasks relevant to their specialized function. (p. 225) Works are not coordinated, and when some poorly defined problems or crossed-organizational-lines problems show up, will make it hard to finish the work quickly and efficient.

• Ayishia was not welcomed by the other unit managers shows that she does not have authority. The acceptance theory of authority argues that a manager has authority only if subordinates choose to accept his or her commands. (p.226) Lack of authority will make Ayishia even harder to do her job.

• IT has not sufficient time to figure out a solution because the other departments weren’t giving them a chance to do the coordination.

• IT staff was feeling underused because they were limited to applications work and don’t have an opportunity to explore and contribute to business strategies.

• In the company’s traditional vertical organization, there is not a specific space for IT, so they don’t know how to...